Friday, June 22nd 2012
SSD Prices in Free-Fall: The Next DRAM?
Hard drive prices refuse to budge after last year's floods that struck manufacturing facilities in Thailand, even as manufacturers turn record profit. The solid-state drive market, on the other hand, is finally rolling with competition, high volume production, and advancements in NAND flash technologies. With memory majors such as Hynix adding new NAND flash manufacturing facilities to their infrastructure, SSD is expected to finally get its big break in the mainstream market.
SSD prices, according to price aggregators, are on a free-fall. Models which once held relative pricing as high as $2 per gigabyte, and going deep within the $1 mark. For example, Crucial's widely-praised M4 256 GB SSD has a price per GB of 'just' $0.82, and a market price around $200, something unheard of, for a 256 GB SSD with transfer rates of over 500 MB/s. With SSD major OCZ Technology releasing new generations of drives under the Vertex 4 and Agility 4 series that use Indilinx processors, older Vertex 3 and Agility 3 models are being phased out, some of these are seeing sub $1/GB prices. Intel is also responding to market trends, with prices of its SSD 520 series dropping sharply. Find a boat-load of stats at the source.
Source:
The TechReport
SSD prices, according to price aggregators, are on a free-fall. Models which once held relative pricing as high as $2 per gigabyte, and going deep within the $1 mark. For example, Crucial's widely-praised M4 256 GB SSD has a price per GB of 'just' $0.82, and a market price around $200, something unheard of, for a 256 GB SSD with transfer rates of over 500 MB/s. With SSD major OCZ Technology releasing new generations of drives under the Vertex 4 and Agility 4 series that use Indilinx processors, older Vertex 3 and Agility 3 models are being phased out, some of these are seeing sub $1/GB prices. Intel is also responding to market trends, with prices of its SSD 520 series dropping sharply. Find a boat-load of stats at the source.
120 Comments on SSD Prices in Free-Fall: The Next DRAM?
You should try an SSD before actually criticize it.
www.anandtech.com/show/4202/the-intel-ssd-510-review/3
And yes, if I had $150 to spend, I'd sell my current card and put the $150 towards a replacement.Really, what kind of framerate boost are people getting from an SSD? Programs and games on my rig already launch in under 10 seconds, so an SSD shaves a few seconds off that, and that is a noticeable difference? No, it isn't.
Sorry, going from 45FPS to 60FPS certianly is more noticeable than the game's loading screen being 5 seconds shorter and Windows booting 15 seconds faster. And yes, those are actual time difference I measured on my rig when it had an SSD in it compared to the Seagate 7200.12.
If I had $150 laying around, an SSD would not be what I would spend it on, they aren't worth it. At this point, I'd probably just save the $150 actually.
Follow up to what i said in the last page:
With a $250 VGA card, gtx 560ti for example, can play any game out there with max setting @1680x1050/1920x1080 with an exception of VERY few games that can't.
I'm pretty sure the majority of us spend out time browsing webs and using programs which an SSD will actually matter more even just by the seconds. Smartphone users will probably understand what I mean here.
SSD will affect all your programs, while a VGA card will only make games faster. I don't think the majority of us play games all day to live.
Maybe it's a matter of opinion, but I think my points fit the majority of gamers with average budget that want to get the best bang for their buck.
Advertisement: Intel 330 Series 120GB with 500/500 read/write for less than $150 @ google.com!
I have 3 OCZ drives and haven't had any trouble with any of them.
120 GB Vertex
64 GB Vertex
60 GB Agility 3
I am glad to see the prices drop though. Maybe a sweet 256 GB is in my future....
And I suggest you try some more modern games before saying a GTX560ti can handle them. Just go look at some video card reviews, W1z's review has a fair share of games that even the GTX570 can't handle at 1900x1200, even without using max settings. Alan Wake, Alien vs. Predator, Arkham City, Battlefield 3, Crysis 2, Dragon Age II, Shogun 2, Skyrim, and those are just the ones in his review, I've got several more install right now that a GTX560ti couldn't handle at 1900x1200.
And after the ~30 second Windows boot time on my mechanical drive, all of my programs load in under 5 seconds thanks to Windows Superfetch, so an SSD is pretty useless unless you are using it to load games faster, and since I can't fit all of the games I play regularly on a 120GB drive $150 for an SSD would be useless.
As for gaming, my gaming rig has an Agility 3 SSD for the windows drive, and a RAID0 of Caviar Black HDD for storing the game files and VM's.
Windows Superfetch cannot compare. RAID anything cannot compare. SSD is the fastest. No one ever debated the capacity issue.
Get an SSD, you will see the light like most other enthusiasts have.
And the capacity issue does come into play, the point of the SSD it to make things faster, if most of my programs are stored on a mechanical drive anyway, how is the SSD helping beyond boot time?I'm not saying the SSD is no good, I'm saying the money can usually be spent elsewhere. If there is nothing else you can upgrade in your computer, then by all means get an SSD. But in most cases an SSD is a poor upgrade choice.
If you are someone who needs a shit ton of storage and stuff then yeah and SSD isn't for you but typically people nowadays have a small SSD just for windows and then 1TB drives or whatever for games and programs and whatever else.
I have RAID 0 with 3 and 5 drives even with superfetch it's no where near SSD.
My friend's GTX460 can play ALL of the games you listed with high or medium setting. You're exaggerating. Turn off the AA and every game gains 20% FPS.
You completely missed my points too. People don't spend all of their time playing game. An SSD will give a more overall performance boosts for the system while a vga card will only help games.