Monday, March 16 2009
In a phone interview with Brian Beard, flash marketing manager for Samsung Semiconductor, CNET have come up with some good news for those of you waiting for the cost of solid-state drives to come down. Solid-state drives are better in almost all ways than current hard drive technology, and they represent the natural step ahead in computing. However there's always something that does not fit well, current solid-state drives are still too expensive to become widely accesible. Mr. Beard says this is about to change in near future. His words exactly:
Flash memory in the last five years has come down 40, 50, 60 percent per year,
Flash on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis will reach price parity, at some point, with hard disk drives in the next few years.
In his talk with CNET, Beard also tries to explain why SSD technology is currently more expensive than hard drive technology. If you are interested, you can read the full interview here.

Source: CNET Blog
posted by malware - 3:22 PM |  Related News

User comments
by h3llb3nd4 (March 16th - 3:28 PM) - Reply
yeah, but time is the problem and so is money...:(
by lemonadesoda (March 16th - 3:45 PM) - Reply
Yep. Construction of a HDD is expensive. Milled aluminium blocks. Stepper motors. Arms. Platters. There is no way HDD will be able to compete with SSD due to manuf. costs of single platter drives from probably as soon as 2011 onwards. However, HDD may still be more economical for multi platter, eg. 1TB+ for a long time to come. Even if SSD goes 32/40nm, 1TB+ requires a lot of expensive chips and PCB space.
by REVHEAD (March 16th - 3:53 PM) - Reply
Well that was allways going to be the case, its like with any hardware, we didnt need some numbskull from Samsung to tell us this.
by PVTCaboose1337 (March 16th - 3:53 PM) - Reply
I hope they eventually comeout with 3.5" SSD's by the time prices drop.
by Basard (March 16th - 4:16 PM) - Reply
well crap, 250gb on newegg is under 500 bucks, and 128 gb on newegg is right around 200, already getting cheap.... everybody and their mom are making SSD's, weird companies seem to be springing up.... the next hard drive i purchase will be solid state, the others are pointless... although i don't intend to buy one of them until i can get 250GB for under 150 bucks.
by PVTCaboose1337 (March 16th - 4:18 PM) - Reply
I will get a 500GB SSD when they reach the $70 mark.
by DaveK (March 16th - 4:22 PM) - Reply
And I will continue to buy 1TB Samsung drives for low price of €95 :D I couldn't care less for SSD, waste of money in my opinion. I've got better things to spend money on anyway.
by BOSE (March 16th - 5:10 PM) - Reply
Well duhhh..... Might as well tell us that Santa isnt real.
by Assimilator (March 16th - 6:22 PM) - Reply
by: Brian Beard
Solid-State Will Match Hard Drive Prices in a Few Years' Time


In Other News: CNN Reports Sky Is Blue

Also, LOL @ that guy's name, I wonder if he does have a beard...
by h3llb3nd4 (March 16th - 6:44 PM) - Reply
no a leaf!...:D
by Mussels (March 17th - 3:23 AM) - Reply
look at flash memory. At least here in Au everythings at least half the price it was last year, AND twice as big. I just got an 8 GB USB flash drive for $40 retail, last year i paid $50 for a 4GB on special.

SSD's are in the same boat - every year they're going to halve in price and get twice as big... expect 1TB SSD's next year for $1K, $250 the year after that, and $125 the year after that and so on
by CyberDruid (March 17th - 3:34 AM) - Reply
Unless they form a Cartel like the DDR RAM manufacturers did. Remember when RAM suddenly became dirt cheap? That was their punishment for artificially inflating the cost of the modules...

Anyhoo I'll be buying SSD and HDD now and later :D By the time SSD drives are affordable the HDDs will be ridiculously cheap and huge...10TB HDDs for $35 with free shipping...yeah baby bring on the SSDs.
by Mussels (March 17th - 3:40 AM) - Reply
by: CyberDruid
Unless they form a Cartel like the DDR RAM manufacturers did. Remember when RAM suddenly became dirt cheap? That was their punishment for artificially inflating the cost of the modules...

Anyhoo I'll be buying SSD and HDD now and later :D By the time SSD drives are affordable the HDDs will be ridiculously cheap and huge...10TB HDDs for $35 with free shipping...yeah baby bring on the SSDs.
mechanical hard drives wont pick up much. It'll be a miracle if they hit 3TB.

Look how much trouble theres been lately with 1TB and 1.5TB drives? The only stable ones are 5,400 RPM!

Once SSD's hit decent prices, the manufavturers will stop making mechanical drives (driving prices up) and shift to SSD's (making their prices drop) - what do yoy think will happen, when seagate, WD, samsung and co make a sudden shift to SSD as their main drives?
by PCpraiser100 (March 17th - 3:55 AM) - Reply
Years?! I wanted months!!!
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