How much longer until SSD prices match HDD prices

IceDigger

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How much longer do you think that you can buy a 4TB SSD for the same price as a 4TB HDD, etc...?
 
Did @Dan_D offer his wife for your date night without the wife to post all these questions everywhere? :D

I would say that process parity is coming. I think it's possible that we will see the ultra dense spinning rust become more expensive at some point due to physics.
 
I'd say some designs will likely become more affordable in the next 2 years. The catch is that there's constantly new design ideas or fab processes still coming out in the SSD ecosystem so it's difficult to say what kind of 4TB SSD, or similar size, will be affordable. I remember with platters we saw some similar advances in the late 90's & early 2000's with 40 wire, 80 wire, DMA, SATA, multiple platters, etc. Other than size and accompanying buffers, or hybrids, not much else has changed in the last 10 years for platters and that's when we finally started to see some major price drops for huge capacities. It's difficult to say how long for a similar trend for SSD's but I'd guess we're about halfway there.
 
lostin3d said:
we finally started to see some major price drops for huge capacities.
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Have we seen yuge price drops though? Back in 2011-2012 I loaded up on 3tb Seagate drives (most of which have died, and their replacements died) for about $80-90 each. That seems to still be the going price for new 3tb drives. Sure, there have been some great sales or you can save a few bucks shucking external drives, but not much movement from my vantage point...
 
I got a white label 6TB for $80 about 2 years ago on sale at NewEgg. Granted that's a used drive but it's worked well. I also got a new 8TB WD Red for ~$180-$200 about a year ago, pretty close to the price per GB you're mentioning for the 3TB but I seem to remember something like that costing in the $300-400 range for that before then. Got that for a KDlinks KODI box. Both were sales so that supports what you're saying. For the most part I only buy drives when they're on sale.

Sorry to hear about those Seagates. It's such a crap shoot. For me it always has been despite what I've read in reviews when it came to platters. I had a stretch of 2-3 years where every WD I bought failed in one year. Meanwhile, I've got 4x500GB Seagates, that I retired, which were used in various RAIDs for about 5-8 years. They weren't failing I just figured not worth pushing since I got them for $50 each thru walmart in 2011. So far I've seen one Kingston 120GB SSD fail for no apparent reason, and one Sandisk 120GB(out of 30+ I installed in some ancient HP workstations three years ago). With SSD's I've tried many different brands, all SATA III, and had good success with all for some o.k. prices except I'm waiting for a better sale on 2TB's.
 
One thing I do is always buy the used enterprise class drives. Even used they last so much longer than the consumer stuff.
 
IceDigger said:
One thing I do is always buy the used enterprise class drives. Even used they last so much longer than the consumer stuff.
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When I first researched the 'white label' drive that's what I found out it was. Hadn't heard of such a thing until then. It's still rock solid. I haven't heard of a SSD version of this yet.
 
Prices will probably never be low enough for huge storage needs, but the fact that $120-130 without sales gets you a top tier 1TB SATA drive that cost about double last year is already pretty crazy. If prices get too low for flash the manufacturers will probably just slow down production or have those magical floods/power outages that seem to affect production forever :mad:
 
Strelok said:
If prices get too low for flash the manufacturers will probably just slow down production or have those magical floods/power outages that seem to affect production forever :mad:
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Yeah, it's funny(not) how often something like that happens when prices really begin to dip.
 
I can see on the low end, where you just have overhead in making a spinner that you don't in making a SSD, especially now that both have become commodity items.

On the high end, I don't think it ever will, at least in so long as spinners remain in production. SSD just has so many advantages I think they will always command a price premium on the larger size/higher sales volume end of the scale, or at least until we have the death rattle of the entire spinner industry.

There's no good reason that couldn't have already occurred, except, as Strelok points out, those pesky floods and power outages keep happening....
 
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