15 ms·

Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $350 Cheapest 1 TB HDD on Amazon: $40 Expecting a 10x drop in prices in 1 year is ludicrous. Even if the prices follow a pseudo M

Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $350 Cheapest 1 TB HDD on Amazon: $40 Expecting a 10x drop in prices in 1 year is ludicrous. Even if the prices follow a pseudo Moore's law and fall by half every 18 months, you're looking at at least 5 years before they reach parity. And in the meantimg HDDs would have gotten cheaper; so expect even more time for parity. In other words: ain't happenin' in 2016.

philjohn 11y ago
The author commented that they've seen a 50% drop in price over the last 8 months (from 20x HDD to 10x HDD), so it's not outside the realms of probability with the increased yields of 3D NAND.
- discardorama 11y ago
  I doubt the 50% figure. Just as a test: I looked at the price history for a random 256GB SSD (from Crucial). The highest price in the last year? $115. The current price? $99. Not nearly a 50% drop. Link: http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX100-2-5-Inch-Internal-CT256MX100SSD1/product/B00KFAGCWK?context=browse http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX100-2-5-Inch-Internal-C...
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Is it not superseded by this item? http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX200-250GB-Internal-Solid/product/B00RQA6DTE?context=browse http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX200-250GB-Internal-Soli... The price is about the same, as is the performance, but are they still making the MX100? If not, I think the pricing information for it will not be very informative.
  - astrodust 11y ago
    The prices at the high end have been imploding faster than at the low end.
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    While I suspect your original comment is closer to the truth than the article's (as far as price parity goes), picking a single data point doesn't make the point. It's rare for a drive to suddenly drop in price so significantly without manufacturing changes (thusly a new version of the drive). So while you're unlikely to see the same exact drive for 50% less after a year it's entirely plausible to see a different model, similar or more capacity, drop in price.
  - nivla 11y ago
    Now you are just cherry picking to prove a point. In a similar tone checkout the huge drop in prices for the Kingston Digital 240GB SSDNow[1]. It has dropped from about $400 to a mind blowing $78!! I have been tracking the prices of HDD's for a while now. Although I do agree that HDDs are currently substantially cheaper than SSDs, HDDs have had much less drop in price or increase in capacity compared to the pre flood era. The bigger problem facing HDDs now is that almost all major manufactures are bought up by WD and Seagate and this is starting to show the ill effects of a duopoly. So it remains in their best interest to keep the prices high [2]. [1] http://camelcamelcamel.com/Kingston-Digital-SSDNow-SV300S37A-240G/product/B00A1ZTZNM http://camelcamelcamel.com/Kingston-Digital-SSDNow-SV300S37A... [2] http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2194549/western-digital-posts-threefold-increase-in-profits-despite-floods http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2194549/western-dig...
    - yen223 11y ago
      "The bigger problem facing HDDs now is that almost all major manufactures are bought up by WD and Seagate and this is starting to show the ill effects of a duopoly. So it remains in their best interest to keep the prices high [2]." It's not in the HDD manufacturers best interest to keep prices inflated, considering price is one of the 2 big competitive edge HDDs have over SSDs. What happened during the floods was that WD[0] got lucky - data consumption remained high as ever, and SSDs simply weren't cheap enough at that point to fill the void that the floods left behind. [0] And to a greater extent, Seagate. From what I remembered their facilities weren't directly affected by the flood, but their supply chains were disrupted.
  - chaud 11y ago
    I have been (unscientifically) tracking the prices of consumer level SSDs that are on sale for a few years now, there isn't any massive drop: http://media.mmo-champion.com/images/news/2015/may/ssdgraph.gif http://media.mmo-champion.com/images/news/2015/may/ssdgraph....
    - Rexxar 11y ago
      A logarithmic scale would give a better image of the situation.
  - zanny 11y ago
    In late 2013 I bought an 840 Pro 256GB for around $190. Today, I'd be looking at a 512GB 850 Pro for $140, probably $120 on a good sale (like when I bought the 840 Pro). Its about 40% in a little over a year and a half. Significant, at least. Its at the point where you cannot recommend to anyone to use a mechanical hard drive as an OS volume anymore, at least, at any price.
    - Rapidwire 11y ago
      Samsung 512GB 850 Pro is $260 on Amazon[0], not $140. Am I missing something? [0] http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-512GB-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-7KE512BW/dp/B00LF10KTO http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-512GB-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-7KE...
mrfusion 11y ago
Prices get weird on Amazon. Maybe newegg would yield a better comparison. Also maybe that HDD and that SSD aren't the same level of quality?
- adventured 11y ago
  It's essentially accurate. For example on Newegg a vanilla 7200 HD from Western Digital, at 1tb, will run you $50. The lowest cost 1tb SSD will run in the mid $300s. A solid 7x difference. In less than two years we'll see consumer retail 1tb SSDs for $150 to $200. What's actually going to happen, more than a violent price plunge pushing 1tb down to $50, is capacity will soar while prices fall more reasonably than the article indicates. So you'll be buying 5tb SSDs for $300 in three or four years. The difference is the friction the SSD makers will insert into the market, when it comes to falling prices; ie the difference between what they could sell them at, and what they actually will sell them at. The race will be to higher capacities first, then as capacity saturation nears, the bottom will fall out of lower SSD storage tiers on pricing.
  - hayksaakian 11y ago
    Are there technical limits to hard drive capacity? Is there a point at which they simply cannot get cheaper?
    - dragontamer 11y ago
      Yes and no? Those new "shingled" Hard Drives are 8TB and pretty cheap. However, the hard drives have severe reductions in speed and are really only for archival purposes. IIRC, there's a path for 10TB, 16TB and beyond if you're willing to put up with the weaknesses of shingled hard drives. Granted, SSDs are moving from MLC(2-bits per cell) to TLC (3-bits per cell) which reduce speed significantly without actually selling any "more" hardware. So both sides are "cheating" extra capacity out of the same hardware. If you want to keep the same high-quality specs that the 4tb hard drives have (speed, reliability, etc. etc.), I don't think there's a valid upgrade path at the moment. There's some research to push the capacities beyond that while retaining the speed of current hard drives, but they're not ready for commercial use yet. But the same is true for SSDs. 16nm MLC Flash might turn to 10nm or 8nm as process technology improves... but that's maybe a 2x to 4x improvment in capacity. TLC gives another 50% boost.
theandrewbailey 11y ago
Even if you factor in the performance difference, the cost still doesn't quite work out. On average, I don't think they are ~9x faster (more like 5x). Sure, SSDs max out disk interface speed and effectively have no seek time, but there are few workloads that are heavy on 4k random I/O (like booting and copying small files).
- AlisdairO 11y ago
  Really? For myself and everyone else I've talked to, using an SSD was by far the largest upgrade they've applied to their home computer for many years.
- mschwaig 11y ago
  As a desktop user tasks like booting and copying small files make a hell of a difference for the perceived speed of a system, because they feel like they should be fast. This is where SSDs shine. On the other hand, most tasks that involve sequential I/O with bigger files are expected to take some time. Have you ever tried unzipping eclipse on different systems?
gwern 11y ago
> And in the meantimg HDDs would have gotten cheaper Don't be sure about that. Remember that the Thai floods setback HDD prices and made them more expensive for years; they still haven't returned to the pre-flood trendline last I checked. With SSDs dropping, that might deter much more investment into HDDs (and with less demand from HDDs in the first place, there will be fewer of the economies of scale & learning curves that drove previous HDD price decreases - and vice versa for SSDs!).
- theandrewbailey 11y ago
  > they still haven't returned to the pre-flood trendline last I checked. They have. I remember buying 2TB drives a year before (2010). I paid about $200 each. Last year (2014), I bought 4TB drives for $130 each. That's about 3x improvement over 4 years, right?
  - artmageddon 11y ago
    The prices may not be falling at the same rate as they were before the floods, though.
    - theandrewbailey 11y ago
      That's likely the case, since a lot of industry consolidation has happened since (5 to 3). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Drive_Manufacturer_Consolidation.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Driv...
  - mapt 11y ago
    Appled to oranges. In 2010, you overpaid by more than 100%: http://slickdeals.net/expired/2495085-79-99-seagate-barracuda-2tb-sata-st32000542as?v=1&src=SiteSearch http://slickdeals.net/expired/2495085-79-99-seagate-barracud...
    - kw71 11y ago
      Apples to oranges. Can't compare the seagate junk to a quality WD or Hitachi that's far more likely to still be spinning _today._
white-flame 11y ago
Let's look at the sweet spots, because that's really what many people will buy: Best $/GB HDD on pricewatch.com: $0.024/GB for 2TB at $48.95 Best $/GB SSD on pricewatch.com: $0.387/GB for 240GB at $92.95 That's a 16x price increase, not 10x.
- samstave 11y ago
  Yeah, 240SSD for <$100 is great! while I cant stand the case and build quality of my System 76 machine - the guts are the best bang for the buck. The fact that it can take two internal drives (both SSD) is awesome - so having dual 240GB drives allows for plenty of space. I have a 1TB external that I glacerize my other stuff to. Also, get a Flickr account which can host your 1TB of pics for free (money for nothin')... and you wont consume space on your local box with pics.
  - ChristianBundy 11y ago
    > Also, get a Flickr account which can host your 1TB of pics for free (money for nothin')... and you wont consume space on your local box with pics. Just make sure you understand the privacy repercussions of hosting your data on Flickr.
    - sosuke 11y ago
      Are there any things to know about settings images to 'private' on Flickr?
      - sneak 11y ago
        Photos have lat/lon/timestamp in EXIF. You're uploading a track log to them.
        otterpro 11y ago
        Even though location is embedded in EXIF, you can disable geolocation feature in Flickr's privacy setting, so that it won't be in the photo that is displayed on flickr. But yes, it does keep EXIF info in its database. For those who are paranoid, either run exiftool or imagemagick to strip off all EXIF before uploading.
jegutman 11y ago
Ah zeno's paradox. When the SSD matches the HDD price, in 28.5 months, the HDD will have moved, and so on and so on. Although at some point they'll probably just make many many fewer HDDs so the price will stop moving much. For any storage experts, will HDD still be preferable for long-term cold storage or are those even currently an unacceptable solution? Seems like cold storage might end up being more important over time. I guess AWS Glacier is <$1 per TB per month which is pretty cheap and can presumably even fall over time. I have no idea what the reliability of these services is though.
- otisfunkmeyer 11y ago
  if im not mistaken, amazon glacier is $10 per TB per month at 0.01 per GB per month stated price. please correct me if something has changed!
  - jegutman 11y ago
    Ah you're right.
- kibibu 11y ago
  > Although at some point they'll probably just make many many fewer HDDs so the price will stop moving much At this point prices will go up again.
- dzhiurgis 11y ago
  Perhaps this is too simplistic, but I think it should be cheaper to build solid-state chip than mechanical device. But this also reminds me LCD / CRT wars. LCDs were promised to be cheaper, but it took years to amortize the setup costs, but we got there eventually.
dean 11y ago
Cheapest new 250 GB HDD on NewEgg: $34.95 Cheapest new 256 GB SSD on NewEgg: $82.99
- digikata 11y ago
  It's more interesting to me to compare cost/GB on the most frequently shipped or bought capacity for each media. At 250GB, the SSD is at close to (or maybe just ahead of) the most common size. 250GB HDDs are basically close to EOL which I imagine can skew the 'sweet spot' price up or down depending on the situation. Under that definition, SSD sweet spots are probably 128 or 256GB, and HDD is probably 1TB or 2TB?
- fencepost 11y ago
  The cheapest 250GB HDD isn't really a good measure - twice the capacity is what, $3-4 more?
- mark-r 11y ago
  But is the 250 GB HDD still in production? I'm guessing that's a fire sale price. I don't think drives still in production ever go below $50.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
Yup, pretty much. The only bit of news is that SSDs can achieve hard drive densities with 3D NAND, but like the early calls for the demise of all lighting other than LED. That was 10 years ago, its getting closer now. I'm putting in LED can lights in my living room for example. So at some point ...
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  To your LED point, I'm unaware of anyone not putting LED if cost of electricity or labor is of any importance. Consumers may not have gotten the message yet, but anyone running the numbers is going LED or nothing at all (small exceptions for grow operations or theater lightening).
  - ars 11y ago
    LED fixtures are worth it, LED edison base bulbs (replacement bulbs) are not. So new installations get LED, but old ones are not retrofitted.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      Citation? I've seen math that all LED bulbs provide a better return in saved energy costs over the S&P500.
      - ars 11y ago
        Better return compared to incandescent, but a worse return compared to CFL. Comparing to incandescent is quite disingenuous. The bulbs just cost too much today, and the heat problems (i.e. much lower lifetime) are not fully solved, they work in some fixtures and not in others.
        toomuchtodo 11y ago
        Cree LEDs have a 20 year lifetime, and a 10-year limited warranty.
brownbat 11y ago
Great point, although we should also talk about the way storage use has shifted. I used to have some massive programs installed, a lot of digital media and video games at one point. Now Steam / GOG / Blizzard "stores" my games when not in use. Google / Apple / Pandora / Spotify "stores" my music. Amazon or Netflix "stores" my movies. When I ran an HDD, I wanted a TB. Now that I'm running SSDs, 80 GB seems to meet all my needs (thanks to changes in internet services). Sure, it won't be true for everyone. (Editing TIFFs for GIS anyone?) I don't run a Chromebook, but its philosophy is not completely insane for a reason... It's like storage has differentiated into at least two separate purposes. Main system drive for consumer PCs, formerly an HDD only component, is feasibly replaced by SSDs. At the sizes needed for that, the difference in price per GB is already under a factor of two.[1] [1] Caviar Blue 80GB @ $0.375/GB; MyDigitalSSD 64GB @ $0.578; Kingston 90GB @ $0.658/GB... https://pcpartpicker.com/parts/internal-hard-drive/#sort=a7&page=1&X=0,25540&S=8000,100000 https://pcpartpicker.com/parts/internal-hard-drive/#sort=a7&...
- pyrocat 11y ago
  I agree to a large extent but I think 80GB is an extreme on the low end. Many modern games (especially MMOs) are 20GB+. Windows 7 alone requires a huge amount of storage. I have a 120GB partition at home (just for OS+programs, not data) and I'm constantly uninstalling steam games in order to install others. If you want a modicum of breathing room, I'd say minimum 200GB.
  - hobarrera 11y ago
    I've Eve-Online and StarCraft 2 installed, which use about 30GB in total. Add another 6-8GB for the OS, and you've still got about 50GB left (which I actually fill up with even more games). IMHO, 120GB is way more than enough.
  - dragontamer 11y ago
    IIRC, Assassin Creed Unity required 50GB by itself. If Windows takes up 30GB, you pretty much need to wipe out everything just to play Unity on 80GB. I think 256GB to 512GB is the best bet for the standard consumer.
duaneb 11y ago
The gap narrows exponentially with each order of magnitude drop in price. Under 256 gigs you'd be hard-pressed to need a hdd over a ssd.
WalterBright 11y ago
My need for SSD is rather modest. I have an SSD big enough for the OS and things I use often, and a huge spinning secondary drive for things I rarely access.
- mark-r 11y ago
  That's a good pattern, one I use too. But that's not what the article was about - it was making the case that SSD would soon reach similar capacities as spinning HDs, and at similar prices. I'm skeptical too. I believe we are already at the point where SSDs are large enough and cheap enough for the majority of use cases. It's only going to get better. There has always seemed to be a price floor for hard disks, where making them smaller doesn't make them any cheaper, and I'm wondering if the floor won't be lower for SSD.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    I use spinning disks for archival backups. It's been reported that SSDs aren't reliable for that. Hard disks also are questionable for long term storage, which means I rotate them often, but still. Anecdotally, USB sticks I throw in a drawer tend to go bad after a few years. I'd still love to replace all the spinning disks with SSDs, though. Faster, smaller, less power, less fragile, silent, what's not to like? Hope the longevity issue gets better.
bcheung 11y ago
Exactly. And how long until it achieves parity in the cloud hosting world. Hard drives and memory are so expensive you can buy they outright every other month it seems like.
jldugger 11y ago
Data! http://www.jcmit.com/flash2015.htm http://www.jcmit.com/flash2015.htm You can see there's about a 10x difference between the two on the logarithmic scale chart. The trend is slightly faster for SSD, but a quick straightedge-on-monitor projection suggests the intercept is closer to 2015, if ever.
- ghshephard 11y ago
  Is that a typo? Did you mean "2025" (i.e. 10 years out?) - I looked at the graph, and that's what it looked like to me based on historical projections. The author, Jim O'Reilly, is not basing his article on historical analysis, but on an understanding of the impact of 3D NAND + his communication with the major flash providers - some of whom are committing to 8 TB and 16 TB SSD drives in the next 18 months. That, in conjunction with massively more efficient utilization of existing Fabs (both by dropping back a few process generations to increase Yield, plus stacking the NANDs in the Z direction) is going to create a huge disruption in the next 18 months. Now - the question up for debate - does this disruption result in lower prices, does it result in large and expensive drives, or are the Fabs supply constrained such that they will be able to serve new markets, but not have sufficient capacity to drive down prices on high volume? Regardless - 2015/2016 are going to be huge years for SSD storage.
  - jldugger 11y ago
    It is a typo; my 10key isn't as good as I imagine it is, clearly =( I meant 2018.
TimSchumann 11y ago
I'd bet it's something more like a 5x increase in capacity for a 50% reduction in cost over the next year. Doesn't sound as crazy when you think about it in that way.
bjd2385 11y ago
I bought a $50 1TB HDD from Newegg for my gaming desktop (which I of course do not use for gaming) about 6 months ago. I've looked again and they're the same price. It appears SSDs are still hundreds of dollars for the same capacity. I won't be buying an SSD until they're under $100/Tb.
lukeschlather 11y ago
When you factor in depreciation, 1TB of HDD is conservatively worth half of what 1TB of SSD is worth. And judging from the reliability figures I'm hearing, it's more like a 1/10 multiplier and SSDs already outpace HDDs in value.
Ecio78 11y ago
for an HP 3PAR Enterprise storage 2TB 7.2k SAS NL: list price 2.300€, discounted about 850€ 1.95TB SSD: list price 12k€ (sources: HP partner quote for the SAS disk, quick textchat with friend in HP for SSD)
benjaminjackman 11y ago
Why would prices follow Moore's law rather than the laws of supply and demand? If all of a sudden there is an immense supply of drives whose performance and capacity themselves don't follow Moore's law then prices certainly wouldn't either. If suppliers can deliver hard drives that follow some cube version of Moore's law (temporarily, long term everything seems to S-Curve IMHO), then prices will fall dramatically, even in a time frame less than 5 years. Are spinnies horse drawn carriages, and Solid States the start of different, new, less mechanically restricted jet age? I think we all know that answer to that question -- maaaybe ;)
pedrorijo91 11y ago
Who besides Apple is 'forcing' users to use SSD? Even most of so called 'Ultrabooks' use HDD in order to become cheaper. If almost no one understands the performance and reliability difference a SSD can give, and almost no one 'enforces' users to buy SSD, how is this technology become cheaper in a so fast rate?
- frandroid 11y ago
  Fabrication improvements.
ycken 11y ago
Quick search says the Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $99 http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Notebook-2-5-Inch-Internal-PH2100U-1SHD/dp/B00JFAA97A/ http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Notebook-2-5-Inch-Internal-PH2... Expecting 60% drop is not that crazy.

philjohn 11y ago

The author commented that they've seen a 50% drop in price over the last 8 months (from 20x HDD to 10x HDD), so it's not outside the realms of probability with the increased yields of 3D NAND.

discardorama 11y ago
I doubt the 50% figure. Just as a test: I looked at the price history for a random 256GB SSD (from Crucial). The highest price in the last year? $115. The current price? $99. Not nearly a 50% drop. Link: http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX100-2-5-Inch-Internal-CT256MX100SSD1/product/B00KFAGCWK?context=browse http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX100-2-5-Inch-Internal-C...
- maxerickson 11y ago
  Is it not superseded by this item? http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX200-250GB-Internal-Solid/product/B00RQA6DTE?context=browse http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX200-250GB-Internal-Soli... The price is about the same, as is the performance, but are they still making the MX100? If not, I think the pricing information for it will not be very informative.
- astrodust 11y ago
  The prices at the high end have been imploding faster than at the low end.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  While I suspect your original comment is closer to the truth than the article's (as far as price parity goes), picking a single data point doesn't make the point. It's rare for a drive to suddenly drop in price so significantly without manufacturing changes (thusly a new version of the drive). So while you're unlikely to see the same exact drive for 50% less after a year it's entirely plausible to see a different model, similar or more capacity, drop in price.
- nivla 11y ago
  Now you are just cherry picking to prove a point. In a similar tone checkout the huge drop in prices for the Kingston Digital 240GB SSDNow[1]. It has dropped from about $400 to a mind blowing $78!! I have been tracking the prices of HDD's for a while now. Although I do agree that HDDs are currently substantially cheaper than SSDs, HDDs have had much less drop in price or increase in capacity compared to the pre flood era. The bigger problem facing HDDs now is that almost all major manufactures are bought up by WD and Seagate and this is starting to show the ill effects of a duopoly. So it remains in their best interest to keep the prices high [2]. [1] http://camelcamelcamel.com/Kingston-Digital-SSDNow-SV300S37A-240G/product/B00A1ZTZNM http://camelcamelcamel.com/Kingston-Digital-SSDNow-SV300S37A... [2] http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2194549/western-digital-posts-threefold-increase-in-profits-despite-floods http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2194549/western-dig...
  - yen223 11y ago
    "The bigger problem facing HDDs now is that almost all major manufactures are bought up by WD and Seagate and this is starting to show the ill effects of a duopoly. So it remains in their best interest to keep the prices high [2]." It's not in the HDD manufacturers best interest to keep prices inflated, considering price is one of the 2 big competitive edge HDDs have over SSDs. What happened during the floods was that WD[0] got lucky - data consumption remained high as ever, and SSDs simply weren't cheap enough at that point to fill the void that the floods left behind. [0] And to a greater extent, Seagate. From what I remembered their facilities weren't directly affected by the flood, but their supply chains were disrupted.
- chaud 11y ago
  I have been (unscientifically) tracking the prices of consumer level SSDs that are on sale for a few years now, there isn't any massive drop: http://media.mmo-champion.com/images/news/2015/may/ssdgraph.gif http://media.mmo-champion.com/images/news/2015/may/ssdgraph....
  - Rexxar 11y ago
    A logarithmic scale would give a better image of the situation.
- zanny 11y ago
  In late 2013 I bought an 840 Pro 256GB for around $190. Today, I'd be looking at a 512GB 850 Pro for $140, probably $120 on a good sale (like when I bought the 840 Pro). Its about 40% in a little over a year and a half. Significant, at least. Its at the point where you cannot recommend to anyone to use a mechanical hard drive as an OS volume anymore, at least, at any price.
  - Rapidwire 11y ago
    Samsung 512GB 850 Pro is $260 on Amazon[0], not $140. Am I missing something? [0] http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-512GB-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-7KE512BW/dp/B00LF10KTO http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-512GB-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-7KE...

mrfusion 11y ago

Prices get weird on Amazon. Maybe newegg would yield a better comparison. Also maybe that HDD and that SSD aren't the same level of quality?

adventured 11y ago
It's essentially accurate. For example on Newegg a vanilla 7200 HD from Western Digital, at 1tb, will run you $50. The lowest cost 1tb SSD will run in the mid $300s. A solid 7x difference. In less than two years we'll see consumer retail 1tb SSDs for $150 to $200. What's actually going to happen, more than a violent price plunge pushing 1tb down to $50, is capacity will soar while prices fall more reasonably than the article indicates. So you'll be buying 5tb SSDs for $300 in three or four years. The difference is the friction the SSD makers will insert into the market, when it comes to falling prices; ie the difference between what they could sell them at, and what they actually will sell them at. The race will be to higher capacities first, then as capacity saturation nears, the bottom will fall out of lower SSD storage tiers on pricing.
- hayksaakian 11y ago
  Are there technical limits to hard drive capacity? Is there a point at which they simply cannot get cheaper?
  - dragontamer 11y ago
    Yes and no? Those new "shingled" Hard Drives are 8TB and pretty cheap. However, the hard drives have severe reductions in speed and are really only for archival purposes. IIRC, there's a path for 10TB, 16TB and beyond if you're willing to put up with the weaknesses of shingled hard drives. Granted, SSDs are moving from MLC(2-bits per cell) to TLC (3-bits per cell) which reduce speed significantly without actually selling any "more" hardware. So both sides are "cheating" extra capacity out of the same hardware. If you want to keep the same high-quality specs that the 4tb hard drives have (speed, reliability, etc. etc.), I don't think there's a valid upgrade path at the moment. There's some research to push the capacities beyond that while retaining the speed of current hard drives, but they're not ready for commercial use yet. But the same is true for SSDs. 16nm MLC Flash might turn to 10nm or 8nm as process technology improves... but that's maybe a 2x to 4x improvment in capacity. TLC gives another 50% boost.

theandrewbailey 11y ago

Even if you factor in the performance difference, the cost still doesn't quite work out. On average, I don't think they are ~9x faster (more like 5x). Sure, SSDs max out disk interface speed and effectively have no seek time, but there are few workloads that are heavy on 4k random I/O (like booting and copying small files).

AlisdairO 11y ago
Really? For myself and everyone else I've talked to, using an SSD was by far the largest upgrade they've applied to their home computer for many years.
mschwaig 11y ago
As a desktop user tasks like booting and copying small files make a hell of a difference for the perceived speed of a system, because they feel like they should be fast. This is where SSDs shine. On the other hand, most tasks that involve sequential I/O with bigger files are expected to take some time. Have you ever tried unzipping eclipse on different systems?

gwern 11y ago

> And in the meantimg HDDs would have gotten cheaper Don't be sure about that. Remember that the Thai floods setback HDD prices and made them more expensive for years; they still haven't returned to the pre-flood trendline last I checked. With SSDs dropping, that might deter much more investment into HDDs (and with less demand from HDDs in the first place, there will be fewer of the economies of scale & learning curves that drove previous HDD price decreases - and vice versa for SSDs!).

theandrewbailey 11y ago
> they still haven't returned to the pre-flood trendline last I checked. They have. I remember buying 2TB drives a year before (2010). I paid about $200 each. Last year (2014), I bought 4TB drives for $130 each. That's about 3x improvement over 4 years, right?
- artmageddon 11y ago
  The prices may not be falling at the same rate as they were before the floods, though.
  - theandrewbailey 11y ago
    That's likely the case, since a lot of industry consolidation has happened since (5 to 3). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Drive_Manufacturer_Consolidation.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Diagram_of_Hard_Disk_Driv...
- mapt 11y ago
  Appled to oranges. In 2010, you overpaid by more than 100%: http://slickdeals.net/expired/2495085-79-99-seagate-barracuda-2tb-sata-st32000542as?v=1&src=SiteSearch http://slickdeals.net/expired/2495085-79-99-seagate-barracud...
  - kw71 11y ago
    Apples to oranges. Can't compare the seagate junk to a quality WD or Hitachi that's far more likely to still be spinning _today._

white-flame 11y ago

Let's look at the sweet spots, because that's really what many people will buy: Best $/GB HDD on pricewatch.com: $0.024/GB for 2TB at $48.95 Best $/GB SSD on pricewatch.com: $0.387/GB for 240GB at $92.95 That's a 16x price increase, not 10x.

samstave 11y ago
Yeah, 240SSD for <$100 is great! while I cant stand the case and build quality of my System 76 machine - the guts are the best bang for the buck. The fact that it can take two internal drives (both SSD) is awesome - so having dual 240GB drives allows for plenty of space. I have a 1TB external that I glacerize my other stuff to. Also, get a Flickr account which can host your 1TB of pics for free (money for nothin')... and you wont consume space on your local box with pics.
- ChristianBundy 11y ago
  > Also, get a Flickr account which can host your 1TB of pics for free (money for nothin')... and you wont consume space on your local box with pics. Just make sure you understand the privacy repercussions of hosting your data on Flickr.
  - sosuke 11y ago
    Are there any things to know about settings images to 'private' on Flickr?
    - sneak 11y ago
      Photos have lat/lon/timestamp in EXIF. You're uploading a track log to them.
      - otterpro 11y ago
        Even though location is embedded in EXIF, you can disable geolocation feature in Flickr's privacy setting, so that it won't be in the photo that is displayed on flickr. But yes, it does keep EXIF info in its database. For those who are paranoid, either run exiftool or imagemagick to strip off all EXIF before uploading.

jegutman 11y ago

Ah zeno's paradox. When the SSD matches the HDD price, in 28.5 months, the HDD will have moved, and so on and so on. Although at some point they'll probably just make many many fewer HDDs so the price will stop moving much. For any storage experts, will HDD still be preferable for long-term cold storage or are those even currently an unacceptable solution? Seems like cold storage might end up being more important over time. I guess AWS Glacier is <$1 per TB per month which is pretty cheap and can presumably even fall over time. I have no idea what the reliability of these services is though.

otisfunkmeyer 11y ago
if im not mistaken, amazon glacier is $10 per TB per month at 0.01 per GB per month stated price. please correct me if something has changed!
- jegutman 11y ago
  Ah you're right.
kibibu 11y ago
> Although at some point they'll probably just make many many fewer HDDs so the price will stop moving much At this point prices will go up again.
dzhiurgis 11y ago
Perhaps this is too simplistic, but I think it should be cheaper to build solid-state chip than mechanical device. But this also reminds me LCD / CRT wars. LCDs were promised to be cheaper, but it took years to amortize the setup costs, but we got there eventually.

dean 11y ago

Cheapest new 250 GB HDD on NewEgg: $34.95 Cheapest new 256 GB SSD on NewEgg: $82.99

digikata 11y ago
It's more interesting to me to compare cost/GB on the most frequently shipped or bought capacity for each media. At 250GB, the SSD is at close to (or maybe just ahead of) the most common size. 250GB HDDs are basically close to EOL which I imagine can skew the 'sweet spot' price up or down depending on the situation. Under that definition, SSD sweet spots are probably 128 or 256GB, and HDD is probably 1TB or 2TB?
fencepost 11y ago
The cheapest 250GB HDD isn't really a good measure - twice the capacity is what, $3-4 more?
mark-r 11y ago
But is the 250 GB HDD still in production? I'm guessing that's a fire sale price. I don't think drives still in production ever go below $50.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

Yup, pretty much. The only bit of news is that SSDs can achieve hard drive densities with 3D NAND, but like the early calls for the demise of all lighting other than LED. That was 10 years ago, its getting closer now. I'm putting in LED can lights in my living room for example. So at some point ...

toomuchtodo 11y ago
To your LED point, I'm unaware of anyone not putting LED if cost of electricity or labor is of any importance. Consumers may not have gotten the message yet, but anyone running the numbers is going LED or nothing at all (small exceptions for grow operations or theater lightening).
- ars 11y ago
  LED fixtures are worth it, LED edison base bulbs (replacement bulbs) are not. So new installations get LED, but old ones are not retrofitted.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Citation? I've seen math that all LED bulbs provide a better return in saved energy costs over the S&P500.
    - ars 11y ago
      Better return compared to incandescent, but a worse return compared to CFL. Comparing to incandescent is quite disingenuous. The bulbs just cost too much today, and the heat problems (i.e. much lower lifetime) are not fully solved, they work in some fixtures and not in others.
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        Cree LEDs have a 20 year lifetime, and a 10-year limited warranty.

brownbat 11y ago

Great point, although we should also talk about the way storage use has shifted. I used to have some massive programs installed, a lot of digital media and video games at one point. Now Steam / GOG / Blizzard "stores" my games when not in use. Google / Apple / Pandora / Spotify "stores" my music. Amazon or Netflix "stores" my movies. When I ran an HDD, I wanted a TB. Now that I'm running SSDs, 80 GB seems to meet all my needs (thanks to changes in internet services). Sure, it won't be true for everyone. (Editing TIFFs for GIS anyone?) I don't run a Chromebook, but its philosophy is not completely insane for a reason... It's like storage has differentiated into at least two separate purposes. Main system drive for consumer PCs, formerly an HDD only component, is feasibly replaced by SSDs. At the sizes needed for that, the difference in price per GB is already under a factor of two.[1] [1] Caviar Blue 80GB @ $0.375/GB; MyDigitalSSD 64GB @ $0.578; Kingston 90GB @ $0.658/GB... https://pcpartpicker.com/parts/internal-hard-drive/#sort=a7&page=1&X=0,25540&S=8000,100000 https://pcpartpicker.com/parts/internal-hard-drive/#sort=a7&...

pyrocat 11y ago
I agree to a large extent but I think 80GB is an extreme on the low end. Many modern games (especially MMOs) are 20GB+. Windows 7 alone requires a huge amount of storage. I have a 120GB partition at home (just for OS+programs, not data) and I'm constantly uninstalling steam games in order to install others. If you want a modicum of breathing room, I'd say minimum 200GB.
- hobarrera 11y ago
  I've Eve-Online and StarCraft 2 installed, which use about 30GB in total. Add another 6-8GB for the OS, and you've still got about 50GB left (which I actually fill up with even more games). IMHO, 120GB is way more than enough.
- dragontamer 11y ago
  IIRC, Assassin Creed Unity required 50GB by itself. If Windows takes up 30GB, you pretty much need to wipe out everything just to play Unity on 80GB. I think 256GB to 512GB is the best bet for the standard consumer.

duaneb 11y ago

The gap narrows exponentially with each order of magnitude drop in price. Under 256 gigs you'd be hard-pressed to need a hdd over a ssd.

WalterBright 11y ago

My need for SSD is rather modest. I have an SSD big enough for the OS and things I use often, and a huge spinning secondary drive for things I rarely access.

mark-r 11y ago
That's a good pattern, one I use too. But that's not what the article was about - it was making the case that SSD would soon reach similar capacities as spinning HDs, and at similar prices. I'm skeptical too. I believe we are already at the point where SSDs are large enough and cheap enough for the majority of use cases. It's only going to get better. There has always seemed to be a price floor for hard disks, where making them smaller doesn't make them any cheaper, and I'm wondering if the floor won't be lower for SSD.
- WalterBright 11y ago
  I use spinning disks for archival backups. It's been reported that SSDs aren't reliable for that. Hard disks also are questionable for long term storage, which means I rotate them often, but still. Anecdotally, USB sticks I throw in a drawer tend to go bad after a few years. I'd still love to replace all the spinning disks with SSDs, though. Faster, smaller, less power, less fragile, silent, what's not to like? Hope the longevity issue gets better.

bcheung 11y ago

Exactly. And how long until it achieves parity in the cloud hosting world. Hard drives and memory are so expensive you can buy they outright every other month it seems like.

jldugger 11y ago

Data! http://www.jcmit.com/flash2015.htm http://www.jcmit.com/flash2015.htm You can see there's about a 10x difference between the two on the logarithmic scale chart. The trend is slightly faster for SSD, but a quick straightedge-on-monitor projection suggests the intercept is closer to 2015, if ever.

ghshephard 11y ago
Is that a typo? Did you mean "2025" (i.e. 10 years out?) - I looked at the graph, and that's what it looked like to me based on historical projections. The author, Jim O'Reilly, is not basing his article on historical analysis, but on an understanding of the impact of 3D NAND + his communication with the major flash providers - some of whom are committing to 8 TB and 16 TB SSD drives in the next 18 months. That, in conjunction with massively more efficient utilization of existing Fabs (both by dropping back a few process generations to increase Yield, plus stacking the NANDs in the Z direction) is going to create a huge disruption in the next 18 months. Now - the question up for debate - does this disruption result in lower prices, does it result in large and expensive drives, or are the Fabs supply constrained such that they will be able to serve new markets, but not have sufficient capacity to drive down prices on high volume? Regardless - 2015/2016 are going to be huge years for SSD storage.
- jldugger 11y ago
  It is a typo; my 10key isn't as good as I imagine it is, clearly =( I meant 2018.

TimSchumann 11y ago

I'd bet it's something more like a 5x increase in capacity for a 50% reduction in cost over the next year. Doesn't sound as crazy when you think about it in that way.

bjd2385 11y ago

I bought a $50 1TB HDD from Newegg for my gaming desktop (which I of course do not use for gaming) about 6 months ago. I've looked again and they're the same price. It appears SSDs are still hundreds of dollars for the same capacity. I won't be buying an SSD until they're under $100/Tb.

lukeschlather 11y ago

When you factor in depreciation, 1TB of HDD is conservatively worth half of what 1TB of SSD is worth. And judging from the reliability figures I'm hearing, it's more like a 1/10 multiplier and SSDs already outpace HDDs in value.

Ecio78 11y ago

for an HP 3PAR Enterprise storage 2TB 7.2k SAS NL: list price 2.300€, discounted about 850€ 1.95TB SSD: list price 12k€ (sources: HP partner quote for the SAS disk, quick textchat with friend in HP for SSD)

benjaminjackman 11y ago

Why would prices follow Moore's law rather than the laws of supply and demand? If all of a sudden there is an immense supply of drives whose performance and capacity themselves don't follow Moore's law then prices certainly wouldn't either. If suppliers can deliver hard drives that follow some cube version of Moore's law (temporarily, long term everything seems to S-Curve IMHO), then prices will fall dramatically, even in a time frame less than 5 years. Are spinnies horse drawn carriages, and Solid States the start of different, new, less mechanically restricted jet age? I think we all know that answer to that question -- maaaybe ;)

pedrorijo91 11y ago

Who besides Apple is 'forcing' users to use SSD? Even most of so called 'Ultrabooks' use HDD in order to become cheaper. If almost no one understands the performance and reliability difference a SSD can give, and almost no one 'enforces' users to buy SSD, how is this technology become cheaper in a so fast rate?

frandroid 11y ago
Fabrication improvements.

ycken 11y ago

Quick search says the Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $99 http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Notebook-2-5-Inch-Internal-PH2100U-1SHD/dp/B00JFAA97A/ http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Notebook-2-5-Inch-Internal-PH2... Expecting 60% drop is not that crazy.