When do you think SSD drives will drop in price?

I would like to get an SSD drive but $319 is alot for only 128gb of storage. Tho it's fast it's still a bit pricey to me. When do you think the price will drop?

 

Basically when the "mainstream" market starts to consume them more often increasing demand especially in laptops, thus production will increase (leading to lower price per unit) and competition between suppliers. I would say 6 months and you will get an 80Gb one for $100 or less which is already very close.

Frankly all you really need on them is the OS and the programs you access the most frequently (games, etc) and you can use a SATA II as data storage. It is only speeding up the read/write access times to HDD so the CPU and RAM are still going to significantly dictate potential system speed. At least it is one more potential bottleneck being addressed.

 

This may be of interest to you and the paragraph at the bottom of this page says what Bold Eagle says.

http://bestssddrive.com/ssd-what-is-it/ (~_^)

 

This is a really good article on SSDs.

It really sounds like it may be a while for the price to come down. Intel and Samsung are making all the chips so not much competition and a good deal of demand/hype. Cheap models don't seem to get the performance either, so no bargain hunting yet.

What really made me sad is that they have no idea on the longterm reliability of stored data. They are talking maybe 5 years much the same as a standard HD. I was hoping that SSD would be a reliable way to archive large amounts of data for long periods--I thought decades.

I can't believe with people putting all their memories into digital format that there is yet to be a reliable media to archive them. CD/DVDs fail all the time no matter how carefully you store them. HDs probably won't fair well in an anti-static bag for ten years with no use (although I trust this more than DVDs). I keep waiting for a media that once written won't deteriorate..at least in my lifetime. I can dream.

 

Excellent find and a good read. Many decent reviewers are also discussing the merits of current "benchmarking" apps and their reliability to truly reflect the SSD outcomes, especially when compared to SATA/PATA HDD's.

The way PC technology evolves it won't be long before they are affordable for the primary apps (including OS) but as an infallible storage medium it looks like the old hard copies in a decent box with mothballs still rules.

 

You maybe interested in this pclover:

the Fastest Solid State Disks (SSDs) and the world's fastest at the moment apparently is:

http://www.fusionio.com/ioxtreme/

I want to win lotto so I can make a RAID0 from 2 of these.

 

Interesting on the fusionio extreme. It is a PCI-e card rather than a 2.5 inch drive. Never thought that HDs might look like that one day.

http://hothardware.com/Articles/Fusionio-vs-Intel-X25M-SSD-RAID-Grudge-Match/?page=1

 

Now I thought I had mis-read it from the manufacturers site but there it is again,
"Life expectancy 48yrs - at 5TB write-erase/day"
http://hothardware.com/Articles/Fusionio-vs-Intel-X25M-SSD-RAID-Grudge-Match/?page=2

"Operating temperature -40°C to +70°C"

What is also really impressive is the temp ranges especially as had 2x250GB WD HDD die within 1-2 weeks of each other and I believe that 45-50C was the cause, just after the warranties.

This is some very impressive technology and although it seems expensive at the moment, I remember paying $450USD for 2 x 1GB of Crucial RAM "direct from the manufacturers" ~3 years ago.

Hmmm I think the article must have got the pricing wrong at $7200 as you can see they are listing the 80GB for $895