SSD prices in freefall -- won't overtake hard disks anytime soon

So in addition to dropping a couple of high-capacity disks this morning, Samsung also gave us some interesting (albeit, depressing) insight into their thoughts on Solid State Disk penetration at a session on SSD vs. hard drives at a product conference in Japan. Big stuff when you consider Samsung's pioneering role to supplant traditional 1.8-inch hard disk drives with flash-lovin' SSDs. We've already heard from Sandisk that SSD prices should fall by about 60% annually. Nice, but SSDs are currently 5x the cost of their mechanical brethren: $7.5/GB compared to $1.4/GB for HDDs. Even by 2010, Samsung (backed by DataQuest research) still estimates at least a 3.x gap: $1.9/GB for SSDs vs $0.9/GB for HDDs according to Hwang's law. In other words, we'll be paying a significant premium for flash memory's lickity quick boots and greater reliability long into the future. Still, a 128GB SSD for $243? Give us two, please.

[snife @ Apr 25th 2007 9:07AM]

2.5/0.6 = 3
silly engadget!

the 2.5 is moores law - the 1.9 is what they are actually predicting and thats just justification for higher prices for the next couple of years - it will actually be much lower than that by 2010

[Ben @ Apr 25th 2007 9:17AM]

Thats compared to a 1.8 inch HD ... you can already get current 3.5 inch HD's for $0.28~$0.35 / GB ... by 2010 this would be much much lower.

[Andir3.0 @ Apr 25th 2007 10:11AM]

That is, if the technology can keep up. Last I heard, it was getting more and more difficult to squeeze more data into those platters.

[Roland Rohde @ Apr 25th 2007 9:47AM]

I'd love to see SSD Harddisks in computers soon since I hate the rattling, powerhungry and slow disks we are using now. If they don't manage to get prices down to comparable levels in the next year or two, I highly doubt this will happen. Probably some other tech will develop in the meantime and erase the SSDs from the roadmaps...

[anonymous @ Apr 25th 2007 10:04AM]

the reliability of these types of drives has not been proven yet. With cheap quality parts and engineering involved with the making of these things, I'd be surprised if they have the reliability that is being touted.

[MikeN @ Apr 25th 2007 10:10AM]

I don't really see where you're drawing that conclusion from. Currently Samsung makes some of highest quality HDD's on market. Assuming that they are engineering these SSD's in house, what reason do you have to think they would be LESS reliable by the elimination of moving parts and sensitive platters?

[shelterpaw @ Apr 25th 2007 10:19AM]

SSD will get cheaper fast than that graph predicts.

1. The average consumer has no clue and once they get a clue, they'll want it even if they don't need it. But everybody needs it. ;)

2. Professionals in the multimedia industry will see the benefits first and be early adopters. This will drive demand for lager capacity drives which will lower the price of the small 128GB drives.

3. Competition will drive it down.

My 3 cents plain.

[Jim @ Apr 25th 2007 10:33AM]

How about access time, reliability and power consumption? For typical business applications you want reliability - road warriors want better power consumptions - gamers want fast access time. At a certain point all that extra drive space is used for achieving purposes - like storing videos and photos.
I would love to have a really fast SSD (128 GB) as the primary drive and then a huge (500 GB+) secondary drive to store all the crap that I do not routinely access.

[Rick (the original Rick) @ Apr 25th 2007 11:01AM]

ditto that thought Jim.. but I could live with a smaller SSD, for the OS only. Then store progs on hd. A 20 gig SSD would suffice.

[I M Goen @ Apr 25th 2007 10:38AM]

Prices will drop much faster if WalMart started to sell them... since they can discount everything.

[MBubba @ Apr 25th 2007 10:47AM]

If *anybody* would start to sell them. Show me where I can buy SSD for $7.5/GB and I'd be all over it. I'm getting sick of all these stories about SSD prices when in fact these things aren't even for sale yet. There is one web site out there selling them for $50-$75/GB.

[greg woulf @ Apr 25th 2007 10:42AM]

I'm with Jim on this one. This would be a great primary hard drive. Gamers will be all over their latest SSD with faster read times and write times, which was a problem.

I would love to have an SSD that I could have the Operating system and one single game on at the speeds they're talking.

The price might be 10X, but Hard drives are so cheap it's like buying an ink cartridge for the printer to get a new hard drive. If this improves performance, and reduces waste time it'll eventually be successful.

My big concern right now is more about longevity. I don't want to spend that money on something that will die in the first year.

[reu @ Apr 25th 2007 10:46AM]

are these even for sale anywhere yet? at non-exorbitant prices? we see so many articles about this here but that's about it.

[RaslDasl @ Apr 25th 2007 11:14AM]

A 32GB SSD would be sufficient for most corporate users. All anyone needs is their OS, programs and a cache of their e-mail. Anything else (videos, music, etc.) is personal data that should not be stored on a work laptop anyway.

[Matt @ Apr 25th 2007 11:16AM]

I want a SSD for my laptop. :(

[catbertz @ Apr 25th 2007 11:23AM]

I'm struggling to wait much longer. Elsewhere on Engadget there is a story about Dell offering ssd laptops

http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/111649644/

[GEEEE @ Apr 25th 2007 12:16PM]

Dell is already selling Latitudes 420 with SSD.

[Jeff @ Apr 25th 2007 1:28PM]

Thanks, I just bought one.

[paul34 @ Apr 25th 2007 12:35PM]

Also, aren't these drives still less reliable than their mechanical counterparts?

By reliability I mean long-term reliability. Flash memory, AFAIK, has never been known to withstand many, many years of constant writing. If I'm not mistaken, they have a certain life as to their read/write cycles.

I'm still waiting for that fancy laser hologram optical memory stuff.

[Grant @ Apr 25th 2007 12:49PM]

Hologram memory?
psht, how 2020.

you gotta go for the bio interface memory.
just think, storing you whole music colletcion and a lifetime of pictures on that 3/4 of your brain you don't use.

[paul34 @ Apr 25th 2007 12:51PM]

good idea, the RIAA can never get me there! yes! screw you RIAA heh

[Grant @ Apr 25th 2007 12:44PM]

ohhhh 2012, When SSDs are the norm, you can clearly not come soon enough.

[ben @ Apr 25th 2007 1:39PM]

Anyone know where I can buy a 128GB SSD for $243? I would purchase two right now! Anyone?

[Chuckles McGee @ Apr 25th 2007 4:51PM]

Sure, it might be a long,long time until SSDs are cheaper per gig than traditional drives- but the time until their price drops to "reasonably affordable for the performance gains" is very close. I'd pay $350+ for a 64 gig 2.5" flash drive right now, I'm getting something cooler, quieter, less energy-draining, more relIable and faster than a traditional drive in that form factor.

Terabyte and larger mechanical drives will be kicking around for many more years, but flash drives for mobile consumers are going to hit affordable prices and begin gaining mainstream acceptance this year. By the end of 2008, SSDs will be the de facto choice for all medium to high end mobile PCs- mobile trad drives will still hang around for budget computers, but they'll pretty much be eliminated once the flash price point goes below traditional, mobile drives. I'll say an essential death for mobile traditional drives (none can be found on retailers shelves or with new systems) around 2012.

[james b @ Apr 25th 2007 7:23PM]

These are really fast at reading and sequential writes, but when you get to small random writes, the performance is worse than rotating media. The flash is arranged in segments that are bigger than a the 512 bytes in a typical disk sector, so to do a single write you have to read multiple sectors, modify the target sector, then re-write the entire segment. That and SSDs start to wear out after between 300,000 and 1,000,000 write cycles (according to endgaget.com).

I would like one for holding GPS data when I offroad in my Jeep, since the bouncing and bashing is generally bad for disk drives.

[Mikael @ Apr 26th 2007 5:47AM]

What's good is that when they fail, it's usually only writing that fails. Thus, you can still read your data.

[thatkidthere @ Apr 26th 2007 11:29AM]

I'm no expert, but I am taking this report with a grain of salt. Snife is on the right track. These predictions (though backed by whateverthecrap research, inc)are likely conservative.

I would expect that the SSD prices will come down in a much sharped decline than that graph indicates. At the same time, I think the descent of the HDD is far too slow as well.

[Peter @ May 1st 2007 2:01PM]

I'm starting to get sick of these people who think the only thing that matters with hd's is cost/mb. Everytime you wait for your computer to do something it's because of the hard drive, not your 3.0ghz dual core processor.

In the year 2007, after 10 years of constant upgrades to hardware and os we shouldn't have to wait for anything to happen on our computers. Yet we still do. Here is a technology that promises to fill that gap and all you people talk about is cost per mb? You all deserve windows vista and sony rootkits.

[Benson @ Oct 15th 2007 8:45AM]

> after 10 years of constant upgrades to hardware and os we shouldn't have to wait for anything to happen on our computers.

After 10 years of upgrades to our hardware, our computers can do things say, 100x faster.
After 10 years of upgrades to our OSs (and correspondingly to our apps & libraries) they require about 100x as many things done to run.
So the CPU/execution stays about the same.
OTOH, the secondary storage hardware has increased in speed much less, perhaps only 10x. But, because much of the 100x things to do lives in system libraries (already in RAM) we only have file sizes about 10x to be loaded from disk.

Result: Performance remains approximately constant for the latest software and latest hardware.

The reason for this, of course, is simple market pressures. Waiting doesn't bother people enough to avoid upgrading to the newest, bloatedest os & apps. If it did, then the resulting low sales to app makers would give them strong pressure to make the next version faster, not slower, as a marketing point. Additionally, if the waiting bothered people, they would be upgrading to high-end hardware instead of midrange stuff; thus encouraging release of better high-end hardware.
These effects clearly work in reverse: if software, while quite speedy, was a little too feature-light, the balance would shift that way. Since the waiting-for-disk time has remained level for years, it seems clear that we are equilibriated at what the market as a whole is happy with.

Doesn't mean I'm happy with it, but for people like us, the sol'n is to buy high-end hardware, and hold off on software updates. That way, we get better performance, and send as strong a message as we can (via $$, the only thing corporations understand) that we don't like waiting.

Re: vista & RKs, dead right! (-:

[nick.chou @ Jul 16th 2007 7:48PM]

Hi,
I got 1 SSD SATA interface (same interface as regulare 2.5'') Now, the speed of my system is working very fast.. I love ebay