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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.