250GB SSD for £75...

rexehuk

rexehuk

rexehuk

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Now you're in! When do you think this title will become a reality on the hard disk scene?

I personally see SSD prices dropping hugely during Q3/Q4 2010, anyone else got any predictions or articles to prove for/against this?
 
Maybe supply v demand will keep them high for sometime. There never seems to be enough Intel or Crucial drives available. Can't see them dropping prices if they're selling all they can make - and if demand is there, no real reason to lower your profit margin - and at least recoup your R&D costs.

Also, so far the old drives haven't really plummeted in price - they've just been replaced by newer, faster drives. There's still a lot of old drives for sale at stupid prices when compared to the latest generation.

My guess is we won't see major price cuts until production is really ramped up and they truly are mainstream. I think for the next year or so we're more likely to see more refinements, larger capacity and faster drives with maybe more modest price reductions.

It'll be nice to be proven wrong :)
 
If you think about it logically SSD's are currently affordable. It's just the initial outlay that scares people.

Take my situation for example... Every 2/3 years I replace my C: drive and turn the old one into storage/backup out of fear of the C: failing.

With an SSD and initial investment of say £300 for a very nice SSD, you get to NEVER change your C: drive again given that most of them (given MTBF) will last for 170 YEARS until failure.

I should stop typing or my student loan might disappear as I begin to convince myself :p


On top of this... the drives create less waste than convential drives when scrapped, and use less power while they are in use. If you put SSD into the server farm equation, the number of hard drives that would be saved over the long term is huge! If anything I think that will be a key driver in the production of SSD's, as well as newcomers to the SSD market driving down prices in attempts for market share.
 
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Think you can probably add another year on to Q3 2010 they still have someway to go before people dump the traditional HD for SSD

Think it is samsung which are working on the SSD with 4 controller chips offering massive bandwith without the hassle of raid, if they can pull that off then potentially we have massive capacity drives which are super dupa quick which would probably be the catalyst needed to put SSD tech front and centre

Or it will be whenever dell announce that all their PCs ship with SSD :p
 
Totally.

Problem is the dilemma for those where price does matter, £120 for a decent 64gb SSD is affordable, but that will also buy 2x1tb HDs. Is the performance really worth that premium? I doubt many people think about the disposal element, and there's not too much difference in power consumption from what I've read.

Wait til the major PC manufacturers start offerring these as standard in their mid to high end machines, until then they're going to be fairly niche products, even if they are popular amongst enthusiasts.
 
Indeed, the server centre idea was looking very far down the line. I read somewhere that theres about a 50% reduction on SSD production costs year on year.

I'd be happy to buy a 256GB SSD by next christmas if the price point was around £250, whether it will happen is nothing but speculation.
 
Was it broke? I don't see regular posts on here asking about OCZ Vertex stock coming in...but lots of Crucial and Intel
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Intel make the fastest chips I believe and Indilinx make the chips for amongst others OCZ and Crucial so (sorry if i caused offence by the way) thought you were referring to the controller chips

Crucial's are a new product and very aggressively priced which is probably why they are so hard to get (the 128g version anyway :mad:)
 
rexehuk said:
Indeed, the server centre idea was looking very far down the line. I read somewhere that theres about a 50% reduction on SSD production costs year on year.

I'd be happy to buy a 256GB SSD by next christmas if the price point was around £250, whether it will happen is nothing but speculation.
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Question is will that reduction cost be passed on...

£250 by end of 2010...I could quite easily see that happening. Problem is price and capacity of HDs won't stay static either, so people will still be faced with the speed v capacity v cost dilemma, and during that time people's storage requirements will continue to grow too.
 
D1ngd0ng said:
Intel make the fastest chips I believe and Indilinx make the chips for amongst others OCZ and Crucial so (sorry if i caused offence by the way) thought you were referring to the controller chips

Crucial's are a new product and very aggressively priced which is probably why they are so hard to get (the 128g version anyway :mad:)
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No offence taken :) I was referring to the drives, but yes you're pretty much spot on. Intel make the fastest drives - not sure what flash memory chips they use - but certainly their controllers are probably the best at the moment for mainstream drives. Indilinx make the controllers for the OCZ Vertex and Crucial M225 which I believe both use Samsung flash memory. The OCZ Vertex and Crucial M225 whilst not identical are very very similar, so yes whilst they are more expensive for essentially the same performance I don't think they're going to be in as much demand. That's why I mentioned Crucial, not Indilinx :)
 
Anyone see a SSD "Standard" being employed? So all SSD have a certain controller? There will need to be some rules laid down for the future if SSD are to expand tbh.

Then again I'm not sure how a standard would be enforced, given intel are clearly controller leaders at the moment, other manufacturers might be against it in favour of their contollers, can't have intel enjoying all the licensing :p
 
No. No more so than we will all run the same CPUs on the same motherboard chipsets.

Remember all controllers comply with the SATA standards, so compatibility is not an issue.
 
ChileanLlama said:
No. No more so than we will all run the same CPUs on the same motherboard chipsets.

Remember all controllers comply with the SATA standards, so compatibility is not an issue.
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I'm not sure... I'll challenge you on this purely on the basis of going against the herd :p.

Reason I say this is that Sata standard supports 3gbps... and SSD are capable of a lot more throughput than that. So I reckon in the future (long term) there will be a new standard like Sata is now but designed for high throughput storage drives. PCI Express can support high throughputs, but as many have multiple hard drives i'm not sure how viable that is at the moment.

Or could look at scsi interfacing... but pretty sure this is very expensive?
 
rexehuk said:
I'm not sure... I'll challenge you on this purely on the basis of going against the herd :p.

Reason I say this is that Sata standard supports 3gbps... and SSD are capable of a lot more throughput than that. So I reckon in the future (long term) there will be a new standard like Sata is now but designed for high throughput storage drives. PCI Express can support high throughputs, but as many have multiple hard drives i'm not sure how viable that is at the moment.

Or could look at scsi interfacing... but pretty sure this is very expensive?
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The current drives don't max out SATA2 yet.

I can see new standards for how the controllers communicate being developed, but I can't see a single standard controller being agreed on.

Why would the companies designing controllers agree this? It would put those companies out of business if they couldn't innovate and profit from that. They would just become a manufacturer of the controller chips with no unique selling point, and would struggle to compete on price with the resources of the likes of Intel and Samsung.

Of course Intel are big enough to try and set their own standard...it might be more successful over the long term than say err Rambus, but even Intel are not dominant in the SSD world yet.
 
"Yet" is the key word as I said "long term". SSD are capable of around 5gbps throughput, so the current Sata standard has a huge shortfall.

Your right through, a single controller would remove a lot of competition which is a fairly bad thing especially at this early stage. Realistically though people like intel and samsung are going to be the leaders in the market, purely down to their semiconductor capabilities and R&D investments. Be nice to see the other competing brands team up, cuthroat competition is wonderful :D
 
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