SSD Prices

adam_m

adam_m

adam_m

Associate
Joined
2 Dec 2009
Posts
159
Morning all!

...desperate to pull the trigger on some SSD goodness for my MBP but concerned that prices will drop significantly sooner rather than later, was so close to purchasing a Crucial 256Gb earlier this year - wish I had now.

What's the general consensus as to when prices may slide again?

I'm after either an Intel 160Gb X-25 or one of the Crucual 128Gb drives at the moment, leaning towards the intel as £/gb is better but for how long?

Cheers!
A
 
I can't see prices coming down at all for another 6 months or so, when 3BPC and 4BPC MLC NAND starts to arrive, and can't see SSD's coming back down to their summer '09 prices for a year.

Crucials won't be going back to near their launch prices even then, they launched them at a loss to establish their brand. Price changes should be proportionate to other brands now.

Get the Intel BTW, TRIM and speed boost firmware is fixed now.
 
I dunno, what with the decent performance of the Kingston 40GB for under £80, I reckon you'll see competing products soon from other companies. I dont see the point of large, expensive SSDs with the premium they charge, afterall your average user just uses Windows (20GB), Office (2GB) few more apps (5gb) and a few games (30GB), for most people 64GB will be fine. All the other stuff can go on normal disks.
 
Lanz said:
I dunno, what with the decent performance of the Kingston 40GB for under £80, I reckon you'll see competing products soon from other companies. I dont see the point of large, expensive SSDs with the premium they charge, afterall your average user just uses Windows (20GB), Office (2GB) few more apps (5gb) and a few games (30GB), for most people 64GB will be fine. All the other stuff can go on normal disks.
Click to expand...

The Kingston 40gb is a gem of a drive, especially in RAID0, but I'm thinking once they have their foot in the door they are going to bump the prices up significantly, just like the Crucials. I hope that isn't the case, but it wouldn't surprise me if they go up from £70 to over £100 in the near future.

At the moment they're something like £1.85 per/GB, which is lower than even the high capacity drives, the other low capacity drives are nowhere near this.
 
ChileanLlama said:
The Kingston 40gb is a gem of a drive, especially in RAID0, but I'm thinking once they have their foot in the door they are going to bump the prices up significantly, just like the Crucials. I hope that isn't the case, but it wouldn't surprise me if they go up from £70 to over £100 in the near future.

At the moment they're something like £1.85 per/GB, which is lower than even the high capacity drives, the other low capacity drives are nowhere near this.
Click to expand...

very tempted on the 40gb/64gb Kingston drive myself - looks cracking value
 
Booyaka, the Kingston 40gb has the Intel controller, but the 64gb and 128gb use the JMicron - as such I wouldn't recommend those - just the 40gb until Kingston bring out larger drives based on the Intel G2.
 
ChileanLlama said:
Booyaka, the Kingston 40gb has the Intel controller, but the 64gb and 128gb use the JMicron - as such I wouldn't recommend those - just the 40gb until Kingston bring out larger drives based on the Intel G2.
Click to expand...

I'm checking out the 40Gb Kingston, does seem good value, but reading reviews it looks like it's quite a bit slower than the 'premium' drives like the Intel and Crucial ... in the real world is that the case?

I'm currently running a 500Gb Samsung 5400rpm job in my MBP and despite stacks of RAM, good CPU etc.. it can feel sluggish at opening stuff and general OS use sometimes - especially when running VM Ware fusion as well.

I guess I could easily find a home for the Kingston SSD once other drives come down in price, £70 really isn't that much to drop on a new device even if it was worth nothing in a few months.

Cheers,
A
 
This the dilemma I have regarding SSDs. I would love to get one for my OS + extras but I have this bloody awful feeling the first time I open OcUK on my freshly installed Windows I will see a post from Fatboy saying

*********INTEL XXXX-100009999XT2822772 500GB HOLOGRAPHIC SSD £70***********

:p
 
LOL SiriusB...I'll take four of em ;)

I can see SSDs being a bit like CPUs/GFX cards for the next few years, a lot of competition, research and innovation - so there's always going to be something just round the corner.

Adam, do you know what SATA controller you have? If it's SATA 1 then you'd bottleneck a decent SSD, but you will notice an improvement over your HD all the same.

The 40gb drives are a baby Intel, basically half the write speed, which is still faster than the Crucial on the small/random writes. So overall, yes, they are good performers for the price. I'm just wondering if a 40gb drive would be enough as your only drive though?
 
SSDs are still very much a niche product in the market, and NAND prices aren't radically changing day-by-day. I can't see prices changing drastically any time soon.
 
Durzel said:
SSDs are still very much a niche product in the market, and NAND prices aren't radically changing day-by-day. I can't see prices changing drastically any time soon.
Click to expand...

Wouldn't nand prices come down after christmas once everyone has their ipod's etc?
 
Lanz said:
I dunno, what with the decent performance of the Kingston 40GB for under £80, I reckon you'll see competing products soon from other companies. I dont see the point of large, expensive SSDs with the premium they charge, afterall your average user just uses Windows (20GB), Office (2GB) few more apps (5gb) and a few games (30GB), for most people 64GB will be fine. All the other stuff can go on normal disks.
Click to expand...

Yes that's fine for your desktop, but SSD's are actually designed for the Notebook market, where very few have space for more than 1 drive.
 
Hmm any reason why people push the Intel drives over the others?

They have really slow writes and are more expensive? Although im unsure if writes are really needed.
 
Trox said:
Hmm any reason why people push the Intel drives over the others?

They have really slow writes and are more expensive? Although im unsure if writes are really needed.
Click to expand...

cause the intel are better for small writes (which seems windows does a lot of them so people say performance is better with them) and not sequential like the crucial, etc
 
ChileanLlama said:
LOL SiriusB...I'll take four of em ;)

I can see SSDs being a bit like CPUs/GFX cards for the next few years, a lot of competition, research and innovation - so there's always going to be something just round the corner.

Adam, do you know what SATA controller you have? If it's SATA 1 then you'd bottleneck a decent SSD, but you will notice an improvement over your HD all the same.

The 40gb drives are a baby Intel, basically half the write speed, which is still faster than the Crucial on the small/random writes. So overall, yes, they are good performers for the price. I'm just wondering if a 40gb drive would be enough as your only drive though?
Click to expand...

NVidia MCP79 AHCI:

Vendor: NVidia
Product: MCP79 AHCI
Speed: 3 Gigabit
Description: AHCI Version 1.20 Supported

..that's SATAII right?

Have just ordered a 40Gb Kingston - tough to track one down! £74 delivered, fairly happy with that. Am now on the look out for external storage solutions for when it's docked at home.

Cheers!
A
 
The prices are a result of demand - and what better time than Xmas?

The produces are very shrewd and can assume releasing products before Xmas as a boon. Its a growing market so many products have been released (some good and not so good) but I doubt that there was much co-ordination for an xmas boon - The unfortunate upside of all this amazing technology is that it creates uncertainty in a very lucrative market. It would be easy to produce 100,000's of units but what if one of your competitors produces a cheaper and equally good SSD? Even worse, what if its cheaper and better - in this internet age it wont take long for people to judge that and buy accordingly.
If it was my company that was at stake, then I would hold back and keep the unit price high - until i was convinced i had the better unit and kill off all my competitors in that field by releasing an unrivaled product at a competative price.


~Crucial er.. i mean Scotty
 
Have just ordered a 40Gb Kingston - tough to track one down! £74 delivered, fairly happy with that. Am now on the look out for external storage solutions for when it's docked at home.
Click to expand...
Just done the same, the 500GB seagate in my HTPC is sounding decidedly unhealthy. All my media is networked so i only need around 20GB space for the OS (Vista, but may put 7 on the rebuild) and XBMC.
XBMC caches a whole load of movie poster thumbnails and other IMDB details locally, and can be pretty laggy when opening and scrolling large folders atm so i'm hoping to see a decent improvement here.
Machine should be almost silent after this, cpu and gpx are passive and it's using a quiet 120mm fan antec psu.

OC must be kicking themselves for ignoring these, they seem to be selling like hotcakes (sold out on the whole first page of froogle results, i think i got the last one at £74)
At the rate they are selling prices are bound to go up once stock comes back in. I could see these shifting quickly even at £90-£100
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom