SSDs: blindingly expensive for a while yet

Author: Richard Swinburne
Published: 6th June 2008
Comments (12) Stumble
SSDs: blindingly expensive for a while yet

There are even some "fast" SSDs with good sizes, but they'll leave a dent the size of Mars in your pocket.

At the request of one of our readers, we dropped by a few memory manufacturers today – these guys often do SSD modules as a diversification because there’s currently more money to be made in NAND than DRAM, as DRAM prices have hit rock bottom and margins are low.

Unfortunately, the news still isn’t quite so good: the performance we want is still far too expensive and capacities just aren’t there yet, we’ll have to wait for a while longer yet, we were told.

How long is unclear at the moment – the estimates vary between an optimistic Q4 this year to a hand-wavy "sometime in the next few years" timescale, but most seemed to think that Q3/Q4 2009 would be a respectable timeframe. It all depends on production, innovation and industry scaling and there seems to be no one pinnacle solution everyone is waiting for. Instead the predominant market is mobile applications which don’t necessarily need huge capacities or speed, but greatly benefit from the better reliability.

For desktop use, there are drives that are faster – 120MB read and 100MB write was seen here and there, and while maybe the latest 320GB Western Digital VelociRaptor can do this on a good day, coupled with zero random read cost and you’re always on to a winner, however at a significant extra cost.

Unfortunately, just like hard drives everywhere is pretty much the same – the general technology jumps in leaps and bounds every so often, but that also means the entire market sees the benefit. With that in mind, it means there’s really no niche core innovations and much variations apart from size and controller type which could differentiate reliability, although that’s hard to show in benchmark numbers.

We’ll still have to wait for that breakthrough hook which really makes you want to grab one. Until then, we’ll still have to put up with our noisy, failure prone spinning disks for a while longer. Sorry, guys.

Discuss in the forums.

SSDs: blindingly expensive for a while yet SSDs – still blindingly expensive for a while yet SSDs: blindingly expensive for a while yet SSDs – still blindingly expensive for a while yet
Quote Paradigm Shifter 6th June 2008, 10:04
Until SSDs reach near 1:1 price/storage with HDDs... or at least toward the 50p/GB range... failure prone spinning disks will be my choice. <£100 for 1TB, or twenty times that price for a quarter of the storage?
Quote wuyanxu 6th June 2008, 10:12
it's 300GB VelociRaptor, not 320GB. lol

same as above, sticking with HDD until i can buy 300GB for, at most, £250
Quote bowman 6th June 2008, 11:16
I asked about this, so I guess you're referring to me. Man, that's some service!

Q4 09 is too long for me, the Raptor is driving me nuts with its churning, chugging combine harvester noise. I just want equal or better speed, somewhat similar a capacity and no noise. I hope it'll be possible within the end of this year for some sort of less-than-four-digits price.
Quote wuyanxu 6th June 2008, 11:37
Quote:
Originally Posted by bowman

Q4 09 is too long for me, the Raptor is driving me nuts with its churning, chugging combine harvester noise. I just want equal or better speed, somewhat similar a capacity and no noise. I hope it'll be possible within the end of this year for some sort of less-than-four-digits price.

which Raptor and what case may i ask?
Quote bowman 6th June 2008, 11:47
Raptor X (the one with the cheesy window thing) and a Lian Li fulltower case, with the rubber grommet thingies and all. It's better than it was in the old cooler master case, where it was just screwed into the hd cage, but it's still much, much worse than a regular hard drive.

It's not so much the noise _level_ as the characteristics of the noise itself. Even at low volumes it's always nagging, in a way.
Quote Omnituens 6th June 2008, 12:34
I'm thinking of getting a small SDD for the OS, then new raptor for games, then a lollerbyte drive for backups/other apps/etc
Quote Drexial 6th June 2008, 12:50
I dunno, HDDs is one of the areas that has never been a problem for me. Only reason I have needed to replace a Drive is because I ran out of space. I have been running a 30 gig Maxtor for 8 years. Still has yet to fail me.

The price vs capacity really is just no where near a point that makes sense in the broadband intense/media rich world we live in.
Quote StephenK 6th June 2008, 13:22
I reckon for backup purposes the standard internal and external drives will do just fine for me. I think for my OS and games though I'll be waiting to get my hands on an SSD. I think when the price comes down to about 400 Euro for a 150-200GB drive then I'll be very happy. In the meantime I'll probably pick up a couple of the standard or VelociRaptors and silence them. Don't see much point in the 20,000 rpm ones to be honest...
Quote EmJay 6th June 2008, 18:54
We're getting there... I'm waiting for prices to hit about $3 per Gig with good speeds before I'll make the switch. Then again my storage needs are very, very small - 64G would be enough for my main computer.
Quote Hamish 7th June 2008, 00:37
Quote:
Originally Posted by Paradigm Shifter
Until SSDs reach near 1:1 price/storage with HDDs... or at least toward the 50p/GB range... failure prone spinning disks will be my choice. <£100 for 1TB, or twenty times that price for a quarter of the storage?
SSDs arent about storage, they're about performance
I, for one, will definately pick up an SSD (or 2 :D) when i can get a FAST one with ~64gig capacity for £100 or less
raid 0 and use them as a system disk for windows + games etc
then >= 1tb traditional disks for storage

really dont need a 500gig SSD thats only slightly faster than a traditional disk for £1500, thats just pointless
Quote hughwi 7th June 2008, 09:44
I think the best approach would be to use the SSD for your performance tasks (OS and Games) and then stick with a couple of large traditional disks for storage. Then you get the best of both worlds for the cheapest outlay :D
Quote mclean007 9th June 2008, 20:30
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hamish
Quote:
Originally Posted by Paradigm Shifter
Until SSDs reach near 1:1 price/storage with HDDs... or at least toward the 50p/GB range... failure prone spinning disks will be my choice. <£100 for 1TB, or twenty times that price for a quarter of the storage?
SSDs arent about storage, they're about performance
I, for one, will definately pick up an SSD (or 2 :D) when i can get a FAST one with ~64gig capacity for £100 or less
raid 0 and use them as a system disk for windows + games etc
then >= 1tb traditional disks for storage

really dont need a 500gig SSD thats only slightly faster than a traditional disk for £1500, thats just pointless

Agreed. I could do fine with a 32GB OS drive, a very quiet but modest sized (say 160-250 GB) reasonable speed mechanical drive for apps and working docs, and then shove all the rest (all my CDs ripped to FLAC; DVD rips; backups; archived digital photos; etc.) off to a big ugly ol' networked RAID 5/6 box that, realistically, can be as slow as you like and hidden away where the unsightliness and noise won't bother me :-D

That would be a sweet setup until large capacity flash gets cheap enough to lose all the spindles from my rig. Actually, as I'm paranoid about data integrity, I'd have 2 RAID 6 boxes, one in the cupboard under the stairs and one locked away in a concrete bunker underneath the shed at the bottom of the garden, with redundant power supplies and data lines supplied through hardened conduits. But I don't have any stairs, or a shed, or a garden, so that will have to wait :-D
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