SSD prices ever going to go down?

[nickdag]

I've been following 256gb SSD prices for a while, and I've seen hardly any movement.

Also, I know shortly before the end of 2010, there was a lot of chatter about Intel's entry into the market and how prices would soon go down.

From what I've seen, none of that has materialized.

Does anyone have any ideas or insights about this? I'm personally only concerned w/ drives around 220gb and up.

Of course, my motivation to write this is that I'm dying to buy one but have been trying to hold out... Can't hold on much longer...

thanks much

 

[Hellhammer]

Flash isn't exactly new technology as first NANDs were released back in 1987. However, NANDs have not offered much capacity before today. Back in 2005, the biggest NAND we had was 1GB. I think 2.5" SSDs can hold up to 16 NANDs so this would result in capacity of 16GB. The biggest HD in 2005 was 500GB, which had more than 30 times bigger capacity than the best SSD could have offered back then.

Right now, we have a lot bigger NANDs. The biggest ones used in SSDs are 32GB I think but Toshiba has already announced a 128GB NAND. I don't know when they are shipping them but 64GB should already be available. 16x128GB would give you 2TB! In the mean time, HDs have not developed that much. In 6 years, the HD capacity has only become 6 times greater (500GB -> 3TB). In that same time, NANDs have become 64 times bigger in capacity (1GB -> 64GB).

Okay, that is it for the history lesson and why we didn't have SSDs until now. The reason why I think SSDs are still so expensive is the huge demand for NANDs. SSDs use the same flash memory as lots of other products, i.e. NANDs. If you look at the industry now, a lot products are using NANDs. Phones, tablets, TVs, computers... Pretty much all electronics with some kind of an operating system. Smart phones have become very popular during the last few years. Tablets are still very new but they are also becoming popular.

When the demand is big, then the manufacturers can keep the prices up because people will buy it anyway. What would your iPhone be without a nice amount of storage? Or would you prefer a hard drive in it which would make it a lot bigger and heavier? Those devices simply cannot be what they are without NANDs. This means OEMs must buy NANDs, no matter what the price is.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1143524/

That is what I said earlier today.

 

[chrono1081]

I've been following 256gb SSD prices for a while, and I've seen hardly any movement.

Also, I know shortly before the end of 2010, there was a lot of chatter about Intel's entry into the market and how prices would soon go down.

From what I've seen, none of that has materialized.

Does anyone have any ideas or insights about this? I'm personally only concerned w/ drives around 220gb and up.

Of course, my motivation to write this is that I'm dying to buy one but have been trying to hold out... Can't hold on much longer...

thanks much

They have been going down. I've watched OWC's site each month and prices have been steadily decreasing.