Who feels the SSD prices are currently too high?

[justn]

They are way too expensive for me to use it as my main drive, because I need a lot of space. I have considered getting a smaller ssd to be my boot drive in my MacBook Pro in place of the Superdrive. Hopefully that will come to fruition when I have some spare cash lying around.

 

[BlizzardBomb]

I suppose I should have clarified for those people who don't understand the market. (Value of stock x number of outstanding shares)...

MSFT has been hurting. Has AAPL?

Wait, are you trying to suggest that Microsoft is somehow less valuable than Apple because their share prices are lower? What is Microsoft is hurting meant to mean anyway? Microsoft have way more shares out there than Apple and had record earnings last quarter with $14.5 billion in revenues. Is that supposed to be bad?

Almost nobody needs anything larger than a 60g SSD. If you're planning on storing tons of movies, audio, you do NOT need to place them on an SSD. You're prefectly fine using a USB or generic platter HDD and using the SSD for things that you will notice daily, the system drive, CAD, renderings, etc.

No one is going to say that the prices for SSDs are perfect or great, but the performance gain is DEFINITELY worth the $150-220 right now for the 60g. Sure, you could wait until Q4 when you can have a 250g for the same price; but who knows if that will actually happen.

Decent ~256GB SSDs will not be $220 by Q4 2010. We'd be lucky if decent ones get to $500. I don't think 60 GBs is enough to be mainstream either. 128 GBs is often reported as the sweet spot for laptops.

 

[DKatri]

I just paid £55 for my WD 500GB HDD. I think that paying 10 times as much for a SSD is a bit crazy. But if you have the money then go for it. They are not, at the moment priced to be able to replace HDDs. I do want one though. I might get the kingston 40GB to use an external that I can throw in my bag and not have to baby as much as an external HDD.

 

[bella92108]

I just paid £55 for my WD 500GB HDD. I think that paying 10 times as much for a SSD is a bit crazy. But if you have the money then go for it. They are not, at the moment priced to be able to replace HDDs. I do want one though. I might get the kingston 40GB to use an external that I can throw in my bag and not have to baby as much as an external HDD.

It's so weird to see the logic of people when it relates to money. People are spending $500 to upgrade their new macbookpro to 8GB ram, which does little to nothing in terms of performance boost for (most) people. People spend a $300 premium to have a 2.66 ghz instead of 2.4 ghz on the new 13" macbook pro, which will give you NO noticeable performance increase ... yet because you're comparing SSD to HDD and it's about 7x the price, it's not a valuable upgrade when for all intensive purposes it'll get your boot time 2x as fast, app loading time 5x as fast, and there's never been someone who says "yeah got my SSD and it's just a slight speed bump" ... everyone raves about the lightning fast speed increase and everyone says it's the best upgrade you can ever do. You pay 2x the cost of a PC to have a MAC, do some research as to what makes a machine fast based on your usage pattern, and upgrade based on that, not based on alternatives that'll save $$$ and provide no performance increase.

 

[apolloa]

I've got 30GB of music, 3GB of pictures, 11GB of apps , 10GB of videos and clips etc. I have filled just a third of my 320GB HDD. I could stand to use some pruning as well.

I'm not sacrificing performance because I want to store a bunch of videos. Consumers need to get into the concept of tiering their storage. You place the stuff that loves fast storage on the fast stuff and place the stuff that couldn't care less about SSD performance on the slower spinning discs.

The problem with SSD is that some people are stuck into thinking about storage from simply a sizing point of view rather than performance. SSD are about performance and eventually the size will catch up but even then it's incumbent upon you to decide what items need to go where.

If you have a Quad Core Mac/PC then you need a SSD even more because contention for RAM and storage becomes even more paramount.

I don't think SSD pricing is anymore outrageous than someone spending $1800 for a new computer and hobbling it with a slow spinning disc. That's "pennywise pound foolish"

I think that's a bit of a draconian thought you have. People must delete videos just to have an SSD or they must use USB drives? What ever for? Most people like me want one computer and a backup system. That's what I have, if I was a professional video editor or something then I would accept additional drives hanging of the laptop. But I'm not, and neither are many consumers so we all expect to be able to keep tons of photos and videos on SSD drives and as we have the 500GB option now if you pay for it then you can.
You don't need to trim your data just to have performance. That's a fail in my eyes.
And slow spinning disks are performing as happily today as they ever have, I don't really consider a hard drive a bottleneck for consumers, only professionals, after all it just loads things a lot quicker, doesn't make a game run faster.

 

[bella92108]

I think that's a bit of a draconian thought you have. People must delete videos just to have an SSD or they must use USB drives? What ever for? Most people like me want one computer and a backup system. That's what I have, if I was a professional video editor or something then I would accept additional drives hanging of the laptop. But I'm not, and neither are many consumers so we all expect to be able to keep tons of photos and videos on SSD drives and as we have the 500GB option now if you pay for it then you can.
You don't need to trim your data just to have performance. That's a fail in my eyes.
And slow spinning disks are performing as happily today as they ever have, I don't really consider a hard drive a bottleneck for consumers, only professionals, after all it just loads things a lot quicker, doesn't make a game run faster.

Spot-on with your comments. Keep the space hogs external. People don't realize that a hard drive is like a file cabinet, the more you have in it the longer it takes to get to the data you want. Having a 640GB drive in my macbook pro is nice, but I barely have 100 gb on it. When I travel i copy a few movies onto it. If you're one of those who keeps all their music and videos on their hard drive inside their mac you're just shooting yourself in the foot as that's slowing the whole system down.

 

[DKatri]

It's so weird to see the logic of people when it relates to money. People are spending $500 to upgrade their new macbookpro to 8GB ram, which does little to nothing in terms of performance boost for (most) people. People spend a $300 premium to have a 2.66 ghz instead of 2.4 ghz on the new 13" macbook pro, which will give you NO noticeable performance increase ... yet because you're comparing SSD to HDD and it's about 7x the price, it's not a valuable upgrade when for all intensive purposes it'll get your boot time 2x as fast, app loading time 5x as fast, and there's never been someone who says "yeah got my SSD and it's just a slight speed bump" ... everyone raves about the lightning fast speed increase and everyone says it's the best upgrade you can ever do. You pay 2x the cost of a PC to have a MAC, do some research as to what makes a machine fast based on your usage pattern, and upgrade based on that, not based on alternatives that'll save $$$ and provide no performance increase.

I see what you are saying but for me, I don't have $500 to drop on an SSD. I saved for a while for my MBP and I love it. But for what I need it is plenty fast. I know that an SSD would be amazing and is a massive performance boost. But at this moment in time its not for me. To some people price does make a difference. To some people price is no object. Unfortunately I am part of the former not the latter.

 

[WisdomWolf]

I'm just going to get a 60GB SSD to use as a system drive(OSX and programs) I will be replace the seldom used Superdrive with a 500GB drive for content such as audio, video and photos.

This seems to be the best option and is my plan as well.

 

[bella92108]

I think that's a bit of a draconian thought you have. People must delete videos just to have an SSD or they must use USB drives? What ever for? Most people like me want one computer and a backup system. That's what I have, if I was a professional video editor or something then I would accept additional drives hanging of the laptop. But I'm not, and neither are many consumers so we all expect to be able to keep tons of photos and videos on SSD drives and as we have the 500GB option now if you pay for it then you can.
You don't need to trim your data just to have performance. That's a fail in my eyes.
And slow spinning disks are performing as happily today as they ever have, I don't really consider a hard drive a bottleneck for consumers, only professionals, after all it just loads things a lot quicker, doesn't make a game run faster.

You're absolutely wrong. Having a 500gb hard drive full of videos creates a slower-performing system than having a 500gb hard drive with 400gb available. See my above reference. Not sure what people's obsession with storing things is... why would you carry all your movies with you slowing down your drive when you can have one massive drive at home (hell you can even have a server to access when on the road),.... but for 99.999% of people web surfing, documents, email, spreadsheets, and presentations, oh, and games, is the function of their laptop... so how many movies do you need? At 700mb per movie, you could watch 300 movies every trip with a loaded 256 SSD... but I'd be willing to bet you don't watch but 1 or 2 movies... so why carry them all? The american way - if I don't need it, store it... lol...self-storage companies make a killing doing exactly what you're mentality creates, hah

 

[bella92108]

I see what you are saying but for me, I don't have $500 to drop on an SSD. I saved for a while for my MBP and I love it. But for what I need it is plenty fast. I know that an SSD would be amazing and is a massive performance boost. But at this moment in time its not for me. To some people price does make a difference. To some people price is no object. Unfortunately I am part of the former not the latter.

Thanks for saying what the other's are too ashamed to say. Nothing wrong with spending the $$ on a macbook pro... if it means having a mac vs a pc you made the right choice. Not sure why others talk trash about a product when the reason they can't get it is because they can't afford it... Nerds get so defensive when someone is mean to them. Guess it's their way of payback from when people picked on em in high school... because here they can hide behind the screen. LOL!

 

[vant]

I don't understand then point of this thread. Is this like a support group or something?

Everything stated here is blatantly obvious.

 

[Pressure]

If you think Solid State Disks are expensive...you should see what I paid for my first 20MB (yes, twenty megabyte) mechanical harddrive!

I see Solid State Disks as are bargain compared to the performance increase they offer.

 

[apolloa]

You're absolutely wrong. Having a 500gb hard drive full of videos creates a slower-performing system than having a 500gb hard drive with 400gb available. See my above reference. Not sure what people's obsession with storing things is... why would you carry all your movies with you slowing down your drive when you can have one massive drive at home (hell you can even have a server to access when on the road),.... but for 99.999% of people web surfing, documents, email, spreadsheets, and presentations, oh, and games, is the function of their laptop... so how many movies do you need? At 700mb per movie, you could watch 300 movies every trip with a loaded 256 SSD... but I'd be willing to bet you don't watch but 1 or 2 movies... so why carry them all? The american way - if I don't need it, store it... lol...self-storage companies make a killing doing exactly what you're mentality creates, hah

Ok I'll give you an example. Your a modern person, and like every modern person you want a laptop instead of a desktop (That's a fact by the way) and you expect your new Mac (Your sold on the Apple advertising and coolness) laptop to do everything like a desktop, you then put your massive CD collection onto the drive, then your photos from your digital SLR (Again modern living) of your kids, then the endless hours of HD videos you've taken of your kids, you then use your imovie to make DVD's of the photos and videos to send to other family members.

And you now have say 300gb of stuff which your NOT deleting as it's your kids growing up etc, you won't simply 'delete' it. And you expect to be able to do al this on the one computer without extra drives being attached, you have a timecapsule backup.
So this isn't exclusively for SSD drives but I am taking aim more at your opinion of just keep it on a server???? or external drives.

 

[vty]

A "modern person" should understand how unreliable and prone to shock and thus damage/failure a laptop hard drive is and NOT store things like that on it; regardless of it being their only system.

The argument that someone has to have 500gb of media on their laptop, and needs access to it at SSD speeds is absolutely ridiculous. Get a $300 NAS box if your data is THAT critical (family photos, etc). Hard drives fail.

 

[nuckinfutz]

I think that's a bit of a draconian thought you have. People must delete videos just to have an SSD or they must use USB drives? What ever for? Most people like me want one computer and a backup system. That's what I have, if I was a professional video editor or something then I would accept additional drives hanging of the laptop. But I'm not, and neither are many consumers so we all expect to be able to keep tons of photos and videos on SSD drives and as we have the 500GB option now if you pay for it then you can.
You don't need to trim your data just to have performance. That's a fail in my eyes.
And slow spinning disks are performing as happily today as they ever have, I don't really consider a hard drive a bottleneck for consumers, only professionals, after all it just loads things a lot quicker, doesn't make a game run faster.

I see what you are saying but for me, I don't have $500 to drop on an SSD. I saved for a while for my MBP and I love it. But for what I need it is plenty fast. I know that an SSD would be amazing and is a massive performance boost. But at this moment in time its not for me. To some people price does make a difference. To some people price is no object. Unfortunately I am part of the former not the latter.

It is in no way a draconian thought. Put it this way. Consumer need mirrors the needs of business though delayed about a decade or so. Back when the family shared a PC there was no need for a home network though at work most businesses couldn't survive without having a network and sharing devices (printers , storage etc).

Businesses have been tiering storage for a long time now. They realize that some data needs very fast storage, some data needs basic storage and for backups tape was the preferred offline storage medium.

Today we see that consumers are now faced with the same choice and rather than realize the incredible performance advantages of SSD some get stuck on stupid and want everything on the same drive subsystem (which is a single hardware failure away from disaster). I'm not saying trim your data at all i'm saying if you spent $1500 on a computer and are sticking with a spinning drive that's slowing your system down it is foolish.

You do have a hard drive bottleneck. You're just being obtuse now considering the overwhelming data and anecdotes showing SSD improving boot, application launch time and overall system responsiveness. If you don't feel these benefits are worth it that's fine but this thread asked an open ended question "who feels the SSD prices are currently too high" so we're going to see the wide variety opinions.

 

[DKatri]

Ok I'll give you an example. Your a modern person, and like every modern person you want a laptop instead of a desktop (That's a fact by the way) and you expect your new Mac (Your sold on the Apple advertising and coolness) laptop to do everything like a desktop, you then put your massive CD collection onto the drive, then your photos from your digital SLR (Again modern living) of your kids, then the endless hours of HD videos you've taken of your kids, you then use your imovie to make DVD's of the photos and videos to send to other family members.

And you now have say 300gb of stuff which your NOT deleting as it's your kids growing up etc, you won't simply 'delete' it. And you expect to be able to do al this on the one computer without extra drives being attached, you have a time capsule backup.
So this isn't exclusively for SSD drives but I am taking aim more at your opinion of just keep it on a server???? or external drives.

This is pretty much how I use my MBP, apart from the kids bit (im only 19!).
It is my sole computer that I use for everything I need to get done (Word/Pages docs, Keynote, bit of playing around in Ableton, Web browsing, iTunes and the odd game). Personally I would much prefer to be able to take everything with me in one package and not worry about having to bring external drives with me while I am working in the library and I want to listen to a random song in my music library. This is personal preference though. I know plenty of people who won't leave the house without an external or two. All of this is very much dependant on personal usage patterns.

 

[nuckinfutz]

That's the ticket!

 

[Garrus]

This is pretty much how I use my MBP, apart from the kids bit (im only 19!).
It is my sole computer that I use for everything I need to get done (Word/Pages docs, Keynote, bit of playing around in Ableton, Web browsing, iTunes and the odd game). Personally I would much prefer to be able to take everything with me in one package and not worry about having to bring external drives with me while I am working in the library and I want to listen to a random song in my music library. This is personal preference though. I know plenty of people who won't leave the house without an external or two. All of this is very much dependant on personal usage patterns.

Seriously do you have that much music that it would actually fill even a 128gb SSD... 😱

 

[Lyshen]

I wasn't complaining, just saying that they are at present they cost too much. I fully appreciate the price premium for being the first users.
I am wondering what will happen with the Intel drives. I read last year I think that they were going to launch bigger sizes but they haven't.
If I did decide to get an SSD of 500GB, I think it would take me another 3 or 4 months to save on top of the original cost so by then we'll be looking at the next refresh.

Intel's Postville refresh with bigger capacities won't happen til end of this year. At that point, the largest drive is going to be 600GB.

 

[bella92108]

Ok I'll give you an example. Your a modern person, and like every modern person you want a laptop instead of a desktop (That's a fact by the way) and you expect your new Mac (Your sold on the Apple advertising and coolness) laptop to do everything like a desktop, you then put your massive CD collection onto the drive, then your photos from your digital SLR (Again modern living) of your kids, then the endless hours of HD videos you've taken of your kids, you then use your imovie to make DVD's of the photos and videos to send to other family members.

And you now have say 300gb of stuff which your NOT deleting as it's your kids growing up etc, you won't simply 'delete' it. And you expect to be able to do al this on the one computer without extra drives being attached, you have a timecapsule backup.
So this isn't exclusively for SSD drives but I am taking aim more at your opinion of just keep it on a server???? or external drives.

So what happens when you travel? Your laptop gets stolen and you lose your whole life? Everyone knowns a laptop hard drive is far more likely to be stolen, lost, damaged, etc, than an external storage. Why would you carry this all with you?

I have not owned a CD since the 90s... so not sure about converting the "collection" .. and I have all the above in about 100 GB, and then I keep all my movies externally as I'm not about to slow down my primary drive with that crap.

Bottom line if you want a hard drive then have a hard drive... lots of people still swear by record players and cassette's too.

 

[bella92108]

Seriously do you have that much music that it would actually fill even a 128gb SSD... 😱

No he doesn't, but he's the same kind of guy who buys a 3 car garage so he can collect more crap rather than keeping what he needs and getting rid of the rest. America's obsession with collecting and storing is bizarre to me, and I'm American.... every corner has a self storage place, and whenever I drive by I see people crating in old junk that I have to wonder if it even justifies what they must spend on renting the storage bin... haha

 

[baryon]

I never have enough storage space, currently there's a 320 GB HDD in my MacBook Pro and within a year I filled half of it, mostly with photos, PSDs and Adobe Creative Suites. I really need a lot of space so SSD is not worth it for me, although I would love to have faster storage. If sometime soon a 1TB SSD becomes less than twice as expensive as a 1TB HDD, then I would consider one (not going to happen though).

I think SSDs are future tech and that their price isn't really worth it today just yet. I really hope computers will move away from moving parts soon though, and we could have an entirely solid state computer. All we need to do then is figure out how to get rid of the fans and the optical drive, and voila! Can't see that happening soon either though 😀

 

[bella92108]

That's the ticket!

That's nice, but don't iMac take full size disks? seems like in a desktop you'd just upgrade the drive inside. I haven't had a desktop computer since 2002 so im not familiar with the iMac

 

[bella92108]

I never have enough storage space, currently there's a 320 GB HDD in my MacBook Pro and within a year I filled half of it, mostly with photos, PSDs and Adobe Creative Suites. I really need a lot of space so SSD is not worth it for me, although I would love to have faster storage. If sometime soon a 1TB SSD becomes less than twice as expensive as a 1TB HDD, then I would consider one (not going to happen though).

I think SSDs are future tech and that their price isn't really worth it today just yet. I really hope computers will move away from moving parts soon though, and we could have an entirely solid state computer. All we need to do then is figure out how to get rid of the fans and the optical drive, and voila! Can't see that happening soon either though 😀

Most thin\light laptops no longer have optical drives, not sure why Apple keeps them on ANY of their laptop line... imagine that space being able to accommodate other things or eliminated. it takes up almost 40% of the inside of the macbook pro. That's the one thing Apple continues to be a bit behind on. They should at least offer a CTO to have no optical drive... if nothing else to shave a quarter of a pound off the weight.

 

[baryon]

Most thin\light laptops no longer have optical drives, not sure why Apple keeps them on ANY of their laptop line... imagine that space being able to accommodate other things or eliminated. it takes up almost 40% of the inside of the macbook pro. That's the one thing Apple continues to be a bit behind on. They should at least offer a CTO to have no optical drive... if nothing else to shave a quarter of a pound off the weight.

Yes I totally agree, however, there is still no proper replacement for optical media. As a photographer, I can say that after a shoot, models often want a disc with their photos on it. If I bring my MacBook Pro with me, I can do that easily. An external burner would require a power adapter, etc, so it would be less portable. At university, my tutors require me to submit everything on DVD or CD.

If there was a simple, cheap, solid-state, write-once replacement to the DVD, I would be the first to adopt it, but it seems that the world isn't quite ready for that yet (it would be stupid to give SD cards or USB drives to people and expect them to somehow return them to you).