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Why are SSD's so expensive?

It makes perfect sense. They are a new technology. Higher density chips are much more expensive and will continue to be so until the economy of scale brings them down.
 
These aren't probably nearly as fast as good SSDs. If you look at different SSDs out there, there are many relatively cheap ones - because they're slow, and they aren't really popular. You could make 1 TB SSD like that, but it would be as slow if not slower than HDD and as expensive or more than the fastest ~200 GB SSDs.
 
The main reason the costs are so different has to do with read / write speed.

The fastest USB drive I could find that Kingston makes can read at 25MB/Sec and write at 16MB/Sec (Click here for link)

While my current favorite SSD from intel will read at up to 250MB/sec and write at 70MB/Sec (Click here for link)- these speeds are significantly higher then your USB drive and one of the main reasons that the SSD drives are being developed.

Traditional Hard Drives are a bit more variable when it comes to their read and write times due to how long it takes to come up to speed (Most drives spin at either 5400rpm or 7200rpm then there is the access time (The amount of time it takes to find data - usually somewhere between 12m/s and 18m/s) so a normal Laptop Hardrive should provide read times of 35MB/sec to 80MB/sec. To write the hard drive uses a buffer (Similar to RAM) to write as fast as possible and speeds upto 70MB/sec can be achieved depending on the size of the files being written.

So yes the Solid State Drives are expensive at this stage, but considering the possible speed improvements and energy saving these drives should become more and more popular and the prices should drop and hopefully larger capacities will become available too.

:rolleyes::apple:
 
The chip being expensive is only the half of it. The main deal is that the manufacturers know that people are willing to shell out cash for the latest and greatest - no questions asked. Costs coming down is only partially the reason for the decrease in the price to the consumer, it's really about the economic demand.
 
Thumb drives use much much slower memory chips, and they have slow controllers. And that's fine, because they are bottlenecked by USB 2.0. Have you ever tried booting from a thumbdrive? You should know...

SSD, use the sata interface, and are several times faster. The memory and controllers are newer, and faster.

The biggest 2.5-inch SSD available is 512GB and has a higher capacity than the highest capacity HDDs which are only 500GB. There ARE 1TB+ SSDs out there as well in different form factors, but they will cost you an arm and three legs.
 
I am excited about this. I am a basic pc/mac user, and can't afford to shell out the money for one of these yet, but as soon as the prices drop within a reasonable range, I am picking one up.
 
I think that although still expensive the SSD's are worth the price. Ever since I got my Vertex 128GB for $250 I can't imagine myself going back to a regular HD even tho I could get a 500GB 7200RPM Seagate for around $120.
 
New 80gb intels are out and will sell for around 250 dollars. If you have an external drive for backup and storate it's getting pretty good for a boot/app drive.
 
Dwalls90 said:
The chip being expensive is only the half of it. The main deal is that the manufacturers know that people are willing to shell out cash for the latest and greatest - no questions asked. Costs coming down is only partially the reason for the decrease in the price to the consumer, it's really about the economic demand.
Click to expand...

This.
 
New technology (as said before). They are more expensive than flash drives because of the read/write times.
 
Newer Tech. Remember when DVD burners cost $500+ I bought my first one when they were $300, and now you can get them for less than $30.
 
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