Gartner: SSDs to get much cheaper in 2012

Research firm Gartner has noted this week that it believes SSD drives will get much cheaper in 2012, in time for the market to have a break out.

SSD, 2.5-inch form factor NAND Flash chips that offer better speeds and reliability over traditional HDDs, have yet to reach mainstream popularity due to extremely high prices.

128GB SSD models sell for, on average, $225 while for that price you can purchase three 2TB HDDs. Certainly the average consumer would prefer 6TB of storage to a measly 128GB for the same price.

Over the past two years, however, SSD prices have marginally fallen, while capacities have increased thanks to better manufacturing processes.

Gartner says it expects SSD prices to fall to about $1 per GB next year, still not "cheap" but certainly more affordable than current prices.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 13 May 2011 13:08

DVDBack23

Originally posted by lizzenup0: And this is news.......hooooowwwwwww????

Prices have been dropping for over a year. While not as affordable as standard HDDs, they are indeed dropping so does Gartner want a medal for acknowledging that??

Hmmm......perhaps they should be duly recognized for pointing out that the human population increases exponentially every year and that gasoline prices continue to rise.

SHUT UP GARTNER! Most will listen when you speculate that SSDs will drop by HALF in the next 6 months to a year. Until then.......tell us something we don't know! If you read, they DID say it would drop by almost half...$225 for 128GB down to $128 for 128GB.

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13.5.2011 14:12 #1

ThePastor

I'll buy at that price point.
The only real problem I see with the article is that it may tend to slow sales, until those pricepoints are reached.
I know I'm going to wait.

Unfortunately for them, all Blu-ray protections have been broken and BD rips can be found around the Internet, usually before the retail even hits shelves.

13.5.2011 15:33 #2

oappi

I wouldn't put my ssd purchase on hold because of this news... Same happened with intel g1 -> g2 drives. Unfortunately demand seems to be so high that for example intel won't need to take prices down anytime soon. Thats probably the reason why intels g3 ssd series didn't get prices down even when they get 2x more flash chips with 25nm manufacturing with same materials than they used to get 34nm flash chips (used on g2 drives).

and to comparison of ssd vs 3 hdd... well they are for totally different usage. You can't get your i7/i5 computer to be as fast with 6x hdd drives than what you get it by buying 1 ssd drive. Latency is like 100 times higher on hdd drives. hd drives are for storage and ssd are for operating systems, software etc. When you get down to it it really is same as asking why not use virtual ram/swap/page instead of ram (in other words store all of the rams content to hard drive)... Some might be fine with it, but those who want their computer to be more responsive go for pricier solution so that they can actually use the computing power of their cpu...

14.5.2011 11:33 #3

Pop_Smith

This week newegg has a 115GB 25nm SSD for $164.99 or about $1.43/GB. That is the cheapest I've seen an SSD and I could see prices hitting the $1/GB mark by the end of this year or the first quarter of 2012 as long as the trend continues.

14.5.2011 11:34 #4

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