Anybody in Sales? - When will the Price of SSDs Come Down?

[Aderes Devorah]

Hi all

Just after a few opinions on the above.

Has anybody heard anything about the price of the 250GB+ SSDs?

No emergency here! Just wondering about it.

Best

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[bassfisher6522]

I've been watching newegg and tigerdirect advertise some 256 GB SSD's for $179 to $159. So there seems to be a trend with those two companies dropping their prices. Which brings to me to the question; what's comming around the corner for the near future.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

They've been coming down steadily already.

The standard retail price for an 80 GB Intel SSD 18 months ago was $190. I paid $160 on sale at that time.

Now you can get 240 GB drives beginning at $150 and 256 GB drives beginning at $160.

I'd doubt if you can get accurate inside info as the retailers don't want to discourage current sales. The best way to get a bargain is to keep on top of discounts and special offers from the major Internet sellers. I see bargain prices from acceptable brands of various sizes several times per month.

 

[cytherian]

If all remains status quo with production (no damage to factories or needed resources) and present economics, the prices will continue to come down rather gradually. I expect we'll see another 10-20% drop by the end of December.

As newer tech comes out that makes SSD's faster and provide more gigabytes/dollar, the older ones will drop in price. But, the difference in that tech will be gradual so that older SSD's won't tank in price. That's all cleverly controlled by the makers, just as it has been with processor improvements. They have to make the most money they can from each iteration. So, they delicately balance inventory and features with each release.

Therefore, if you're not in serious need of a new SSD, wait a bit. But if you could kind of use one at this point, get one now rather than limiting yourself by continuing with an HDD.

As for HDD's, they've seriously dropped in price at this point and their rate of declining prices will be faster than SSD's. At some point, there will be far fewer models made as demand dries up. Hybrids will probably continue to exist for a good while longer, because they provide near SSD performance once optimized for a given computer, with far greater maximum disk space. But the firmware to manage them is more complex and is taking the manufacturers longer to get it stabilized.

 

[Aderes Devorah]

Thanks guys.

Are these prices in US$?

Just so I can convert to £.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Thanks guys.

Are these prices in US$?

Just so I can convert to £.

The prices I gave were US dollars at a well known Internet retailer (Newegg).

 

[GeneO]

Hi all

Just after a few opinions on the above.

Has anybody heard anything about the price of the 250GB+ SSDs?

No emergency here! Just wondering about it.

Best

AD

What I paid $240 a year ago is now around $100.

 

[cytherian]

I've seen SSD prices fluctuate a little up and down over the past couple of weeks, for sought after models. Less popular ones will probably drop more than rise, though. I'm very curious to see if there will be any autumn or winter sales on them.

By the way, Samsung is slated to come out with the 840 series in October. There are some notable improvements over the 830, while introducing a modest cost increase. It may be well worth it to wait for it.

 

[kbrady1979]

The price is now around the "$1/GB" that everybody was hoping for, and quite a few are well below that. If we look into the future we can already count on a new SATA standard being a few years away, and from what I've read, it will be PCI based. SATA 3.1 has already been covered in a few tech articles, but I believe that is more of a firmware upgrade and it won't have much, if anything, to do with increasing SATA speed. How does that affect the current SSD market you ask? Well, I'd venture a guess that since they are already hitting the limits of SATA III in terms of Seq. Read/Write, they will start optimizing firmware to goose the performance of Random 4K Read/Write speeds, which in my opinion, are the speeds that give SSD's that "feeling" of high performance. I could also see SSD overall capacity going up, but how much, I have no clue.

That being said, I don't look for SSD's to get down to HDD prices in terms of $$/GB, but that doesn't mean there aren't good deals out there. Everyday Newegg has some sale going on for some SSD........sign up for the Newegg e-blast flyer and whatever else they have so you can be notified when there is something going on. That's how many people get smokin hot deals on their hardware.

 

[DeaconFrost]

I doubt you will see them go much lower, to be honest. If you are waiting for them to go any lower, you may be out of luck.

 

[cytherian]

^ A lot of that will depend upon the economy, but in general any rapidly evolving product technology sector will progressively shift older model products down in price. The newer models coming out are notably improved, that being the main pressure on older model pricing. The computer hardware arena has been trying to optimize the profit model on products for decades. When there are few competitors, it works well for them (like AMD and Intel, who sucked the marrow out of each CPU release during the 80's and 90's, until operating system efficiency in the 00's reduced the need for faster CPU's). The consumer SSD space is still quite crowded with a number of competitive offerings, and as such attractive pricing will usually be found.