SSD Prices to Drop Even More...

$80 for a $250gb HDD? Puleeze! Even immediately post flood, they were never that high...actually, does anyone even buy 250gb drives anymore or is that just an iFruit thing...you know, overpriced, over marketed, over hyped and under performing!

I read another article about this on another website. Probably Toms or Anandtech -

Basically it said the big companies are scared the small companies are going to have quality issues and give SSD bad reputation. NAND is falling in price and the larger companies are planning to price out the smaller ones with aggressive prices- and take over the market share to make them go away.

I am not sure we need 200 different SSD's anyhow.

I would rather pay $80 for a good 120GB than have 50 different $150 120GB models to choose from.

It was Maximum PC:


http://www.maximumpc.com/article/new..._ssd_price_war

Slow news day. Did anyone think that SSD prices were NOT going to drop?

umm? everyone would love to pay less? how is that news?

the thing is, once all the little guys get choked out, there is no reason for the big guys to sell for $80 anymore... then they sell for $200 and that makes everyone sad

I just got a new Sandisk Extreme 120GB for a good price. Should I return it since it is not on this list and is therefore "inferior"?

No your fine. Reality is everyone know pc stuff gets Better and cheaper as times passes. It's been like this for thirty years now.

My toughts exactly...

I won my last one (an Intel 520) in a contest. Can I expect my next one to be cheaper than that?

I purchased a 128gb Crucial M4 for $110 last week. I thought it was a good deal. In a month it's going to look like a crap deal.

PCI-e SSDs will also have an impact on prices.

How many computer components have you bought ( all of us) that did not turn out this way ?

Ahhh.. Moore's Law

Today that is a steal on that drive. How much lower that drive will be in 6 months? It's part of the "early Adopee" downside

It's not a big deal if they drop months after I buy because I am not waiting months just in case something does drop in price.

That whole waiting thing never made any sense to me.

I am happy to pay more not to wait .

SSD performance is so good compared to hard drive performance there is no possible way I would suffer with a normal hdd operating system install more than three seconds.

I just love the reasoning! I am reading one thread where the guy is trying to build the lowest cost HTPC and another where money is no object when disk speed is concerned! Not that I do not do exactly the same thing .Sigh

Lol.

But I didn't wait. I bought two in following week after that thread. One from staples and one at costco.

That's not waiting.

That's just me looking for a deal.

I would do the same thing with an SSD purchase.

I often buy when a good opportunity presents itself. But if I really need it I would buy instantly at normal price too.

"waiting" I don't understand is when your so afraid of the price dropping that your too scared to buy anything and you go without for months.

I've never been a huge fan of being an early adopter for new technology, except in the case of the Ceton InfiniTV4. The bottom line is that pretty much any component you buy for a PC today will be much cheaper several months from now. You can certainly wait until the price drops, but by then it's already been superceded by a newer model. Personally, I have no problem waiting until prices drop to a point where I want to buy it.

SSDs are currently going on sale for $1/GB or even less. It took a long time for standard hard drives to hit that price point. Of course, the bottom literally dropped out of that market prior to the floods and they were practically giving multi-terabyte drives away for peanuts. I don't see huge SSDs dropping quite that low for a very long time, but then I'd be hesitant to use them for anything other than the OS drive anyway. I'll stick with standard drives for DVR recording chores and servers.

Interesting, as I'm testing the difference for a review I'm writing. So far the 'clean install test*' is about a wash (42 minutes on an SSD -vs- 48 on the hard drive). I'm going to do some testing with compressed and uncompressed data too. Even though artificial benchmarks say one thing, actual use just may say something else.


*W7 Ultimate, drivers, Office 2010 Pro, and 14 other programs from Ninite.

I would imagine most of the clean install time is slow read speeds from the cd/dvd.

I think Mfusick may have been referring to boot times. Booting from an SSD is amazingly fast compared to a standard hard drive.

Yes.
But also,

Install times. Normal operation performance. System hang ups.. and about everything else that sucks about using a PC.

SSD is superior to HDD in ever single way they can be compared. And the difference = It's not even close.



Yes.



And normal operations daily use.

Install from DVD is about same because read speed from DVD drive is limiting the SSD performance

Try timing the after install set up period where you install Microsoft updates and programs you want and restart ten times

Windows updates alone- and the Install CD or MFG download drivers + a few browsers, Office, mediabrowser, adobe, winrar.. the basics and core stuff.

Your looking at tripple the time without SSD. no doubt about it.

infact- the entire process is so slow on HDD that my personality is just in conflict with the entire process.

I built a HTPC on a 2TB WD green. It was an i3 2100 based/Asrock/8GB DDR3.

It was a total turd. crappiest HTPC I ever built. I would gladly take any of my celeron or pentium based HTPC's I have built for less on cheaper stuff but on SSD drives anyday no contest.

Infact, I would go as far as to say the performance with the OS on the green drive was 100% unacceptable to me.

I actually stopped doing the windows updates halfway through and just gave it to my partner to finish up because I was to frustrated.

It locked up, it was slow... I could not install more than one thing at a time... it was horrible. I am talking hours here... to get everything done.

It was my first non SSD install in quite a while and I actually forgot how much it sucks.

Honestly - I never got that far so you could be right.

I could not tolerate the set up process. Installing, restarting and configuring a new installation of Windows 7- with MS updates was unbearable.

It seemed like the PC would just freeze up- lag- and hang up periodically for no reason. On totall new and perfectly working parts. Good parts too. Brand names people use, (I have used before same WD drive, Asrock boards, Gskill DDR3 etc)

I realized it was the HDD that was the problem. It just performed much lower than my current expectations.

OS on HDD is a terrible user experience. You will never change my mind on that. Try installing any program, uninstalling any program and it's instantly noticable.

Honestly I just don't have the patience for when a PC hangs up and just appears stuck ...

Perhaps once mediabrowser is up and that is all your doing it might function OK as you suggest.

The problem is it sucks so much at the stuff I mentioned above I would never get to that point.

It's decided. No more HDD based OS builds for me. Period. Stop.
The decision for me is absolute and final.

A 200% increase in SSD prices could not sway this opinion the slightest. The performance to me is still worth it.

I can remember my first $250 120GB SSD I bought, and I thought it was well worth it then. Considering I can get a better one for $99 now there is no going back for me.

I usually agree with you Assassin, but this time my friend I am afraid I just simply can not agree.

I can't in good concience reccomend anyone a non SSD based build for any purpose today when you can get a 60GB SSD for $1 per GB ($59) without any sale or special buy needed to purcase from multiple large retailers.

If you can't afford the $60 for the SSD then either drop the price of other components, or go without.

THat is my reccomendation. The time and frustration alone of installing windows, updating, and setting it up to the final way you way on a normal HDD is not worth the $60 you spend. It's particuarly not worth it when you consider you might do it again with an SSD in the future. It's a total waste of time and effort (time is money). Better off doing it right the first time on an SSD, or just not doing it at all.

When did getting an SSD become a political debate? Thanks for bringing balance and reason back to the discussion. SSD, nice to have? Absolutely! Must have? Definitely not

Interesting points there gents. I'm currently running my new install off the Hard Drive after having used this (i7 2600 with 16GB RAM) machine for the last 6 months on SSD. I concur that the SSD is indeed quicker to boot, but only by perhaps a couple seconds. Let's say 10 seconds. If you rebooted every day for a year you'd save a whole hour.
On my Acer Revo, however, it's a different story. It was a rather under-powered machine with only 2GB of RAM when I got it and boots a lot quicker (30 seconds or so) now with 4GB and an SSD. However, the Revo only gets rebooted once a month or so.
Neither case, to me, is enough to make an SSD mandatory. I do, however, believe them to be desirable. But in a true 'economy build' I would forgo SSD.

I have two htpc. One is off a 40gb intel ssd. The old one not a recent version. And the other is run off of a 2.5" HDD.

The difference is night and day in all aspects. Changing channels in the guide, browsing with mb, shutting down. I tend to get pretty frustrated while using the bedroom htpc because of it.