Samsung: Solid state will match hard-drive price
Samsung expects solid-state drives to reach price parity with hard-disk drives within the next few years amid steep annual price declines in flash memory chips.
Solid-state drives, which use flash memory chips as the storage medium, typically offer much better performance than hard-disk drives. But they cost more. Currently, opting for an SSD instead of a hard-disk drive will add anywhere between $100 and $600 to the cost of a laptop, depending on the capacity of the SSD.
Dell's Alienware Area-51 laptop (above) and Dell's Studio XPS 16 come with a 256GB solid-state drive option
(Credit: Dell)In a phone interview, Brian Beard, flash marketing manager for Samsung Semiconductor, said reaching price parity with hard-disk drives is just a matter of time. "Flash memory in the last five years has come down 40, 50, 60 percent per year," he said. "Flash on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis will reach price parity, at some point, with hard disk drives in the next few years." Samsung makes both SSDs and HDDs.
Beard explained why a cost gap persists between solid-state drives and hard-disk drives. "The difference in cost is fundamentally very different. A hard drive has a fixed cost of $40 or $50 for the spindle, the motors, the PCB (printed circuit board), the cables," he said. "To make the hard drive spin faster (increase speed) or to add capacity doesn't really add a lot of incremental cost to the drive." (The price for most laptop-class hard-disk drives on the market is between $60 and $100 at retail, Beard said.)
"When you contrast this with SSDs, they also have a fixed cost for the PCB and the case and the controller, which is lower than the fixed cost of a hard drive," according to Beard. "But as you scale the capacity of the SSD up, the cost scales linearly. For example, if the spot price of the flash chip itself is $2, a 64GB drive is going to cost $128 just for the flash and then you would add the fixed cost of the PCB and the case, he said. So, the cost will double as you double the capacity, according to Beard.
This argument, however, works in favor of lower solid-state drive pricing too--as flash memory prices drop and densities and capacities increase. And Beard added that "there's a lot of pressure for OEMs (PC makers) to match the price to the traditional pricing in the hard-drive industry." Samsung is also a PC maker and faces the same pressures.
And what will happen to the price of SSDs this year? "The rest of the year is quite unpredictable. Because the SSD price is directly tied to the price of flash, no one knows. Everyone is just giving their best guess as to what will happen in the flash market," he said. To date, flash memory prices have dropped so much that chipmakers can't make money.
"Every major flash manufacturer posted major losses in Q4. So flash and SSD manufacturers are under a lot of pressure to make a profit," Beard said.
Where is the price-per-gigabyte sweet spot for solid-state drives going to be later this year? "On the business side, the sweet spot is 64(GB) moving to 128. On the consumer side it's definitely 128 moving to 256," he said.
Samsung SSDs with a capacity of 256GB have been shipping since January. Dell offers these drives in some laptop models already. 256GB drives are just now "rolling out into mass production," Beard said. "We'll start shipping it to some of our smaller customers about right now."
Note: Currently, on a Dell Studio XPS 16, opting for a 128GB SSD instead of a 7200rpm 320GB HDD adds $200 to the price of the system. Opting for a 256GB SSD adds $400.
Brooke Crothers has served as an editor at large at CNET News, an editor at Dow Jones' Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and a senior editor at InfoWorld. His CNET blog covers chip technology and computer systems, and how they define the computing experience. He also contributes to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. Follow Brooke on Twitter @mbrookec. 
What does it mean. Price per gigs go up or down in this year?
[CNET editors' note: Prohibited content deleted.
LOL. I hope nobody's relying on you for financial/economic advice. I could post a list of data that proves how foolish your assertions are, but I imagine the average reader here already realizes that. I will leave you with one number: 9.4% unemployment nationwide...and it's been quite a while (25+ years) since we've seen those kinds of numbers.
And why else are people in business? Genius!
From what I learned, only READ speed is "typically" faster.
Most SSDs are pretty slow. The more interesting is the Application Performance which the best SSD couldn't match the WD VelociRaptor; and they didn't test with the 15K drives.
So now it's your turn to give us some typical, not theoretical proof. I'll happy to stand corrected.
That article is nearly a year old. There has been a completely new generation that has been released since. Today's SSD's, in general, completely destroy traditional HDDs in both writing and reading. That's why there's such a push to put them in high-throughput enterprise applications (see Sun's new product lines) as well as laptops where the typical 5200rpm (or slower) drives that are mandated by power consumption concerns are just abysmally slow with today's multimedia apps. Try looking at some benchmarks from late 2008 or preferably 2009 and you'll see what I mean ;)
The premium one pays for SSDs is so high, I think it'll take more than a few years - more like 5+ - before SSDs are competitively priced to hard drives. I wish it wasn't so - as I'd love to have a semi-permanent backup solution with no moving parts to break - but I seriously doubt that SSDs will become price competitive with HD.
60 Gig SSD's are already at $100. It is totally ludicrous they are still building laptops that have platters. It should already be industry standard to have encrypted SSD drives on all portable devices.
Samsung was a bit vague into what they meant by the "next few years," but I don't think it is a question of IF SSDs will become price competitive, but when. Unless there is some yet unknown limitation that caps SSD capacity or a real huge revolution in HDDs I don't see anything that will stop SSDs from eventually reaching parity with HDDs in every market sector.
So, a 100 terabyte flash drive for $79.95? I'll believe that when I see it.
I don't question that there are some people who will find a use for still higher capacities, but at some point I think that speed rather than capacity will become the leading factor that people use to determine what storage technology that they use. For those people not using their computers are HD DVR or some other use space intensive use I think a lot of people would prefer a 1TB SLC SSD over a 8TB 7200RPM HDD. A some point capacity doesn't offer much value for a lot of people.
Statements like this always look stupid a few years down the way. I remember when we put the first working 120 MB (yes, megabyte) hard drive in a PC. One of the engineers said, "Wow, what would anyone ever need all that space for?"
the speed increase should be between 10%-25%
I got an HP Omnibook 300 flash in 1995
(hpmuseum.net/display_item.php?hw=123)
paid an extra $700 for an additional 20MB of PCMCIA flash. (!)
Thing would run 5 hours on 4 AA alkalines, 8 hours on a new NiMH.
10 years ahead of the mainstream
I think Samsung deserves an award for their awesome research skills.
/sarcasm
- by revrend23 March 17, 2009 9:52 AM PDT
- is anyone really willing to pay more for 500G or 1000G in a _laptop_? some will, most will not.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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- by firefoxluva95 March 17, 2009 6:53 PM PDT
- I wish...after all. I'd love to put Windows 7 on an SSD and take it for a spin...or I won't be spinning as SSDs don't spin. I have an 80 G hard drive so anything out there right now is better.
- Like this
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(35 Comments)IMHO for laptops --- the tipping point will be when cost/G for a 128G SSD gets close enough to a 160G HDD. and when the cost/G for a 256G HDD gets close enough to a 500G, 320G or 250G laptop HDD.
then the benefits of SSD low power, better reliability, performance will be acceptable for mainstream
I personally believe this will be back to school 2009