Comments on: Buyer beware: Solid-state drive prices vary--a lot

The solid-state drive has arrived, but its prices are all over the map. Usually, but not always, higher-price SSDs use better controllers and larger cache memory.

[chuchucuhi]

At some point the marketing teams will get in there and different drives/price points will be targeted to different users e.g. home user who acesses the internet/email and stores their family photos and then the gaming market who need speed at all times and the digital enthusiast who uses it for temporary storege when working with videos, photoshop, and other large file type items who need speed and longevity this will also help them maintain profitability in a market where the margins can drop pretty quickly.

[gbelk08]

It sounds to me like a simple matter of extortion. Up until SanDisk announced its high capacity drives at CES, Toshiba was the virtually only source for Laptop manufacturers. So Toshiba took advantage of that fact and is using the money from its SSD sales to make up for its lack-luster laptop sales last quarter.

We can at least be satisfied in the fact that hopefully this gauging will end now that SanDisk and Intel are throwing their hats into the ring.

[ikramerica--2008]

It just sounds like Toshiba didn't get the memo that the "first gen pricing" was over.

Then again, if you think those prices are crazy, try the P2 card pricing at Panasonic, which RAIDS 4 normal chips into a superfast PCMCIAA card. 16GB cost me nearly $1000 last year, but it's what you have to do if you want to use your camera effectively. They are still runnning 18GB plus.

[biffhenerson]

Brooke you are way off base on the pricing. The difference in price is the due to the memory chip type. Multi-Level Cell (MLC) memory has a higher capacity and is cheap but is very slow to write when compared to the more expensive Single-Level Cell (SLC) memory. In general, SLC drives are twice the price of MLC drives. If your mainly doing reads, an MLC drive may work fine. If your doing lots of writes, go with an SLC. Its also worth noting that the new Fusion-IO drive plugs into a PCI-E X4 slot (Version 1.1 is 250MB/s x 4 = 1GB/s) rather than a SATA port (300MB/s limit) .. Fusion-IO reports a read speed is 700MB/s rather than 150MB/s for SATA SSD. Unfortunately with a MSRP near $3000, the price reflects this faster speed. http://www.fusionio.com/PDFs/Fusion%20Specsheet.pdf To date, the Intel X25-E seems to be the best performing SLC drive out there. (Retail $600)

[TravisOwens]

Buyer beware, car prices vary greatly!