SSDs cost half of what they did in 2011

http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/index/~3/j1XNJ40m48I/

by vasili • 14 years ago

98 63 14 years ago

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nirvana• 14 years ago

It seems flash drives go for about $1 a gigabyte or less. If the prices drop in half twice more they will be down to the $0.25/gigabyte I was paying for hard drives when I first started tracking prices in 2008. At that time, SSDs were $9.38 per gigabyte.

fletchowns• 14 years ago

Here's a nice table of SSD prices on Newegg: http://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/ssd/

SSD is definitely one of the best upgrades I've ever purchased for a computer.

cbsmith2• 14 years ago

Interesting comment about the minimum size of flash storage being 18nm here: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/why-ssds-cost-half-of...

Can anyone provide more information on the nature of that limitation?

I did find reference to this article from 2 years ago: http://features.techworld.com/storage/3211959/is-nand-flash-...

It just seems like it's talking about the usual ongoing issue of, "we're near the cutting edge of lithography techniques", but that's kind of a given (you always build on the best lithography method that can scale, which tends to be fairly close to the best lithography method period). We've been in a similar state for CPU's and RAM for decades now. Is there something different about SSD's?

jrabone• 14 years ago

I read an article somewhere (sorry, don't have reference to hand) that suggested it was diminishing returns from error correction vs number of levels per cell rather than lithography limits per se.

jpxxx2• 14 years ago

I think you're both talking about different sides of the same problem.

Visualize a single SSD cell as a bucket of electrons. If it's full of electrons, it stands for 1. If it's empty, it stands for 0. Reading this is fast and unambiguous - there's either lots or none. (Single Level Cell type)

Now visualize a bucket that can be filled with no electrons, a third full, two-thirds full, or full of electrons. Now you've got 4 possibilities, so you can encode 2 bits! (Multiple Level Cell type)

Most consumer SSDs use the latter kind, MLC. It's slower to read and the results have to be amplified with better error correction, but you get so much more storage per chip that it's usually worth doing it this way.

The problem is that once you've cranked each of these cells down to 18nm or whatever, you're talking about holding and measuring (at most) 100 electrons per cell. What's that, 0, 33, 66, and 100 electrons? Crank it down even further and you can hold even less.

I think I pulled the numbers out of my ass, but the idea is essentially correct. We're close to the point where it's too difficult and error-prone to get a good read on a cell, requiring too much error correction to make engineering sense and rendering the MLC technique infeasible.

Also going below 18nm is going to be a pain in the ass for other reasons. So it's sort of a mutual dead end.

reitzensteinm4• 14 years ago

It's different this time (and I cringe saying that), because we're rapidly approaching fundamental limits to scaling down silicon.

The concerns in the past have been mainly to do with lithography; eg, when the feature size of the silicon went below the wavelength of the light we were using, we had to make masks that utilized difference patterns. This is a mere manufacturing problem.

But now we're getting to fundamental limits. Even if we had the ability to place the atoms however we wanted them, there's an intrinsic limit. You can't make a transistor out of half an atom.

We already hit a wall with frequency; for the longest time, it looked like speeds would go up and up. It's not an apples to apples comparison, because the Pentium 4 had a long pipeline, but a 3.8ghz Prescott was released in 2005 - which is exactly the maximum turbo frequency of the 2011 Sandy Bridge 2600k I'm typing this now on. Ivy has it beaten by just 100mhz.

Now, that's not to say that computation will stop progressing. But it's not going to look like last year's CPU just smaller for much longer; some pretty fundamental changes are going to have to be made. Dynamically reconfiguring memristor circuits are what excites me, but it's just as likely to be something else instead.

As far as flash memory in particular goes, I'm no expert, but cell durability is falling substantially with each shrink (on average; Intel bucked the trend with their 25nm flash), and so the usable limit to feature size may come more quickly than with standard transistors.

But the industry has managed to push through walls that seemed just as intrinsic before, so I wouldn't bet my life savings on it.

Leynos2• 14 years ago

A few years ago, there was talk of producing chips with three dimensional stacks of NAND cells (for example, http://www.semi.org/en/node/38361?id=sgurow0811 ). Has there has been any movement on this front? Every article I can find on the subject is a year old or more. This strikes me as the ideal way around the limits of individual NAND cell size, with an obvious proviso that drastically new manufacturing techniques would need to be perfected before this limit is hit.

davidb_• 14 years ago

> We already hit a wall with frequency

This is true, but the way you wrote it ignores the fundamental problem - it's not we can't make transistors switch any quicker, it's that doing so causes such an increase in temperature that we risk damaging the device. That's why you can read about overclockers using things like liquid nitrogen to run chips at 8 GHz.

Cooling mechanisms like microchannel cold plates and, as we continue with 3D-ICs, interlayer cooling, can allow for higher frequencies.

cbsmith2• 14 years ago

> But now we're getting to fundamental limits. Even if we had the ability to place the atoms however we wanted them, there's an intrinsic limit. You can't make a transistor out of half an atom.

I believe though that limit is well below 18 nm. Last I heard, they'd done a transistor with 1.5nm, and they weren't saying that was the limit. I'm not sure what the magic is with 18nm, but I'd sure like to know.

adsr• 14 years ago

I've been under the impression that NAND will someday be replaced with something like MRam. Not sure how far of that is or how it's progressing, would be interested in knowing if someone knows more about this.

gpvos• 14 years ago

What worried me most is that SSDs with the apparently current 22nm size have only 2k/3k write cycles, where older ones had 10k. Seems a bit low to me.

philjohn• 14 years ago

It is low, but controller technology has come on as well. cxtreme systems have a 2xnm endurance test going on at the moment and a 256 GB Samsung 830 has got to 2.4 PB written so far and is still going strong (at an average rate of over 200 MB/s).

stcredzero• 14 years ago

SSDs bring a different set of assumptions to the table than spinning hard drives. What would an OS designed from the ground up in the world of SSDs and the cloud look like?

mathgladiator• 14 years ago

> What would an OS designed from the ground up

I wager it would look mostly the same. The reason I say this is because there would still be a distinction between the CPU's memory, the system memory, and then "disk". So long as the IO hierarchy exists, I wager the OS design would more or less be the same.

Now, when memristors come about which have compute+massive memory, then we will need a new OS.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

Agreed on the first part; SSD is still orders of magnitude slower than RAM, which is really what matters in the distinction between memory and storage, from a computing point of view. The rest is just implementation details (SSD has wear leveling, HDD has park and resume, etc)

spamizbad• 14 years ago

SSDs are fast, but they're still orders of magnitude slower than RAM in terms of latency. Keep in mind, back in the day, the spread between dram and spinning disks wasnt as bad as it is today.

The next great performance challenge may be the so-called "memory wall" wrt the performance of CPUs vs the performance of RAM. Id be curious to see what that would do to performance if it underwent the same dramatic improvement as nonvolatile storage.

reitzensteinm4• 14 years ago

We may actually see them both happening at once; one of the things R. Stanley Williams talks about in his excellent memristor talk is a method they developed for stacking hundreds of chips on top of a processor, which he says may end up providing just as much benefit as the memristor itself.

The possibilities that could be opened up by having a terabyte or more of extremely fast non volatile storage attached by a bus as large as you care to make it directly on top of a CPU are mind boggling.

Then when you consider that you can use them as FPGAs for computation instead and dynamically reconfigure them... wow.

Memristors are only a year or two away from commercial availability, though it will probably be a while after that until they live up to the hype. We live in exciting times.

The talk:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY

polshaw2• 14 years ago

FWIW, although it is no doubt not an apples/apples comparison[1], todays faster SSDs (~500MB/s) have roughly the same bandwidth as pentium-era PC-66 ram, while todays faster DDR3 is >12GB/s (which i guess doubles with dual channel). So its not 100% crazy.

1. no doubt latency etc are much better for RAM.

kdsudac2• 14 years ago

I wonder what it would cost?

Amazon S3 pricing starts at $0.125 per GB per month. So if you just want to store an extra 500 GB that's gonna run $62.50 per month on a HDD!

Given SSDs are 5-10X more expensive who would be willing to pay $300-$600 per month?

Serious question: Any S3 users out there who would pay 5X as much for better performance? If so, what are you working on?

tylerhobbs• 14 years ago

S3 isn't where the SSDs will go, it's the EC2 instances. Many, many, people would pay those numbers for local, dedicated SSDs when their instance is running a database.

jpxxx2• 14 years ago

The perceptual performance increase from a SSD in a laptop or a desktop is tremendous, and there's no going back once you make the leap. Hopefully, HDDs will shortly follow DVD-ROMs down the memory hole for portables.

listic2• 14 years ago

Yo say it like you hate having an option to have either. I like options.

polshaw2• 14 years ago

What I would like to know is what are the expected future prices? Are they expected to continue to fall, level off, or is this expected to be a temporary low?

wavephorm3• 14 years ago

So where's my 1TB solid state disk to replace the 256GB one I've been using in my laptop for 3 years now? It seems as though all innovation in storage stopped in 2009, and we've been coasting ever since. And don't even mention there's still no 4TB hard disks. My blu-ray rip collection isn't getting any smaller and our storage systems aren't getting better anywhere near fast enough.

1qaz2wsx3edc• 14 years ago

Drive speeds have increase, capacity is slowly rising. Why compete on capacity when hdds still dominate it. But yes, this industry is still slow in it's evolution.

wmf3• 14 years ago

There are 1TB SSDs, but not many. I guess few people want to spend $1,000 on a single SSD.

Seagate has a 4TB disk; they were probably about to release it when the floods hit so I guess they decided to wait.

Leynos2• 14 years ago

They're here:

http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-Technology-2-5-Inch-Performance-OC...

AFAICT, the OCZ Octane is the only 1TB 2.5" drive on the market, but I suspect you'll start to see more of these later this year (at slightly more sensible prices, one would hope).

wtallis6• 14 years ago

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6038/owc-releases-960gb-mercur...

$1270 for a drive that is essentially a RAID-0 of two 512GB SSDs, packaged in a single 2.5" drive. OCZ also has the Colossus drives that offer 1TB as a RAID-0.

wtallis6• 14 years ago

You don't need a solid-state drive for your movies. That's just wasteful. Mechanical hard drives are fine for data that will only be read, and only sequentially. Plus, they're still 10x cheaper, even given the currently inflated hard drive prices and record low SSD prices. There simply isn't a market for a 1TB consumer SSD. What you're really looking for is a hybrid drive with 64+ GB of Flash.

EDIT: Also, at the end of 2009, TRIM support was just hitting the market, and SandForce-based drives were just being announced. Since then, TRIM has become universal, as has 6Gbps SATA support, and most controllers have been through at least one other iteration. SSD caching has also hit the market in a variety of forms.

wavephorm3• 14 years ago

I seriously need a 1TB SSD (which either don't exist or are still way too expensive) for my laptop because I am constantly moving files off my local system and onto my file server which could also seriously use some 4TB drives, which also don't exist. I am running out of space on each of my systems faster than I ever remember.

BlackNapoleon2• 14 years ago

Excuse me, but some of us don't like carrying around externals with our main laptops because we happen to have more than 100 songs in itunes.

velodrome2• 14 years ago

Where are Seagate and WD SSDs in the market? Why are they sitting on the sidelines while Intel, Samsung, and smaller players eat up market share?

wmf3• 14 years ago

Classic innovator's dilemma.

(They actually have SSDs, but they're not competitive in the consumer market. See http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/solid-state-hybr... and http://wd.com/en/products/solidstate/embedded/ )

kdsudac2• 14 years ago

Seagate and Western Digital are way too busy making money hand over fist selling hard drives :)

A lot of the SSD companies aren't really making that much money. The fabs to make the memory chips are huge capital investments and suppliers have historically been bad at managing supply and demand leading to volatile pricing.

Hence the current drop in prices cited in the original article.

mgkimsal3• 14 years ago

As someone who bit the bullet and bought at 256g SSD in January, yes, I've noticed this rather dramatic drop recently. I paid about $420, and could get a 512 gig for $399, IIRC, going by last week's pricing. Ugh.

I wished I'd waited a bit, as switching again to a 512 would be... I dunno - not sure if it would be worth it again, but I am running out of room a lot on a 256.

hnwh• 14 years ago

Where did you find a 512 for $399? I haven't seen anything near that

riobard• 14 years ago

There's a Crucial M4 deal running on Amazon a few days ago...

mgkimsal3• 14 years ago

Yes, as the other poster said, it's crucial:

http://www.compusa.com/applications/SearchTools/search.asp?k...

But others manufacturers sub 500g are coming down: http://www.compusa.com/applications/Category/guidedSearch.as...

thealphanerd• 14 years ago

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-det...

have one in my late 2011 mbp... working great

BlackNapoleon2• 14 years ago

And they're still too expensive.

Getting a rMBPro with 768GB is $1000 more than the 512 option. Thats just absurd

janardanyri• 14 years ago

Apple charges way more than market rate for storage and memory upgrades. A stick of memory that costs $40 on Newegg might cost $200 from Apple.

In the past the sensible option was to buy a Macbook with stock memory / storage and upgrade it yourself, but of course that's no longer possible with the rMBP. Still, that says no more about the actual cost of SSDs than the price of a hotel room says about beds. :)

barlo• 14 years ago

I love this analogy

tjoff• 14 years ago

And harddrives cost exactly the same as they did in 2011 (probably depends on which drive you look at, a 3 TB drive cost about the same and a 4 TB drive costs more now).

http://www.isuppli.com/Memory-and-Storage/News/Pages/Hard-Di...

chmars2• 14 years ago

Has anyone data on the price development of Apple SSDs?

Since newer Macs doesn't allow for an SSD change, the initial SSD price is very important. I suspect that the fact that you have to max out your SSD on purchase if you want to use your Mac for a longer time, SSDs in Macs have actually become more expensive.

In the past, you could buy a Mac with a small SSD or even a HDD. After one or two years, you could replace your small SSD or your HDD with an up-to-date SSD and could usually benefit from lower storage prices …

listic2• 14 years ago

Which newer Macs do you have in mind?

lloeki• 14 years ago

I guess latest MacBook Air and Retina MacBook Pro. They're not soldeded on, but the SSD is a specific daughter-board.

chmars2• 14 years ago

MacBook Air and the latest MacBook Pro with Retina display and of course the iMac.

For iMac and MacBook Air, upgrade options are available but they are pricey and non-trivial.

kalleboo• 14 years ago

OWC sell an upgrade for the Air's SSD, I imagine it's just a matter of time until there's one available for the retina pro http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Aura_Pro_Express

Dylan16807• 14 years ago

Oh, I hadn't realized that even though the ram is soldered on the SSD is on a relatively-easy to remove card. It's the only thing that looks feasible to upgrade.

SSDs cost half of what they did in 2011

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