Analysts estimate SSD prices will drop 50 percent by mid-2023:
As SSD and NAND prices gradually decline, analysts now believe the price drops have no end in sight. The latest projections show that next year, consumers may be able to add 2TB worth of SSD storage to their PC for less than $100.
It's safe to say that one of the best inventions for PC components was the creation of NAND flash and the subsequent M.2 SSDs. The ability to store upwards of multiple terabytes of data on a storage device nearly the same size as a stick of gum is fantastic.Unfortunately, M.2 drives with those high amounts of data have been unfathomable for most consumers for a while.
Recently, SSDs have seen significant price cuts and capacity increases. Just six years ago, a 1 TB NVMe drive from Samsung cost nearly $500. Now, the same SSDs go for $90. That's an 80-percent price cut. Analysts believe this steady price decline will continue. Estimations indicate current SSD costs could be cut in half by the middle of 2023. If projections prove correct, 1 TB M.2 SSDs could retail for around $50, 2 TB SSDs might reach sub-$100 prices, and the 4 TB drives approaching the $200 mark might put them within reach of budget-minded customers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Thursday October 13 2022, @03:55PM
$60 to $100 for 2 TB PCIe 4.0, DRAMless QLC on the low end of that. All bets are off for PCIe 5.0.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2022, @08:27PM (1 child)
And to think I was extatic about 20 years ago to pay $80 for an 80 GB, 5,400 rpm, IDE hard drive. They finally reached $1/GB at that point.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday October 13 2022, @09:22PM
Storage is boring and stagnant now. HDD $/TB has plateaued and the technology is prone to horrible mechanical failures, especially on cheaper consumer drives. The 30-100 TB HAMR/MAMR drives on the roadmap are probably only relevant to big companies.
An SSD sets you way back on capacity and $/TB, and isn't reliable for unpowered data retention. The move to cheap QLC causes problems, and PLC (5 bits per cell) might be on the menu.
SD card technology also uses NAND, so same problems. The 2 TB SD/microSD that would max out SDXC readers is missing in action. It's unclear if SDUC (supporting up to 128 TB) will ever catch on given that smartphones are ditching microSD capability. Newer versions of the SD standard have specified impressive speeds of up to 4 GB/s (PCIe 4.0 x2), but actually reaching those speeds might be impossible due to heat issues.
Optical discs are dying. You can get BDXL discs, but $/TB is much worse than HDDs. The consumer electronics industry is phasing out optical discs at every turn, and prices will continue to creep up. Storage longevity of existing consumer discs is debatable. "Archival Disc" allegedly hits 1 TB (the 500 GB discs exist, not sure about 1 TB), but it's only relevant to enterprise, again. There's still talk of multi-terabyte discs [whathifi.com], but there will be resistance to putting anything in the hands of consumers, who will be
forcedencouraged to store everything in the cloud instead.Two things could save us: post-NAND universal memory to tackle SSDs, and some kind of super optical/holographic technology for bulk storage. Both are plagued by vaporware as expected. Intel's 3D XPoint/Optane was portrayed like a universal memory early on, but that was a lie and now Intel has ditched it.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Thursday October 13 2022, @09:09PM (3 children)
I am not up-to-date on the current state of SSD technology, but I know that earlier SSDs had a definite lifespan concerning the number of writes they could withstand (I think it was around 10,000 writes to the same block?). Has this barrier been overcome, or are we still faced with SSDs that have 5-year lifespans (or less for those whose use-cases involve frequent writes to disk)?
Is there still a place in the world for HDDs?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2022, @09:40PM
Nothing has changed except the push for $cheap/gb have made the cells LESS reliable
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday October 13 2022, @09:48PM (1 child)
See my screed above.
SSD write endurance is getting worse, not better. QLC drops write endurance but probably not as much was once thought (here's a TLC [anandtech.com] and QLC [anandtech.com] with same rated TBW for the 1 TB model), and PLC is being talked about but it seems like no manufacturer is willing to go for it in the near future. Oh, there is a prototype:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/solidigm-plc-nand-ssd [tomshardware.com]
Consumer SSD lifespan is helped by the fact that most people aren't writing hundreds of gigabytes per day, so even with atrocious write endurance, the limits are not being reached. Increasing the capacity also helps counteract usage. You could fill your 4 TB SSD with games on day 1, but when are you going to reach 1600 TB written? Not anytime soon, probably.
SSD warranties are still 3-5 years. I'm not sure they would be increased for consumers even if the technology was magically lasting 10x longer. I think enterprise warranties are still around 5 years too.
HDDs are still the only game in town if you want to store large amounts of video. Most pirates aren't bothering with storing what they watch anymore [torrentfreak.com]. If you record video yourself, you could fill up the largest drives very quickly.
If you are a data hoarder, video or otherwise, you are going to be using HDDs. Maybe with multiple identical backups.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Friday October 14 2022, @02:30AM
"HDDs are still the only game in town if you want to store large amounts of video. Most pirates aren't bothering with storing what they watch anymore [torrentfreak.com]. If you record video yourself, you could fill up the largest drives very quickly.
If you are a data hoarder, video or otherwise, you are going to be using HDDs. Maybe with multiple identical backups."
If you use them crazy high bit rates I suppose they fill up quickly. I am happy enough with relatively low settings I use it looks perfectly fine on my 1080 screen that I am in no hurry to upgrade. That gives me many many files on the HDDs I have in four machines loaded up with drives a main master and three backups of that machine rsynced to them. I upgrade my machine every couple of years the old one gets tasked as a new backup which I fill up with new drives. The system works fairly well the machines and the drives get powered on every week for additions of new files from the series I get during the year and any new additions I download. Very few of the drives fail the oldest date back to around 2014, the newest were all bought last Christmas when my machine got upgraded and I gained my fourth backup machine. I have been waiting for years for someone to come out with a nice high capacity SSD at a low price as I am cheap SOB. They do not have to have many write cycles as my use case is generally write the files I am going to keep to the drives the one time. If an optical storage system that would actually work were available it would be perfect for me, but they are all garbage whose data never survives restoring after any period of time. I lost many files relying on that trash back then that is when I decided on the HDD solution that has not failed me once. I say bring on the cheap SSDs I will take the chance on them.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 2) by EEMac on Friday October 14 2022, @02:46PM (2 children)
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday October 14 2022, @03:26PM (1 child)
TFS says M.2, not SATA. SATA are already noticeably lower. They will be removed from the market eventually. I see M.2 to SATA adapters for the people who must get an SSD into their laptop or whatever.
https://slickdeals.net/f/16077259-pny-cs900-1tbb-ssd-57-99-free-shipping [slickdeals.net]
https://slickdeals.net/f/16060837-2tb-team-group-cx2-2-5-ssd-newegg-99 [slickdeals.net]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by EEMac on Friday October 14 2022, @09:43PM
Good point. Have an upvote.