Keith E. Whisman

March 04, 2010 at 11:32am

SSD suppliers are never going to recoup the money spent on R&D until they mass produce them and sell them at an affordable price and Capacity more in competition with mechanical hard drives. The idea I believe is to replace the mechanical hard drive in your mobile device and your home desktop and relegate the huge capacity and slower mechanical disk to server storage jobs and back up chores. This will never be realized however until costs come way down. Say $200 US Dollars for a super duper fast 512GB SSD with prices dropping from even there. 

The only thing that is keeping prices way up is that there are only a few suppliers of the memory chips used in SSDs and controller chips have only 2 suppliers as far as I know. So until things change prices are going to be just too high.

This is all just too unfriendly to common competition. If we can get a glut of memory suppliers producing high performance memory chips for a very cheap price because they are making so much of it then things will come down in price and also the controller chips need more competition that will bring prices down.

The cost of producing a mechanical hdd is pennies yet is more involved than the solid state drive. So it would seem the SSD would be easier and cheaper to manufacture then a mechanical drive.

I believe that part of the problem with SSD pricing is just pure price fixing and greed. It's really hurting the advancement and adoption of the SSD.