Kingston States Obvious about SSDs (Better Pricing Needed)
Kingston States Obvious about SSDs (Better Pricing Needed)
Posted 09/15/2010 at 7:27am
| by Paul Lilly
16
Comments
Print
Plain and simple, solid state drives (SSDs) still cost too much for mainstream adoption. That epiphany seems to have hit Kingston's Scott Chen, VP of sales for Asia Pacific, who says that the price premium of SSDs over hard drives needs to drop by about 20 percent from the current 40 percent to drive widespread adoption.
Great, step one is identifying the problem, and step two would be fixing it. Sometimes it takes a give-and-take between consumers and manufacturers to prove there's a market for certain technology, but in this case, the ball is squarely in the manufacturers' court.
As it stands, the average cost of 1GB of NAND stands at $2.50, which would explain the horrible price-to-capacity ratio of SSDs compared to hard drives. According to Chen, the cost of 1GB of NAND needs to drop below $1 before we'll see any kind of widespread adoption of SSDs.
Chen isn't the only one who thinks so. Back in August, market research firm pegged $0.40 per GB as the price point NAND memory will need to hit before SSDs can become competitive with traditional HDDs.
More like this
16
Comments
Comments are closed on this article
Bullwinkle J Moose
September 15, 2010 at 1:09pm
I wuz over at OCZ Forums a couple of weeks back looking for info on the hardware encryption of Sandforce SSD's and wuz SHOCKED by the number of bricked VERTEX 2 drives that revert back to old data and ignore new data after shutdown or reboot!
Who is covering this story as it unfolds anyway???
Thats wut I thought
someuid
September 15, 2010 at 11:34am
The price of these chips have a lot to do with the size of the circuitry in the chips. For example, Intel was able to drop their prices by 34% when they moved to a 34nm manufacturing prices.
According to these articles, 20-25 nm manufacturing processes are either here now or will be here before the end of the year.
Stick around. Prices are going to drop and capacities are going to go up.
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4207599/Nomura-backs-Hynix--see-21-nm-NAND-coming
vcr182
September 15, 2010 at 9:30am
When building a new pc, if each part is going to be 200-300$, it will lead to an expensive pc...no? "Gaming PC"
bbotzong
September 15, 2010 at 8:08am
I tell you what... I put in a 250gig SSD as my main hard drive and the speed increase has been phenomenal! I'm now FINALLY getting the performance out of this desktop that I had dreamed of only a short time ago. The time when the bios starts loading the O/S until login screen (Windows 7) is barely 15 seconds. No more waiting as hard drives churn. Once in Windows, other programs are lightening fast to load and operate. For example, Outlook used to take up to a minute to load. With SSD, I'm fully loaded in under 10 seconds. For those on the fence, this technology is superb and is a complete paradigm shift. Can't wait for the drives to drop in price so I can outfit some other machines in my house with them.
Eoraptor
September 15, 2010 at 8:06am
...and in other great "duh" statements, the world is round, the moon landing was real, Bush was an idiot, and pizza tastes good.
Really, it's nice he and others can identify the blanket concern... but you know, how about looking at the real problem, like WHY price per GB is so high... you know, something that's actually a step towards SOLVING the issue of the nosebleed inducing costs of SSD installations.
The cheapest I can find 64 gb of SSD is $101US; and 64 gb is, I think, the smallest anyone would comfortably want to run windows and a few critical apps/games on. By contrast, you can pick up a cheap and reliable barracuda chambered in 80 gigs for $36US, and still get a terabyte for under a C note in a mechanical drive. Granted these aren't burner 10,000 RPM drives with green features and lifetime bearings, but the basic math is still solid.
I Jedi
September 15, 2010 at 7:38am
While I myself think the prices are still way too high for the average consumer, I plan to build my next rig with a few SSD. The future of storage is with SSD drives, and so I see the investment of acuiring faster read/write speeds. Of course, I'm probably a year off from getting my next rig, so by the time I do get ready to build my next computer, prices could very well drop a few cents, if not more. Anyone else here planning to build their next rig with an entire SSD lineup, or possibly a SSD for Windows, whilst having programs loaded on a regular H.D.D.?
whr4usa
September 15, 2010 at 11:51am
I won't be buying an SSD until there's a SATA III drive using a cache-less controller (i.e. Sandforce) with Advanced Format (4,096-Byte Sectors & 64-bit addressing of its clusters)
when that happens I'll start buying only SSDs for Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 or VMWare ESXi 5.0 or RHEL 6.x or SUSE + .NET or whatever I'm running as my primary OS whenever that happens ha
however until SSD-specific SATA III, Advanced Format && TRIM commands can either pass-through or be processed by true hardware RAID 5, 10 & 51 controllers with duplexing possibilities && they're less than 3X higher priced than the optimum traditional alternative I won't be buying them in bulk for RAID arrays or as the default in my merchandise PCs
Caboose
September 15, 2010 at 7:48am
Thats actually going to be the first upgrade to my HTPC. Move the OS to a 64GB (or a 32GB even) SSD, and leave recordedTV, Movies, HD Movies, TV Shows, Music and Anime on the 4 standard 1TB-1.5TB HDD's
I don't think I'll move my desktop over to an SSD for Windows until storage space increases a lot. I have a 1TB RAID1 as my OS drive, and I have a lot of apps and games installed. Heck, my Steam library alone is almost 110GB.
dracx619
September 15, 2010 at 9:40am
you read my mind...i just turned my main computer into a sweet htpc and was thinking the other day on what would make it faster and quieter. 4 HDD spinning isn't great for the noise so i was thinking a nice 64gb ssd for system and at least one 1-3tb hdd for recordings and all media files would be ideal
dracx619
September 16, 2010 at 3:13am
thanks dudes. my case came with the sound dampening gromets which does help. while it is quieter than when it was my desktop, i think what bothers me is that since it is in the bedroom, the slightest noises kind of bug me at night. such as the grinding noise of the hdds reading and writing occasionally and i think the biggest offender(s) might be either the side fan and or the gpu fan. its not super loud, but compared to when i had the tivo which was practically no sound, its taking me a while to get used to the distinctive hum.
so i guess my question to you guys is, whats a good, cheap, quiet, and small gpu that can handle hd, blu-ray, and such and do you know of a good, quiet 90mm case fan...i noticed there aren't much 90mm fans out there so do the more common 92mm fans fit?
the plan for the future is to have to htpc in the living room when we get our condo, and have an extender in the bedroom for our recordings and movies but just use the standard cable hookup for the tv to not have the xbox on all the time.
thanks guys
ps, max pc should have a nice HTPC feature in their mag. that would be great! you know, budget builds, no budget, slim, nutty, using the best parts, recycled parts, what not to do, plug-ins, tweaks...DO IT =)
Erris
September 16, 2010 at 5:07pm
If you want a silent GPU that can handle HD content get an ATI 5450. It has no fan - passive cooling, sells for $45. I have it in my HTPC and love it.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00365DY3Q/ref=oss_product
dracx619
October 11, 2010 at 8:30am
so just an update on all this work.
ssd in, noise went down a tiny bit
i put in this gfx card you suggested, sound level went WAY DOWN. blu ray and hd playback is great. thanks for the suggestion. im super happy with the results.
the only thing left making noise (but barely) is the stock intel cpu fan. the sound coming from the 3 case fans and psu are super, super faint and i confrimed this with a few little tests.
so definitely, these little changes have helped me reach my goal of making my htpc, tivo quiet. now if i can find a way to quiet the cpu fan, you probably wont know its on at all!
Eoraptor
September 15, 2010 at 11:39am
a couple of cheap noise-dampening shims/gromets or hard drive sleeves (also known as dampers or condoms) may actually go a long way towards quieting your system. such as http://www.frozencpu.com/products/6468/noi-11/FrozenCPUcom_HDD_Noise_Isolation_Strips_-_Black.html
Hell, in a pinch, use the rubber spoke liners from inside an old bycicle wheel and punch some holes in em for the screws to pass through.
Caboose
September 15, 2010 at 10:07am
I don't notice the noise in my HTPC. The one 1TB drive is a Seagate 7200.11, the 2 1.5TB's are Western Digital Green 5400rpm's (and I'm noticing the huge difference in load times) and then my 4th drive actually is a 500GB Seagate (Unless I too moved that over to a 1TB Seagate... I forget). I'm using the stock CPU fan (Dual-Core AMD Athlon II) and 4GB of Kingston RAM. Case has a single 120mm fan, and I think the PSU has a 120mm fan. Even when the room is quiet, there's not much more than a very soft hum from beside the TV (My HTPC is on 24/7/365).
I run Windows 7 HP, with a Hauppauge HVR-1800 (I think... It's a PCI-E 1x card) tied in to my Shaw digital STB (looking for an HDMI capture card so I can get HD), using stock audio via SP/DIF (Fiber) to my 5.1 reciever. Outputting video via the onboard ATi Radeon HD 3200 via HDMI. Blu-Ray playback with a LiteOn Blu-Ray ROM drive. I use AcrSoft TotalMedia Theater for my blu-ray playback as it integrates in to WMC, and plays discs beautifully. SlySoft AnyDVD HD runs in the background. And Media Browser handles all my movies, TV shows, and anime (downloads metadata off the net).
Hit me up on the forums under this same name if you wanna talk more about HTPC's and what I'm running and stuff.
I Jedi
September 15, 2010 at 8:43am
Yes, I agree with you, there is a lot of storage to be had when it comes to files these days. Hell, I take roughly 400 GB of H.D.D. space, so I know where it is that you're coming from. If I were to buy 400 GB of SSD space, it would cost me roughly... Carry the 5, minus the 12... a whopping $1120 dollars, which is exactly why I hope that in a year's time, that price will come down considerably. Oh, and that $1000 dollar mark is only assuming I never plan to install anything else on my computer, except for what I have now. At either rate, I am a tech. enthusiast, but if push comes to shove, I'll simply buy a SSD for my Windows drive, and put the rest of my games, etc, on a regular 1TB drive. Although, I hope it doesn't come to that, as pushing forward to an all-state SSD system would be nice.
Connect with MaximumPC
Featured Content
The gang discusses the GTX 690, Trinity, Ivy Bridge, Amazon, big-box stores, MMOs,...
This month's issue
Feature
Build a PC On Any Budget
Feature
Cloud Services Showdown
How-To
Encrypt Your External Drive
Build It
Upgrade an X58 Rig
Most Commented Articles
Latest Max PC Tweets
- maximumpc: Original RickRoll Video Returns to YouTube After 24-Hour Copyright Hiatus http://t.co/MaH9Sxyy1 day 18 hours ago
- maximumpc: Corsair has decided not to go forward with its $78 million IPO, citing weak equity market conditions http://t.co/A5a4DAzj1 day 18 hours ago
- maximumpc: Want to work at Maximum PC? Our Online Managing Editor, Alex, is moving away, so we need a new one. http://t.co/9Z7JCh0E3 days 15 hours ago
