Last Updated on July 15, 2017 by Dave Farquhar
It’s not news to my regular readers that SSD pricing continues to drop, but Computerworld noticed that this week.
Everyday pricing is well around 90 cents per gigabyte now, and with some shopping around, it’s possible to do better than that.
The article cited several factors, including decreasing prices for flash memory and increased competition from Samsung. More importantly, the price of larger-capacity drives has dropped. Traditionally, we’ve generally paid a premium for the highest-capacity drives, which was something that was bound to change eventually. The difference between a 64 GB drive and a 512 GB drive is the number of memory chips on the board; the cost of the controller, the board, and the rest of the circuitry is constant. You’re paying $15-$25 for the board and controller no matter how many memory chips the manufacturer puts on the board. Right now a 64 GB Crucial M4 costs $72, and a 512 GB drive costs $389.
The article also stated that OCZ drives have reliability issues, which reflects what a Micro Center technician told me earlier this year.
Prices will continue to drop over time. Eventually SSDs will be cheaper than hard drives.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.