Solid state drives. Why so expensive?

One of my 500GB hard drives is starting to sound unhealthy so I thought it's about time to buy another to transfer the data on to. So I start to take a look at a Solid state drive. Holly shit, these things are expensive. For the price of a 64GB solid state I bought a 1TB portable hard drive. Why are solid state drives so expensive? I can but USB sticks to the same size for a fraction of the price? Is there something I'm not understanding about SD? I thought the were basically like a massive USB stick or SD card.

 

SSDs use memory that are many times faster than the flash used in SD cards and USB sticks. Prices have come down incredibly in recent years as scales of economy have begun to bring production levels up.

 

For the price better off getting 6Gb/s hard disks than solid state.

 

I think it won't take very until prices decrease more. 128GB SSDs used to be MUCH more expensive 3 years ago. What really bugs me are the prices for 2-3TB harddrives. They just seem to never go down anymore, and the HDD's don't get bigger either! I bought a 2TB HDD three years ago for $80, and nowadays it's still the exact same price for the same capacity!!

 

SSDs are still more expensive per the amount of storage they offer compared to HDDs, but they've gotten cheaper in the past few years and will probably continue to get cheaper in the future. If you've never used an SSD, here's what's good about them: everything loads faster. The system boots/wakes from sleep/shuts down faster than with an HDD. Programs load faster, documents and files load faster, games have shorter loading times. It doesn't affect things that require a lot of CPU or GPU power.

In my current setup, I have my OS and all of my programs on a 240GB SSD, and I keep all of my documents and files on a separate 1TB HDD. I'd never done this before buying an SSD, but it's probably a good practice anyway; if your important files are on a separate HDD and your OS becomes corrupted or fails for whatever reason, all of your data should be intact.

You're right that they are basically like big USB sticks. They use flash memory to store data, rather than a magnetic disc as in traditional hard drives. The motherboard treats them exactly like HDDs. They generally use SATA (or PCIe in some cases) rather than USB. Like APE said, they're generally faster than USB sticks. Although some of the newer USB 3.0 flash drives are pretty fast as well.

 

They are expensive but worth the investment, you shave quite a lot of loading time overall. Most people use SSDs for storing the OS and programs. It's just not cost effective for anything else IMHO at the consumer level. It's great for audio when you have 5-6 GB of plugin samples to load up in a Digital Audio Workstation, it does it in a 1/4 of the time in my case compared to a classic spinning HDD.

My setup:

OS Drive 256GB SSD
Data Drive 1TB SATA HDD
Backup 2 x 500GB SATA HDD in RAID 1
2TB on a NAS for media stuff ie iTunes server

You can get a 240GB SSD sub-£100 now in the UK (http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/partspecs.aspx?imodule=CT240M500SSD1) not the best but not the worst either. How much are they in Japan?

 

They're about £100 for a 250gb Samsung ssd here but when you think like I do, 250gb ssd or 2tb HDD for pretty much the same cash it really doesn't look good for value for money even if it is faster. Maybe in the future I'll get a small 64gb ssd just for the OS and programs as that would be handy but for mass storage (which I was planning) they're still way too much

 

That's what I was thinking about too, just speed up my OS load times. I have a really crap Hitachi 1TB for my OS it's fucking slow.

 

Check out intel rapid storage. You can use a cheaper 64gg ss as cache on a normal sata drive.

 

It depends on your usage, you can get away with a 64gb easily, although 128gb is not that much more expensive. I took 256gb as I had a good deal on a Sandisk and because one of the programs I use for music require 40gb for installation, another is 20gb... Add Windows 8 + other apps and a couple of games, I've only got 90gb left already and I'm reasonably tidy x) Plus I needed to plan for usage growth.

For what I do in music, not waiting for Windows, programs and plugins to load-up is a big plus. I'm ready to record within 2 minutes instead of 7-10 minutes in the past and that includes picking the guitar or bass, turn on my guitar processor, sit down and breath

Finally I wouldn't use SSDs for long term storage because:

a. it's prohibitive
b. some people argue that their lifespan is shorter than spinning disk (to be verified)
c. I don't need fast data access for everything

Over time when price decreases and we have more information on their lifespan, I might switch fully.

But anyhow for today, I think it's one of the best upgrades you can do to your PC. Plus it allows you to separate OS and data if currently you only have one disk. Always a plus in case of Wincrash.

 

The flash used in SSDs is exactly the same as flash used in SD cards and USB sticks. The difference is that SSD controllers operate on many flash simultaneously to get very high throughput, and allegedly have better wear management.

-more physical flash chips for the same capacity = more expensive
-more expensive controllers, interface hardware, connectors, PCB, enclosure
-purchased or licensed controllers instead of in-house
-still a niche market (evident because drive manufacturers aren't designing their own controllers)

They're priced at a sweet spot to maximize profit. Prices (on modest SSDs) will continue to fall as flash densities grow and SSD approaches ubiquity.

 

In 2011 floods in Thailand caused a major shortage of HDD production, which in turn, increased prices dramatically. Almost a 30% to 45% difference if I recall correctly. It was only until recently that prices started matching pre-flood levels. So It will take a bit more time before prices start plummeting again, as normally happens for storage media.

 

Got a spare $514.92? This: http://www.geekstuff4u.com/microsd-ssdx10-creator-kit.html

Combined with this: http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-micro...8&qid=1395958159&sr=8-1&keywords=64gb+microsd

Makes for a 640gb SSD.

Even now prices aren't completely normalized which is sad. I have to wonder if the prices weren't kept somewhat higher just to capitalize on the profit margins but I've got absolutely no proof of this.

 

$515 for a slow and unreliable (those MicroSD sockets aren't that good, sometimes you have to re-insert the card, and cards itself can fail) SSD?
Waaaaaaaaaaay too much. it's easier to use 128G SSD for read-only OS parts (more than enough for full linux distro installation, but show me the guy who will install everything, not to mention any windows or OS X version) and conventional HDDs for the rest. 515= 5x3Tb = a lot of disk space.

 

Is that Micro SD ssd kit using some kind of RAID? I thought Raid and SSD's/flash memory was still a bit of a no-no

 

It's most likely a SPAN. Also, RAID SSDs are currently used all around the world in servers these days without any problems.

 

I don't know if Windows or Linux have this feature (I think they do), but Mac OS X has a feature where you can specify a folder on any drive to use as the home directory. And once you do that, the Finder and every part of the OS that has to do with file browsing uses that folder to store files - and it treats them exactly as if they were on the same drive as the OS. So, for example, if you open Finder and go to Movies or Pictures or Music, you'll be taken to that folder on the drive you specified. Also, files are automatically downloaded to the Downloads folder on the drive. The OS and all of the Applications are still stored on the root drive. So this is very useful if you have an SSD/HDD combination; it allows you to seamlessly integrate them. Like I said, I'm not sure if Windows or Linux have this feature, but newer versions probably do.

Even with the OS and lots of large Applications installed, my OS X partition only takes up about 50GB. So a 128GB drive is more than sufficient for that. A 64GB drive would be pushing it, but would probably work.

 

Yes, In linux you can do this. Except you can link any file or directory from any location. Even inside another folder that just contains links... Even if those links go back to the original! (though I dunno why you would want to loop).

 

apologies for my late night brain fart, I put 2 SSD's into RAID0 the other week so should have been aware.