Gartner sees SSDs costing $1 per gigabyte in 2012
updated 04:30 pm EDT, Wed May 11, 2011
Small, efficient footprint help them go mainstream
Gartner, an industry market research firm covering the computer and IT market, predicts that prices for SSD (Solid State Drive) storage drives will drop below $1 per gigabyte in the second half of 2012. That's about 1/2 of current prices. SSDs, which use NAND flash technology are smaller, more power efficient and faster than conventional hard drives, but their high price and smaller capacities have limited their attractiveness to the consumer market. A traditional hard drive has capacity of up to 3TB, for which prices can be as low as 5-cents per gigabyte.
Gartner also believes that falling prices will help SSDs become mainstays for storage in consumer PCs and tablets. Already, SSDs are finding their way into laptops such as the Apple MacBook Air and Dell Adamo series.
SSD's high pricing has usually limited their application to systems with little storage and slower processors. [via CrunchGear]
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Aug 2001
Huh?
"SSD's high pricing has usually limited their application to systems with little storage and slower processors"? Say what?
I was under the impression that their high price had limited them to extremely HIGH-end systems with little storage. I'm not aware of anything, other than ultracompacts or iDevices (which only use slower processors because they're physically tiny; they're actually fast CPUs given the size), that uses an SSD that isn't very high end.
Certainly, when it comes to aftermarket parts, nobody is buying an SSD unless they're a performance junkie, in which case a slower processor is the last thing they want. I certainly didn't pay almost $3/GB for a 500MB/s SSD to stick it in a computer with a slow processor.