

SSDs cost half of what they did in 2011 - vasili
http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/index/~3/j1XNJ40m48I/

======
cbsmith
Interesting comment about the minimum size of flash storage being 18nm here:
[http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/why-ssds-cost-half-
of...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/why-ssds-cost-half-of-what-they-
did-
in-2011/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+arstechnica%2Findex+%28Ars+Technica+-+All+content%29)

Can anyone provide more information on the nature of that limitation?

I did find reference to this article from 2 years ago:
[http://features.techworld.com/storage/3211959/is-nand-
flash-...](http://features.techworld.com/storage/3211959/is-nand-flash-memory-
a-dying-technology/)

It just seems like it's talking about the usual ongoing issue of, "we're near
the cutting edge of lithography techniques", but that's kind of a given (you
always build on the best lithography method that can scale, which tends to be
fairly close to the best lithography method period). We've been in a similar
state for CPU's and RAM for decades now. Is there something different about
SSD's?

~~~
reitzensteinm
It's different this time (and I cringe saying that), because we're rapidly
approaching fundamental limits to scaling down silicon.

The concerns in the past have been mainly to do with lithography; eg, when the
feature size of the silicon went below the wavelength of the light we were
using, we had to make masks that utilized difference patterns. This is a mere
manufacturing problem.

But now we're getting to fundamental limits. Even if we had the ability to
place the atoms however we wanted them, there's an intrinsic limit. You can't
make a transistor out of half an atom.

We already hit a wall with frequency; for the longest time, it looked like
speeds would go up and up. It's not an apples to apples comparison, because
the Pentium 4 had a long pipeline, but a 3.8ghz Prescott was released in 2005
- which is exactly the maximum turbo frequency of the 2011 Sandy Bridge 2600k
I'm typing this now on. Ivy has it beaten by just 100mhz.

Now, that's not to say that computation will stop progressing. But it's not
going to look like last year's CPU just smaller for much longer; some pretty
fundamental changes are going to have to be made. Dynamically reconfiguring
memristor circuits are what excites me, but it's just as likely to be
something else instead.

As far as flash memory in particular goes, I'm no expert, but cell durability
is falling substantially with each shrink (on average; Intel bucked the trend
with their 25nm flash), and so the usable limit to feature size may come more
quickly than with standard transistors.

But the industry has managed to push through walls that seemed just as
intrinsic before, so I wouldn't bet my life savings on it.

~~~
davidb_
> We already hit a wall with frequency

This is true, but the way you wrote it ignores the fundamental problem - it's
not we can't make transistors switch any quicker, it's that doing so causes
such an increase in temperature that we risk damaging the device. That's why
you can read about overclockers using things like liquid nitrogen to run chips
at 8 GHz.

Cooling mechanisms like microchannel cold plates and, as we continue with
3D-ICs, interlayer cooling, can allow for higher frequencies.

~~~
reitzensteinm
I don't think better heat extraction would really change that much for today's
CPUs (certainly when we head towards 3D chips it will become critical).

Gate delays are smaller at low temperatures; those LN2 overclocking runs
aren't just fast because of efficient heat dissipation from the CPU, they're
fast because the chip is being actively cooled to below room temperature.

So while heat dissipation is a factor, we're also close to the electrical
limits as well. Otherwise water cooling (replacing the stock heat spreader)
would get closer to LN2 runs. ALUs run at higher frequencies than the rest of
the chip, but they're designed to do so (you'd have to shorten the gate
pathways like a P4 to do that to the entire chip).

But ultimately, performance per watt is almost universally optimised for these
days. It's critical in servers, laptops, mobile phones - The demand for 6ghz,
300W CPUs would be limited to workstation chips, even though we could probably
engineer them to be reliable.

Power consumption is always going to increase super linearly with respect to
frequency, probably as a fundamental property of any method of computation we
use.

------
fletchowns
Here's a nice table of SSD prices on Newegg:
<http://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/ssd/>

SSD is definitely one of the best upgrades I've ever purchased for a computer.

------
polshaw
What I would like to know is what are the expected future prices? Are they
expected to continue to fall, level off, or is this expected to be a temporary
low?

------
chmars
Has anyone data on the price development of Apple SSDs?

Since newer Macs doesn't allow for an SSD change, the initial SSD price is
very important. I suspect that the fact that you have to max out your SSD on
purchase if you want to use your Mac for a longer time, SSDs in Macs have
actually become more expensive.

In the past, you could buy a Mac with a small SSD or even a HDD. After one or
two years, you could replace your small SSD or your HDD with an up-to-date SSD
and could usually benefit from lower storage prices …

~~~
listic
Which newer Macs do you have in mind?

~~~
chmars
MacBook Air and the latest MacBook Pro with Retina display and of course the
iMac.

For iMac and MacBook Air, upgrade options are available but they are pricey
and non-trivial.

------
mgkimsal
As someone who bit the bullet and bought at 256g SSD in January, yes, I've
noticed this rather dramatic drop recently. I paid about $420, and could get a
512 gig for $399, IIRC, going by last week's pricing. Ugh.

I wished I'd waited a bit, as switching _again_ to a 512 would be... I dunno -
not sure if it would be worth it again, but I _am_ running out of room a lot
on a 256.

~~~
hnwh
Where did you find a 512 for $399? I haven't seen anything near that

~~~
mgkimsal
Yes, as the other poster said, it's crucial:

[http://www.compusa.com/applications/SearchTools/search.asp?k...](http://www.compusa.com/applications/SearchTools/search.asp?keywords=512+ssd)

But others manufacturers sub 500g are coming down:
[http://www.compusa.com/applications/Category/guidedSearch.as...](http://www.compusa.com/applications/Category/guidedSearch.asp?CatId=5298&srkey=ssd)

------
jpxxx
The perceptual performance increase from a SSD in a laptop or a desktop is
tremendous, and there's no going back once you make the leap. Hopefully, HDDs
will shortly follow DVD-ROMs down the memory hole for portables.

~~~
listic
Yo say it like you hate having an option to have either. I like options.

------
stcredzero
SSDs bring a different set of assumptions to the table than spinning hard
drives. What would an OS designed from the ground up in the world of SSDs and
the cloud look like?

~~~
spamizbad
SSDs are fast, but they're still orders of magnitude slower than RAM in terms
of latency. Keep in mind, back in the day, the spread between dram and
spinning disks wasnt as bad as it is today.

The next great performance challenge may be the so-called "memory wall" wrt
the performance of CPUs vs the performance of RAM. Id be curious to see what
that would do to performance if it underwent the same dramatic improvement as
nonvolatile storage.

~~~
reitzensteinm
We may actually see them both happening at once; one of the things R. Stanley
Williams talks about in his excellent memristor talk is a method they
developed for stacking hundreds of chips on top of a processor, which he says
may end up providing just as much benefit as the memristor itself.

The possibilities that could be opened up by having a terabyte or more of
extremely fast non volatile storage attached by a bus as large as you care to
make it directly on top of a CPU are mind boggling.

Then when you consider that you can use them as FPGAs for computation instead
and dynamically reconfigure them... wow.

Memristors are only a year or two away from commercial availability, though it
will probably be a while after that until they live up to the hype. We live in
exciting times.

The talk:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY>

------
tjoff
And harddrives cost exactly the same as they did in 2011 (probably depends on
which drive you look at, a 3 TB drive cost about the same and a 4 TB drive
costs more now).

[http://www.isuppli.com/Memory-and-Storage/News/Pages/Hard-
Di...](http://www.isuppli.com/Memory-and-Storage/News/Pages/Hard-Disk-Drive-
Prices-Not-Expected-to-Return-to-Pre-Flood-Levels-Until-2014.aspx)

------
velodrome
Where are Seagate and WD SSDs in the market? Why are they sitting on the
sidelines while Intel, Samsung, and smaller players eat up market share?

~~~
wmf
Classic innovator's dilemma.

(They actually have SSDs, but they're not competitive in the consumer market.
See [http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/solid-state-
hybr...](http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/solid-state-hybrid/) and
<http://wd.com/en/products/solidstate/embedded/> )

------
BlackNapoleon
And they're still too expensive.

Getting a rMBPro with 768GB is $1000 more than the 512 option. Thats just
absurd

~~~
janardanyri
Apple charges way more than market rate for storage and memory upgrades. A
stick of memory that costs $40 on Newegg might cost $200 from Apple.

In the past the sensible option was to buy a Macbook with stock memory /
storage and upgrade it yourself, but of course that's no longer possible with
the rMBP. Still, that says no more about the actual cost of SSDs than the
price of a hotel room says about beds. :)

~~~
barlo
I love this analogy

------
nirvana
It seems flash drives go for about $1 a gigabyte or less. If the prices drop
in half twice more they will be down to the $0.25/gigabyte I was paying for
hard drives when I first started tracking prices in 2008. At that time, SSDs
were $9.38 per gigabyte.

------
wavephorm
So where's my 1TB solid state disk to replace the 256GB one I've been using in
my laptop for 3 years now? It seems as though all innovation in storage
stopped in 2009, and we've been coasting ever since. And don't even mention
there's still no 4TB hard disks. My blu-ray rip collection isn't getting any
smaller and our storage systems aren't getting better anywhere near fast
enough.

~~~
wtallis
You don't need a solid-state drive for your movies. That's just wasteful.
Mechanical hard drives are fine for data that will only be read, and only
sequentially. Plus, they're still 10x cheaper, even given the currently
inflated hard drive prices and record low SSD prices. There simply isn't a
market for a 1TB consumer SSD. What you're really looking for is a hybrid
drive with 64+ GB of Flash.

EDIT: Also, at the end of 2009, TRIM support was just hitting the market, and
SandForce-based drives were just being announced. Since then, TRIM has become
universal, as has 6Gbps SATA support, and most controllers have been through
at least one other iteration. SSD caching has also hit the market in a variety
of forms.

~~~
BlackNapoleon
Excuse me, but some of us don't like carrying around externals with our main
laptops because we happen to have more than 100 songs in itunes.

~~~
wtallis
Hence, hybrid drives. Better yet, save yourself some money by ripping out the
optical drive in your laptop and use that space for a second internal drive.

