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512GB SSDs' Price-Per-GB Estimated To Fall Below $0.1 and Hit an All-Time Low This Year End (trendforce.com) 138

Posted by msmash from the about-time dept.
According to research by DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, the NAND flash industry this year is clearly exhibiting signs of oversupply, and SSD suppliers have gotten themselves into a price war, causing SSD prices for PC OEMs to take a dive. From a post: Average contract prices for 512GB and 1TB SSDs have a chance to plunge below $0.1 per GB by the end of this year, hitting an all-time low. This change will cause 512GB SSDs to replace their 128GB counterparts and become market mainstream, second only to 256GB SSDs. We may also look forward to PCIe SSDs achieving 50% market penetration, since PCIe SSDs and SATA SSDS are nearly identical in price.

TrendForce points out that SSD adoption among notebooks had already come above the 50% threshold in 2018. Contract prices for mainstream 128/256/512GB SSDs have fallen a long way by over 50% since peaking in 2017, and those for 512GB and 1TB SSDs have a chance to fall below US$0.1 per GB by year-end. This will stimulate demand from those seeking to replace their 500GB and 1TB HDDs. SSD adoption rate is expected to land between 60 and 65% in 2019. According to TrendForce's latest investigations, 2Q19 marks the 6th consecutive quarter of average contract price decline for mainstream PC-Client OEM SSDs, with the average contract price for SATA SSDs falling QoQ by 15-26%, and PCIe SSDs by 16-37%.
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512GB SSDs' Price-Per-GB Estimated To Fall Below $0.1 and Hit an All-Time Low This Year End More

512GB SSDs' Price-Per-GB Estimated To Fall Below $0.1 and Hit an All-Time Low This Year End

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  • You can say "ten cents" you know.

  • The price per Gigabyte, per Ghz, per MIPS... Have been going down.

    That is why In my pocket I am carrying a device orders of magnitudes more powerful in nearly every spec then the full sized PC that I used back during my undergrad 20+ years ago.
    And I had calculated that my current Home Laptop is 1000x more powerful then the computer I used in college. And I still paid less for it then that PC.

    • Re:What do you mean the cost of technology is drop (Score:5, Informative)

      by darkain ( 749283 ) on Thursday May 09, 2019 @03:08PM (#58565150) Homepage

      The actual news is that the flash market is crashing right now, prices are falling significantly faster than pretty much any other time in history for flash storage.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        Only in the sense that they've been artificially limiting supply to keep the prices ridiculously high as well as magnetic storage in the regular mix for years and are finally granting us this boon.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ooshna ( 1654125 )

          I remember years ago their was some sort of natural disaster that took out a few of the really big HDD factories and caused prices to rise and price drops after slowed to a crawl. I believe it was flooding but I can't say for certain.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by edwdig ( 47888 )

          They weren't keeping the prices artificially high.

          The smartphone market kept growing and growing, and phone specs were increasing rapidly for a while. Phones ate up a ton of the manufacturing capacity for RAM and flash memory. Now that almost everyone has a smartphone, and they're replacing them less frequently, there's way less demand for phone parts. We're finally seeing much greater supply than demand, so prices are going down.

          As for hard drives, there was flooding a few years ago that wiped out some of

        • Only in the sense that they've been artificially limiting supply to keep the prices ridiculously high as well as magnetic storage in the regular mix for years and are finally granting us this boon.

          This is pattern going back to the 80s. The prices of RAM, at the retail level especially, has on occasion hit a price floor (even slight increases at time) and stayed there for a year or more, followed by a sharp drop to take us back to the trend-line. Although genuine supply problems may be involved (e.g. Asian plants flooding) and so forth, it is always also an exploitation of opportunity to squeeze out higher profit. I don't know that the industry has ever actually engineered a shortage, but they do exte

      • That's right. We're heading toward... wait for it... a flash sale of flash drives.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by qubezz ( 520511 )
        Really, all technology pricing, along with progress in specification, has been stagnant for about four years before this final relaxation in SSD - starting only around last November. The 256GB Samsung 850 Pro that I bought in 2015 for $99 was never that low again for four more years.

        Repeating that trend for HDD was the "flood", where hard drives were never that price again for another four years, and capacity was stagnant at 2TB for a long time before finally creeping ahead.

        30-15 years ago, your compu

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hodr ( 219920 )

      Deus Ex and Counter Strike came out 20 years ago. I seriously doubt your laptop is capable of running 1000 concurrent VMs each running one of these games. In fact, I doubt it could do more than a couple.

      Or is your 1000x metric based on some new hardware acceleration for an old CODEC or AES encryption or somesuch, and not 1000x the actual general performance.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        He did say "20+"...

        If I think back to the end of my college days 23 years ago, my fast PC was a 486DX4/100 (a 99-100 MHz core) that was able to issue approximately 1 op per cycle on its single core.

        Let's compare this to a contemporary ultrabook cpu like i5-8265U. It has a base frequency of 1.6 GHz and can issue up to 6 ops per cycle per core. As a quad core, that is 384x faster than the 486DX4. If we consider the max 4-core turbo frequency of 3.7 GHz, that is 888x the speed.

        If we consider numerical computin

      • The one thing that probably has increased by 1000x though is the capacity/$ of solid state storage like SSD's. The Rio PMP 300 mp3 player (Sep 1998) had 32 MB(!) of storage. Now a 32 GB microSD card is $8.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sconeu ( 64226 )

      And I had calculated that my current Home Laptop is 1000x more powerful then the computer I used in college. And I still paid less for it then that PC.

      About 10 years or so ago, my wife bought me a EEEpc 900. For about $250.

      Compared to the $10K departmental Unix server my office bought in the early 90s, it had 100x CPU clock (2GHz vs 33MHz), 100x RAM (4GB vs 32MB) and 4x storage (4GB vs 1GB).

    • The real news is then vs than .... several times in one post. GD&R

    • Yes. But the pace of dropping has slowed or stopped. Most likely the device you are carrying now will have about the same capability as the one you will have 10 years from now.

  • How much does it cost to make these drives?

    512 is a pretty good size for tablets ans chromebooks.

  • They make good LVM cache devices. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    $ man 7 lvmcache

    You can use a small (I have a 512 GB) SSD as a fast cache to a bigger amount of rust based storage. LVM will migrate your commonly used data onto the SSD and dynamically manage it so you can have the performance benefits of the SSD coupled to the size benefits of rust storage.

    Best of both worlds and it is painless after you set it up. Even setting it up is easy enough in LVM.

    • I'd rather use bcache for this.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I wouldn't. I ran bcache for a long time. It is a huge pain in the rear end compared to lvmcache.

        lvmcache is much more polished and integrates more seamlessly than bcache. It's trivial to add and remove, unlike bcache. It's overall just a much easier thing to deal with.

  • Pretty Close Already (Score:5, Interesting)

    by b0bby ( 201198 ) on Thursday May 09, 2019 @03:27PM (#58565264)

    Since I just ordered a 512GB SATA SSD for $57 including shipping, I'd say for the end user we're pretty much almost there already. You can get some deals on 2TB SSDs under $200 now too, which kind of blows my mind. Not that I'm old or anything.

  • And Apple's price-setting team said.... (Score:3)

    by chrism238 ( 657741 ) on Thursday May 09, 2019 @03:29PM (#58565276)
    Move along; nothing to see here.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      Yeah, don't worry... we can still count on Apple to give you 1 TB of spinning rust at 5400 RPM as the default option, and charge for $600 to upgrade that to an SSD of that same size.

    • After replacing an and HDD with an SSD on a imac this week, I don't think they need to worry much about people replacing hard driver.The process involved un-gluing the front panel (LCD sceen) with a special tool and suction cups and then re-gluing everything. It was a long, fiddly, delicate process which if not done correctly could have resulted in the screen cracking. Not something I want to do again any time soon. Basically they make it way more work than it needs to be, probably to get people to upgrade
  • I always cringe now when I see a great looking computer or laptop using a hard drive. I imagine the only people still buying computers with the OS on a hard drive instead of a SSD are people who don't know the difference and clearly didn't spend any time researching.

    • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 )

      If they weren't artificially limiting supply (hence calling the price dropping "oversupply" like someone fucked up) we'd be talking about price per TB instead of GB.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shaitan ( 22585 )

        I'll grant they've got things covered. There is definitely a group who leverage mod points to attack anyone who points this out.

        https://www.networkworld.com/article/2267770/first-512gb-ssd-drive-offered-for-sale.html
        https://www.computerworld.com/article/2494482/micron-unveils-its-first-1tb-ssd----for-under--600.html

        Why you might rightly asked is something that was shipped to consumers over 10 years ago even sellable? Not a car but tech, which should be shifting from enterprise to high gaming in 3 years and

    • I always cringe now when I see a great looking computer or laptop using a hard drive. I imagine the only people still buying computers with the OS on a hard drive instead of a SSD are people who don't know the difference and clearly didn't spend any time researching.

      It's often cheaper to buy a laptop with a HD and clone it to an inexpensive SSD than to buy it with the same size SSD from the outset.

    • Re:Should have happened years ago (Score:5, Informative)

      by goose-incarnated ( 1145029 ) on Thursday May 09, 2019 @05:09PM (#58565926) Journal

      I always cringe now when I see a great looking computer or laptop using a hard drive. I imagine the only people still buying computers with the OS on a hard drive instead of a SSD are people who don't know the difference and clearly didn't spend any time researching.

      You cringe because you don't know enough. Not to worry, I'm here to alleviate your ignorance: the movie watching, web-browsing, email-reading and instant-messaging experience for those people is not improved by spending 4x more on a hard-drive.

      It doesn't matter how fast your hard drive is: the movie will still play at the same speed. It doesn't matter how fast your hard drive is, the web pages will still load at the same speed. It doesn't matter how fast the hard drive is, the emails will still download at the same speed.

      Sure, it takes longer to start, but they only start it once a day, and yes, it takes longer to open Office, but after the first document, the remaining for the rest of the day open immediately anyway.

      It's hard for office users to justify spending 4x the money on a hard-drive when any slowdown on their computer is more likely to be because of RAM, CPU or network speeds.

      Of the dozen or so people who I moved to SSDs for the OS, only one of them commented that the computer was faster. The others said bootup was faster, everything else was more or less the same.

      Most users don't notice that what used to take 500ms now takes 100ms.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Nope. Windows still performs like trash when the disk latency is high. Things start blocking that really shouldn't block. A quick AV scan, an indexing run or an automatic backup in the background will make your video stutter, and your web browser hang.
        I just bought a decently spec'd Dell Inspiron for a family member at Christmas. The damn thing was slow as a dog for up to twenty minutes, and opening a browser or video player was absolutely painful. Plus things would randomly hang for up for a second or two,

      • It doesn't matter how fast your hard drive is: the movie will still play at the same speed. It doesn't matter how fast your hard drive is, the web pages will still load at the same speed. It doesn't matter how fast the hard drive is, the emails will still download at the same speed.

        Agreed with your comments on the mostly equivalent performance of HDD vs SSD aside from bootup and initial application startup times. A big reason for this equivalence is relatively cheap DRAM that makes large disk caches possible. That means that applications are mostly running from DRAM after the initial startup except for those applications with read/write disk access that isn't hidden by the disk cache.

        That being said, although HDD prices per GB for large devices will be significantly cheaper than SSD

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Agret ( 752467 )
        On a desktop using a relatively new 7200RPM hard drive this is often the case, on a laptop with a 5400RPM drive there is a massive difference. The single biggest upgrade you can do to a computer in terms of speed/usability is to replace the mechanical drive with a solid state drive. Things like clicking onto explorer and navigating to a folder can take ages while the computer is doing updates/av scans/indexing in the background. Clicking into outlook or chrome can take well over 30 seconds to fully load up
      • But a simple thing like a virus scanner or search indexer will totally destroy performance on a laptop with an HDD, even for just loading up a browser or web browser. And if you fill up the RAM and start swapping onto an HDD, heaven help you.

        My wife is a teacher and they're still using 2013 macbooks, they're awful, they just sit there with the beach ball while the drive spins half the time.

      • The real reason a faster disk/SSD may not matter is amdahl's law. The local storage is the weakest link / slowest piece of the pipeline - compared to CPU, DRAM, Network. Just making it faster a bit (or twice) doesn't solve your overall experience. If the system is hit by huge IO delays, you have a higher system problem - algorithmic complexity. eg chrome has a cpl of dozen windows/tabs and all are writing into disk say for maintaining local cache. The right solution here is just close some tabs/windows and

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Yes but moving from a typical laptop HDD to a SSD isn't just making it a bit faster - and it's not the data throughput that really matters, it's the latency and IOPS, especially if you have several processes each wanting to access a significant number of files. The resultant head seek thrashing will bog down any rotating drive: the SSD won't even notice. It's always going to be most effective to attack the bottleneck, and the old mechanical HDD seek time is the bottleneck by a country mile.

      • That is laughably wrong, except for the poor people stuck on HDDs are not laughing.

        Your movie may play at the same speed, but web pages most definitely show a difference, especially when the computer fetches half of it from the disk cache. Emails still download the same? I'm not sure about you but the time it takes to open outlook is significantly longer than the time it takes for emails to display. You are right, users won't notice a difference for something there, but it's not at all what you think.

        Office

  • QLC NAND had a hand in that as well (Score:4, Insightful)

    by JoeyRox ( 2711699 ) on Thursday May 09, 2019 @03:43PM (#58565410)
    QLC has higher density and thus lower cost, and is helping to drive prices down even for better MLC drives. I personally would never touch QLC because its lifetime write cycle count is just a bit low for my tastes.

    • Re:QLC NAND had a hand in that as well (Score:5, Informative)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Thursday May 09, 2019 @04:05PM (#58565520)
      Overall write endurance capacity is the product of (write endurance cycles) x (drive capacity). QLC write endurance is roughly 1/3 that of TLC write endurance (1000 vs 3000 cycles [neweggbusiness.com]). But SSD capacities have increased significantly. So if you upgrade from the 256 GB TLC SSD you bought two years ago, to a 1 TB QLC SSD, you've actually gained total write endurance capacity, not lost it.

      And for most consumer use with modern capacity SSDs, the write endurance should give you decades to over a century of use before cells start to die. The fuss over P/E cycles and write endurance is a carryover from the days back when SSDs were only 16 to 32 GB in size, which just won't go away because people reading old web pages keep repeating the outdated information. When I sold my laptop with a 3 year old 512 GB Samsung 860 EVO, there had been a total of 5.1 TB of data written to it. I did a lot of video encoding on that drive, so it was actually pretty heavily used. That drive is rated for a total of 300 TB of lifetime writes, so at my usage rate it would've taken 176 years to hit the TBW rating.
      • Fair points, and I didn't mean to imply QLC doesn't have a place in the market. They're perfectly fine for a majority of usage cases. But for anyone who generates a lot of data, particularly content generation, their write count is just too low. As you said, capacities have expanded, which by itself reduces wear per cell, except when your data use has expanded along with that capacity.

      • the write endurance should give you decades to over a century of use before cells start to die.

        The way I position that to our IT department's budgeting group is, "If you buy this drive, you can move it from machine to machine, and under very heavy use, it will outlive the end-user. Under normal use, it will outlive their children." Now if they only failed read-only to handle the exceptions.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Wolfrider ( 856 )

          > Now if they only failed read-only to handle the exceptions

          --I know, right? Don't care how fast they are, don't care how cheap they can make them, I care about how RELIABLE they are. And if it starts dying, can I get my data off it. Regular backups are important, but geez - write endurance has been coming further and further down with each new generation of SSD tech. It's like a race to the bottom.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Don't forget that there is also over-provisioning. A QLC drive with a decent amount of over-provisioned space may actually last longer than a TLC drive with less spare blocks.

        This is a common strategy for getting costs down while keeping reliability up, or even improving it. Automotive batteries are similar - the cheapest ones are pouch cells that are a little less durable than cylindrical cells, but they are so much cheaper and more energy dense it's possible to simply over-provision them and end up with a

    • I personally would never touch QLC because its lifetime write cycle count is just a bit low for my tastes.

      What is it you do? Run your compiler all day? Duplicate and delete data just for fun? Outside of a production house you'll find that QLC write cycle count won't impact any normal computer users.

      That's before you even get into how incorrect your blanket statement is. Let's just look at current generation drives shall we:
      Samsung 970 EVO 1TB write endurance 600TBW
      Samsung 860 QVO 1TB write endurance 360TBW

      You were right, except where you were wrong. You see for the price of a 1TB QLC drive you can only get a 50

  • I am thrilled that SSD prices have come down, but they are still 5x more expensive per GB than HDD. It is much better than the 10x it has been for several years, but it still doesn't come close if you have many TB of data to store. The good news is that prices now make it affordable to buy SSDs in large enough capacity that you can put way more than the OS and a few apps on it. My next computer will probably have a 1TB m.2 NVMe SSD that can read more than 3000 MB/sec.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xjerky ( 128399 )

      I'm wondering about replacing my NAS drives with SSD at this point, for lower power consumption and noise.

      • I'm wondering about replacing my NAS drives with SSD at this point, for lower power consumption and noise.

        You have a little NAS then. I have 6TB and 10TB drives in mine. There's no discussion to be had about SSDs for quite some time to come. Flash memory manufacturers REALLY don't want to give up the gravy train.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by xjerky ( 128399 )

          I do, actually. it's a 6TB array built 5 years ago made of 1.8TB and 2.7 TB drives, and I still have 1TB free.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I am thrilled that SSD prices have come down, but they are still 5x more expensive per GB than HDD.

      Not really. Not if you are comparing with a HDD with the same latency and throughput.
      If storage capacity to price was the only thing that mattered we would be using tapes.

  • Based on this, I am curious how long before Apple starts charging reasonable prices for storage in the their MacBooks?

  • Micro Center has Inland SSD on sale - $48 for 480GB and $90 for 1TB

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