# Why are SSD drives taking so long to come down in price?



## gsilbers (Dec 23, 2019)

imma right?! damn still small and expensive. 
whats your conspiracy theory? or real reason i guess 

i think these companies are price hoarding it... some oligopoly thing going on or something.


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## jononotbono (Dec 23, 2019)

Because most people don't need them. They literally need loads of storage to hold all of their illegally downloaded Films and Music and therefore don't care about paying loads of money for something that gives them less storage. No Tin Foil hat needed for this one.


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## erica-grace (Dec 23, 2019)

jononotbono said:


> Because most people don't need them. They literally need loads of storage to hold all of their illegally downloaded Films and Music and therefore don't care about paying loads of money for something that gives them less storage. No Tin Foil hat needed for this one.



You may have a point there, unfortunately.

Supply and demand, I guess?


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## Joakim (Dec 23, 2019)

What are you talking about? Every single graph you find on the subject shows a strong downtrend. Today I can get a 2TB SSD cheaper than I bought my first 256GB SSD for.


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## jononotbono (Dec 23, 2019)

erica-grace said:


> You may have a point there, unfortunately.
> 
> Supply and demand, I guess?



Yeah, it’s easy to think everybody is out there rushing to buy 4tb SSDs and need ultra fast drives but most people stream stuff and want somewhere to store their downloads etc.

Of course, it’s just what I think based solely on, yeah, what I think! 😂


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## Ben (Dec 23, 2019)

[IMO] There are different factors:
- The factories are more expensive
- SSDs need on-board RAM so they can maintain a high speed as well as high density. Due to the RAM shortage from a few years ago, then the high mobile market demand, RAM was expansive -> SSDs are expensive
- There are just a few SSD manufactorers left on the market
- Higher data density comes at a price: Less life expectancy and less speed or complicated and more expensive

Please be carefull and don't get the cheapest SSD you can find. There are SSDs on the market that will write at full speed for just a few seconds before they will become slower then 5000 RPM HHDs. The read speed of this drives is also not near as fast as with high quality SSDs.

For Samples: NVMe SSDs are my favorit: If the sample player can make use of them (performant disk streaming, depending on drive speed) you will have amazing fast loading times, less RAM consumption as well as less CPU usage with even low buffer sizes. This is especially true for multi-mic libraries.


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## VivianaSings (Dec 23, 2019)

That's interesting. I thought the prices were pretty amazing considering what I spent on SSDs ages ago.

Good enough that originally many years ago I had just replaced my main drive with an SSD. Very expensive for maybe 256 gb. Last year when I saw how cheap SSDs were, I replaced all my drives with 2 tb SSDs and thought it was a bargain.


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## Dewdman42 (Dec 23, 2019)

Gaming is still a huge industry and they need big storage too. 

I think prices have been inching down. 4Tb ssd is finally looking reasonable to me and I plan to get one soon


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## Quasar (Dec 23, 2019)

Joakim said:


> What are you talking about? Every single graph you find on the subject shows a strong downtrend. Today I can get a 2TB SSD cheaper than I bought my first 256GB SSD for.


This is my take on it too. I bought a 1TB Samsung Evo on holiday sale in Dec. 2017, and today the equivalent is about half that price when not on sale.


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## charlieclouser (Dec 23, 2019)

Yeah the prices are dropping faster than I can fill the drives! I've paid basically the same price for my latest round of 4tb SSDs as I did for my first-ever 1tb SSDs. 

There may be a bit of a slowdown in the ever-doubling of capacities though - I don't see any drives bigger than 4tb except for 16tb drives which are enterprise-oriented, although their price is roughly equivalent to 4x 4tb drives. For consumer needs it seems that 4tb is the ceiling at the moment.

The big migration is away from SATA-connected drives and onto m2 bare blade-style drives, which are six times the speed but must be mounted internally, on a PCIe card or in an enclosure like the OWC 4m2.

At the moment those drives top out at 2tb, but I did notice that OWC has a 4m2 PCIe card loaded with 8tb of sticks for $1,600, so that's coming down to the point that they're almost in line with SATA pricing - and at 3gb/sec they'll be screamers in the new Mac Pro. Two slots, 16tb of sample libraries inside the box... yes please.


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## Technostica (Dec 23, 2019)

For higher capacities look at 110mm M.2 drives, U.2 which can be used in PCIe 3.0 x4 adapters and PCIe x4 card drives. 
The lower end Enterprise drives aren't that expensive if you must have 8 to 16TB per drive.


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## tmhuud (Dec 23, 2019)

I feel they are coming down. Just not the ones I want. lol... I'd like all 4TB drives in my Magic Docks but... People get used to the cap on storage pretty fast. The real small drives 250, etc can be had cheap. But who really wants those anymore.


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## jononotbono (Dec 23, 2019)

Of course, Mr Clouser is right. The prices of SSDs are amazingly cheap compared to what they were a couple of years ago. I’m still agitated by how much I spent on a 2tb Samsung 850 Evo when they first came out. I think everyone is hoping they will just be the price of a floppy disk (but not in 10 years time) soon 😂


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## Virtuoso (Dec 23, 2019)

My first one was 256GB and cost $699 so they really have dropped!

10 years ago you had to run 4 7200rpm drives in a RAID0, with all the risks that entails, just to get equivalent performance to the cheapest SSD nowadays. The NVMe ones are incredible - sustained 3500MB/s read and write for $170/TB?! Can't get enough of them!

In video it's a total game changer - 4k ProRes RAW on a cheap high capacity SSD that you can just plugin in and start editing immediately. Good times!


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## NormkbPlayer (Dec 24, 2019)

What's about external SSD. 

Would you go for the Samsung T5 or SanDisk. 

I'll be getting a Internal SSD NVMe ( 490 GB ) For around $105 After tax. 

I would like to get a external one too.


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## gsilbers (Dec 24, 2019)

well, its the 1tb that came down a lot. but dont you guys think the 4tb has stayed about the same? came down a bit a while back. interesting what ben said. and the demand doesnt fit a lot folks outside of video editing. most are ok w the 7200k hdd. 
the 1tb are cool but im running out of dock for them. its like 8 one tb ssd drives and some using as backups. but too many small drives. 

im happy the micron 5210 came out with 7.68 tb drives for about $800. finally something priced decent over 4tb. 

and the market seems to be going towards those new NVMe which are smaller. but still hovering around 1tb.


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