On another site someone made the usual comment about how they won't buy an SSD until they get to $1/GB. I've seen this statement with many numbers attached on many sites, by many various authors.

Today I decided to make my comparison and see how the $/GB numbers look for drives that are on my short list for comparing prices when I build PCs. Some of these drives I don't consider as honestly I am not willing to pay >$200 for a boot drive and I'm happy to get a high performing SSD with little regard to total capacity. I say this so you won't have to wast time wondering why I have a $600 drive on my short list. It's there just so I'll know when it becomes a cheap drive if it ever does.

I can buy a WD Blue 7200 RPM drive for $50 and still get rather good performance. I don't care about capacity as a 500GB drive or a 1TB drive I'm still going to format it to something like a 25-50GB partition and leave the rest unformatted. This is purely a consideration for performance and cost with no consideration for the noise difference.

If you want to talk about what controller is reliable please see the SSD reliability thread. If you want to talk performance please find the thread relating to a specific drives release and/or start a new thread. I'll be happy to discuss specifics of each drive in the proper thread.

This thread is about pricing/availability and while I'm doing it with a US dollar US delivery attitude you are more than welcome to copy my code section grab your favorite text editor or spreadsheet program and whip up a comparison for the country/currency combo of your choice and add it to this thread. All of my price quotes and math based on $/GB are based on price after tax, shipping, and any other charge it might take to get it in my hands in the Southeast United States.

here is a quick quote of part of my reply I made on the other site:

I'm assuming the sandforce drives will always be as expensive or have a premium over the Intel/Marvell based drives and until they get price competitive with the indilinx barefoot based drives I'll ignore them. For the purpose of keeping this thread updated I'll probably add some sandforce based drives in soon I'm just not in the mood to do it today.

As you can see $1/GB is far from reality in 2010 and even $2/GB would be extremely cheap vs today's prices. The math/daydreaming below are just a thought exercise and not a prediction or me expressing what I think these drives are worth.

Just to give you an idea I think there should be a discount for the 40GB and below drives as they have lower write speeds. Indilinx drives at 64GB are the baseline, Intel 80GB deserves ever so slight a premium, 160GB Intel a slight premium, and Marvell/Sandforce drives deserve a slightly bigger premium. I'm not sure how to mathematically model the premium but playing with $2.5/GB delivered to my door I'm looking at prices like this for the group with the premiums I'm thinking:
with the thought that even fairly priced around the $2.5/GB line none of the drives over 80GB would even catch my attention.

at the $2/Gb pricing with my premiums thrown in we are looking at:again nothing above 80GB gets my consideration but at this price level I stop buying hard drives for anything other than a file server.

at $1.5/GB and premiums we get: where finally I can consider not only the indilinx 128GB drives but even the top end quality of the C300 128GB drive.

now lets look at the world of the $1/GB insanity some posters suggest
in this dream world I can buy 64GB or 80GB drives for slower PCs and 128GB C300 drives for fast PCs and servers with little regard to cost.

again I don't think these drive should be this cheap in 2010 I'm just doing some math and putting the numbers out there so you can laugh if you like or so we can track prices as they drop.

I'd like to flesh the list out at some point and update as prices change I think if this thread works out I'll start a new version at the start of 2011 to continue the theme but allow me to clean up the content and start fresh.

Feel free to make suggestions, comments, or ask questions regarding drives to add to the list or about the concept of the currency/GB criteria that drives this comparison.

Current prices are viewable at http://silentpcreview.pricegrabber.com/ ... &viewmod=2

Please use the pricegrabber link above if you plan to purchase a drive as following the link all the way to a purchase helps to support SPCR.

May 2010 pricing update:



Note the "math price" in this post is comparing vs my $2.5/GB + premium price from the initial post in this thread. I didn't spend a lot of time looking for bargains this is a just a quick comparison using the SPCR pricegrabber.

Other points to note in the math vs actual pricing comparisons:
* I do think the 32/40GB drives are overpriced still. I've bought a few for testing but don't buy them currently when I need new drives as traditional hard drives short stroked still beat the price/performance value calculation for me.

* I don't value the Crucial M225 or Corsair Nova differently even though there is often a price difference between the two at 64GB and at 128GB. They should benchmark the same and have the same warranty. Other than the label I don't think even an avid consumer would be able to notice a difference.

* I didn't put a large premium on the C300 even though I consider it the fastest drive available right now. This is in part due to the consideration vs cheap boot drives and in part looking forward to how it's status will be when new Intel and Indilinx controllers are released later this year.

* Crucial is not charging a premium on the C300 256 GB compared to getting two C300 128GB. In fact the single 256GB is cheaper. This is a sign that the flash is not the primary component driving cost of SSDs. Controllers, Distribution, warranty, etc are significant.

You could ask why I credit the cost issues in the 256GB drive but don't cut any slack for the same cost issues in the 40GB and below products. It's all about performance. The low end products just don't perform well enough for me to ignore that pricing premium in absolute dollars. When they get to be $50 items I won't care about minor variations in pricing. At the current price levels I'm still very cost conscious.

These drives may be too new to safely buy and/or their price may vary widely while supplies are low.

The OCZ and Corsair drives are sandforce 1200 based which I'm not confident about yet and of course these drives are up in the $4/GB+ range so they are above my price criteria anyway.

The Plextor SSD hasn't been reviewed on Anandtech yet and I'm not sure if it is the same controller as in the Crucial C300 or if it is a slower controller. It remains on a watch list to possibly be added to the price list. I did add it to the SPCR pricegrabber list but I'm not confident about these drives yet.

If I recall correctly, the original idea behind Sandforce was to allow a cheaper grade of flash memory to be used, in light of Durawrite's more efficient writing system. In practise, I don't think this has translated to any new benchmarks for value. One could almost RAID 0 a pair of X25-Vs for the price of a 50 GB Vertex 2.

Having said that, the Sandforce is in enough SSDs now to presumably have tremendous confidence by the industry. I would almost trust one reliability-wise, but the value for money equasion is a little hard to take seriously at this time. One is much more likely to notice Sandforce's reduced capacity/$ than its superior performance compared to Intel.

I don't think there is enough confidence in SSDs in general to push the cheap factor yet.

See the near 50% failure rate for the Patriot Torqx drives or the vast complaints about OCZ drives (Jmicron were worse but even the Vertex/Agility based on the Indilinx controller had more complaints on newegg than you'd care to count).

So assuming OCZ and the like are already using "cheaper" flash memory the Sandforce controller might save some RMAs from happening but every time the controller has to mark part of the drive bad it eats into the overall performance/reliability numbers.

I'd much rather know the drive I bought had better than average flash chips to begin with and look for my price drops to come from overproduction (aka increased supply).

Or even better know that the price drop is based on the controller being perfectly functional/safe but not in the top 3 that are in highest demand so that they are willing to drop the price premium.

Right now the top consumer controllers are:

Intel 2nd generation
Marvell (88SS9174-BJP2)*
Sandforce 1200
Indilinx Barefoot

In the future this list will look more like

Intel 3rd generation
Indilinx Jet stream
Marvell (88SS9174-BJP2)*
Sandforce 1200
Intel 2nd generation
Indilinx Barefoot

With the Intel 3rd generation drives out in 2010 and the Indilinx Jet Stream drives in 2011.

Assuming they continue to produce the older controllers and/or there is a sufficient supply of old drives sitting on shelves maybe the smart play will be to buy Indilinx barefoot drives on the cheap after they drop a few slots on the performance list (preferably of a Brand that uses better chips like Crucial)**. Or maybe it'll be to buy the value version of the Intel 3rd Generation product knowing Intel/Micron/Crucial won't use cheap memory chips but will have a half or full process generation advantage for Fall 2010 until sometime in 2011. At the worst we can expect Intel 160GB 3rd generation drives in 4th quarter 2010 to replace the 2nd generation 80GB drives we have now. It'd be nice to see the Intel 80GB Gen 2 drive become the new value drive (discontinue the 40GB and drop the 80GB price) or to see the 3rd Gen value drive which I don't expect until 2011.

*Note the C300 is not using the same controller as the Plextor which uses the older "Da Vinci". C300 = Marvell 88SS9174-BJP2 SATA-III and "Da Vinci" = Marvell 88SS8014-BHP2

**I'll be watching and researching reliability issues and of course the ones that do bad don't make the price list and the ones that do OK or better will make the list.

To the best of my knowledge, the idea behind the 25nm manufacturing process is the ability to make more flash memory cells with the same amount of physical material. Thus an equivalent G3 drive will always be technically cheaper than the G2. This does not count the likelihood of initial price gouging on the G3 combined with the G2 being in runout mode.

Reportedly the G3 will have capacities as high as 600 GB, and at the bottom of the range, the 40 GB would either be discontinued or very sharply priced.

50% of reviews on Newegg mentioning a drive failing does not equal a 50% failure rate. People are far more likely to write a review if a product dies early than if everything goes smoothly. I'm sure the failure rates of these drives are far below what user reviews would indicate. That said, it is likely to indicate a higher failure rate relative to other SSDs, so I probably would avoid drives with above average reported failures.

Along the same lines, these specific drives with high numbers of reported problems shouldn't necessarily indicate a lack of confidence in SSDs in general. Just look at user reviews in the hard disk section at Newegg. Many disk-based drives, built on supposedly proven technology, have 20 to 40% of their reviews at 1 star. Most of these drives with higher reported failures are from Seagate, which is a brand a lot of people trust anyway.

newer process generations use more expensive wafers and more expensive equipment and early in their life have more failed chips. At the time of the transition it is often the case that the new process puts out chips at the same or higher cost than the old process.

The goal is for yield to improve (and it usually does) and depending on how quickly that happens chip prices come down. You as a consumer have no guarantee that process Y will produce chips cheaper than process X and thus can only watch and wait.

I haven't seen any reference to a 40GB G3 drive.

I'd forgotten the mention of a 600GB drive. That implies confidence in price dropping noticeably. To keep the price under $1000 they would have to get it down to $1.65/GB. So IF we see the 600GB at $999 it would imply under $2/GB or near $2/GB for lower capacity drives.

While I agree in principle with many of the points in your post this is a discussion to be had in http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/vi ... hp?t=58422 and is off topic here.

My point in this thread is in reference to how chip supply choices affect price. I only mention reliability in passing as it relates to that choice.

Dailytech ran another fluff piece on SSD pricing http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=18415

It includes the quote "Intel cut its SSD prices by 60% when it introduced 34nm production in July of last year."

If you look at Intel's current SSDs as being sold at about $2.75/GB then it points to $1.25/GB after a roughly 60% drop. I'd love it if I'm wrong but I don't expect that much of a drop late 2010/early 2011 when the Intel SSDs go 3rd gen.

Anybody want to place their bets on what a low price for a 3rd gen Intel 160GB drive will cost (no rebate) to a consumer any time in 2010?

Have a look at how many factors there are before betting the farm:

Driving down prices
* New manufacturing processes
* Hotter competition in the marketplace
* Likely all-time-high volumes, and presumably factory capacity to cope

Driving up prices
* Initial demand likely to outstrip supply, including older SSD owners wanting to upgrade
* Possible price gouging by Intel if they can get away with it
* Price gouging by retailers if they can get away with it

Probably heaps more...

I just did some searches and found old articles from 2008 and 2009 talking about the 50nm to 34nm Intel SSD transition. Key points to note:

The 160GB 50nm SSD started at ~$950 and the 80GB started at ~$600

Articles back then quoted Intel reps saying 34nm would produce a 320GB SSD along side of a 2nd improved revision of 34nm SSDs by 1st half 2010 but it hasn't happened yet.

I suppose there could be a Gen 2.1 SSD coming out between now and the Gen3 SSD but you sure don't hear anybody talking about it.

OK, new sandforce drives from Corsair

old lineup was

Corsair Force 100
Corsair Force 200

In June it will be

Corsair Force 60
Corsair Force 100
Corsair Force 120
Corsair Force 200
Corsair Force 240

not sure how the pricing will go. Presumably the drives not in bold with the multiples of 60 have less spare area as in



Note the 50GB sandforce is not a Corsair model but OWC sells them and OCZ may as well. Also this table is just educated guesses. I have no inside info.

It will be interesting to see how they price these. Will the 100GB and 120GB be roughly the same cost given the internals are the same or will they charge a price premium for the extra usable capacity?

The thing is if I bought one of these I'd be formatting it to less than it's advertised capacity so I would not pay the premium though less informed consumers might. To get someone like me to buy the sandforce 100/120/128 drive it has to be priced below the Indilinx 128 drives. I doubt that will happen but I've been wrong on other predictions.

Here's another angle you could take - all this is based on Intel Mainstream SSDs and their original retail price (ORP):

I took it back to the most basic metric, silicon. Look at pricing based on silicon process size (nm) and the amount of silicon (area) required for memory chips.

Rev 1 - 50 nm (starting point, 100%)
80GB ~$600 ORP
160GB ~$950 ORP

Rev 2 - 34 nm (area = 46% of 50nm [54% smaller])
80GB ~$295 ORP - 51% price drop
160GB ~445 ORP - 53% price drop

and from that, these are my rough estimates for the Intel Mainstream 3rd gen ORPs.

Rev 3 - 25 nm (area = 54% of 34nm [46% smaller])
80GB ~$168 ORP - 43% price drop
160GB ~$245 ORP - 45% price drop

Of course there are things in there that have not been considered like competition, the fixed price of packaging & shipping etc, etc.

Just for fun, I also figured that silicon will have to be at least 20nm to crack the magical $1/GB at ORP.

Too bad the pricing won't be based only on feature size...

pluses for lower pricing:
- smaller geometry means more good die per wafer
- more competition in the market with better controllers
- more fabs coming online with smaller geometry memory.

negatives for lower pricing:
- Intel is the king of gross margins. Very good at working the supply/demand curve.
- smaller geometry generally means higher wafer processing cost. So, it's not a linear cost reduction when they move to a newer process.
- the usual price fixing by the memory mfgrs
- capacity limitations will keep pricing up

The sandforce controllers are pricey - don't think they will lead to cost effective consumer grade SSDs. Maybe Samsung will get it's act together and make a decent controller/SSD combo. Indilinx's upcoming controller shows promise.

I jumped in and bought an OCZ Agility 60GB back in Feb. I've been running it as a games drive w/o problems. Did the trash collection routine and didn't see and difference between new, cluttered, and post trash collection in benchmarking w ATTO. Haven't had time to turn it into my System/apps drive. Benchmarking w ATTO showed 20% improvement in write speeds and 100% read speeds vs my WD640GB blue.

right or wrong I'd like to say good first post and

Welcome to SPCR

Hi Steve

I totally agree with you, I wasn't assuming pricing is gauged on feature size alone. But I thought it was a good "dumb" metric, kind of in a way incorporates all the factors you listed that influence pricing. I also wanted to make the point that the new feature size isn't the same reduction in area as the last revision, so we are more likely to not see the same drop in prices that were seen last time.



I'm glad that Intel doesn't have a ~80% market share in the SSD market like it does in CPUs. There are many big dogs in the arena - all trying to become the top dog, and many trying to keep the share they already have in HDDs.

Also a article on Softpedia (I can't post the full link as I haven't reached 3 posts) /news/Intel-Aims-to-Dominate-the-SSD-Market-134350.shtml
and from that -
[i]“We want to be a leader in SSDs. We want to bring SSDs out of the niche markets and into the mainstream,â€

I've noticed in recent days and weeks the X25-V price has been on the rise. In recent days it's jumped from $120 to 125 on Newegg, and soon after I bought one for my laptop from an eBay seller the price increased by a similar percentage. I'm unclear of the reason for this but over time it has been detracting slightly from the drive's relative bargain status.

Indeed. I've been watching the same progression.

Also of note today is

400GB and 480GB sandforce drives (vertex 2 and agility 2) being announced [EDIT: just noticed OWC anounced their 400GB version May 5th 2010]



Oh and OWC answered the question on pricing by charging $80 more for the 400GB version than the 480GB version. They bill it as 7% over provisioning and 3 year warranty on the 480GB version and 28% over provisioning and 5 year warranty on the 400GB version.

Even at ~$2/GB these will be $900+ drives (OWC put them on preorder a few weeks ago at $1500). Of course if Crucial (Micron) doesn't respond with a 512GB C300 then the 400GB sandforce will be the largest high performance SSD for a while.

That sort of race to the top could push down pricing on the lowest capacity drives due to lack of demand and push up the pricing on the high capacity drives due to lack of supply. It is possible for both of those to happen at the same time though it takes one of the top SSD players making a bold move to steal market share.

A more likely scenario is everyone stair stepping or waterfalling their prices down as new models come out in competitors lines or their own lines. With SSDs being mostly interchangeable (fungible is the term the economists would use)

Either way I say bring it on.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/vi ... p?p=513045 discusses the performance of the Indilinx Amigos.

Pricing seems to be similar to Indilinx barefoot but performance is worse so it won't make my price lists.

A point that over gets overlooked is that the Intel drives include an adaptor so that they can fit into a 3.5" drive bay, whereas with OCZ you have to buy one at extra cost. I'm not sure about the Kingston and others. But worth factoring in total cost before being seduced by the lowest base price...

Many brands include the adapter (Intel, Kingston, Corsair, Mushkin, I'm sure I missed a couple) some cases now include mounting points for 2.5" drives.

Most SPCR regulars would be fine strapping, taping, suspending, wedging, etcetera to put the SSD in a untraditional mount (inside a bay, on the floor of the case, on the side of the case, etcetera). Some are even willing to lay the SSD on the bottom of the case (essentially loose and unsecured) since it doesn't have the heat or vibration issues of a traditional drive and is practically immune to shock damage.

Current prices are viewable at http://silentpcreview.pricegrabber.com/ ... &viewmod=2

Please use the pricegrabber link above if you plan to purchase a drive as following the link all the way to a purchase helps to support SPCR.

June 2010 pricing update:

Some lucky guy got a Crucial M225 64GB for ~$150 when OWC put it on clearance to sell their last one (they dropped the price about $10 a day until it sold, I didn't buy it so I'm not sure what it sold for but I know I'm not far off).

The Intel X25-M 80GB increased ~$5 this month.
The Crucial M225 128GB dropped $60 this month.
The Crucial C300 128GB dropped $20 this month.
The Intel X25-M 160GB increased ~$10 this month.
The Crucial C300 128GB dropped $15 this month.

Basically the Crucial/Indilinx/Marvell names aren't holding the premium anymore and Intel is receiving the benefit from the people that are switching. See the June newegg data dive in the reliability thread for some stats on that.

Note the "math price" in this post is comparing vs my $2.5/GB + premium price from the initial post in this thread. I didn't spend a lot of time looking for bargains this is a just a quick comparison using the SPCR pricegrabber.

Other points to note in the math vs actual pricing comparisons:
* I do think the 32/40GB drives are overpriced still. I've bought a few for testing but don't buy them currently when I need new drives as traditional hard drives short stroked still beat the price/performance value calculation for me. I'm dropping the 32GB Nova from the price list as it just doesn't hit the bang/buck target close enough.

* Crucial is not charging a premium on the C300 256 GB compared to getting two C300 128GB. In fact the single 256GB is cheaper. This is a sign that the flash is not the primary component driving cost of SSDs. Controllers, Distribution, warranty, etc are significant. In fact the new 64GB version is even cheaper per GB than any prior version. Enough so it's time to redo the price/GB math.

http://forums.storagereview.com/index.p ... t-bestbuy/

Not necessarily cheaper but if you have a gift card to use up or need one in a hurry on Sunday morning or something it's nice to know you can walk in and grab a SSD without waiting on UPS/Fedex.

80 GB it may be, but if Intel are serious about making the technology mainstream they will still need to make a 40 GB version. Considering what a sell-out the $98 Newegg X25-V sale was, imagine if the regular price was $70-80...

If the 80GB Intel is $120 how cheap will a Indilinx 64GB drive become? Say the Indilinx 64GB drive becomes a $105 drive, how many will want a 40GB drive if the 64GB drive is the new bottom end?

Even if you take the Indilinx drives out of the equation. Who wants a 40GB drive at $80 when a 80GB drive is $120? It's twice the capacity at 1.5 times the price.

It'd be nice if I could buy a 40GB Intel SSD for $55 but I don't expect it to happen this year or next.

Crucial started selling the C300 in a 64GB version at $150. This is a significant price drop considering its the only 6GB/s sata SSD on the market right now.

Note it's just as fast as the 128GB and 256GB versions on reads but is noticeably slower on writes (just as all the lower capacity SSDs are).

I expect an Anandtech.com review of the C300 shortly and with any luck they'll review the smaller capacity versions as well.

64GB Crucial RealSSD C300 2.5-inch SATA 6GB/s
CTFDDAC064MAG-1G1

http://www.crucial.com/pdf/Datasheets-l ... online.pdf

http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs. ... 064MAG-1G1

This drive changes the math on price per GB for now the list sorted by Gross Price is:


Standouts from that based price per/GB are

Crucial C300 64GB ~$150 ~$2.35/GB
Intel X25-M 80GB ~$215 ~$2.70/GB
Crucial C300 128GB ~$338 ~$2.64/GB
Intel X25-M 160GB ~$430 ~$2.69/GB
Crucial C300 256GB ~$640 ~$2.50/GB

Unless you are a fan of sandforce drives, right now there is a strong 2 horse race for SSDs. And if you really want to play it safe then Intel is has the field. Assuming no one drops the price on barefoot drives or Intel based drives the price difference pushes me towards the C300.

The list sorted by Gross Price is:


Standouts from that based price per/GB are
Crucial C300 64GB ~$143 ~$2.23/GB
Crucial C300 128GB ~$280 ~$2.19/GB
Crucial M225 128GB ~$288 ~$2.25/GB
Crucial C300 256GB ~$574 ~$2.25/GB

with the C300 being the value drive of choice for Win7 users and the M225 being an option for XP diehards. Though the Intel G2 drives are still the overall safe choice no matter what OS you run.

I still don't recommend sandforce drives due to their behavior with compressed data and the lack of a manual trim utility for XP use but for those that want to live on the edge the current pricing is similar to the price/GB of the 2nd Generation Intel drives.