Will $1 Per Gigabyte Spur Solid State Drive Sales?
How times have changed. I remember in the early 90′s it was easy to price hard drives. They sold for $1 per one MB. I recall buying a 212 MB hard disk and the price was exactly $212. Memory was selling for $50 per MB during the same period. So when I read that SSD may start to be sold for $1 per GB, it is definitely a much awaited change. Many of us would be happy to dump our mechanical hard disk and were waiting for the prices to drop. What is being predicted is this:
Pricing for NAND flash memory had been expected to flat-line until next year, when NAND flash chip fabricators will be able to reinvest their profits to ramp up production and begin selling higher-density products, industry experts say.
But in a report released today, iSuppli forecasts that NAND flash pricing for 3-bit-per-cell NAND will average $1.20 per GB for the entire fourth quarter and will then drop to $1 by the end of this year. The $1 per GB level is considered a threshold that will drive adoption of solid state drives, iSuppli stated.
Yang said that with pricing headed back to the $1 per gigabyte level, the SSD market may be ready to get back on the fast track to adoption.
“With NAND pricing having returned to per-gigabyte pricing levels not seen in two years, there’s likely to be a lot of new buzz created for the solid state storage market at the end of 2010,” Yang said. “However, traditional HDDs gained a lot of additional ground during the past few years in terms of rising capacity and falling prices. In fact, HDDs have gained so much ground that SSDs now are in danger of never regaining their competitive footing.”
Here is what I focused on:
Yang believes that in order for SSDs to compete against HDDs, per-GB pricing for NAND flash memory will have to decline to 40 cents by 2012, which would mean a 100GB SSD would cost about $50. At that price, SSD would be appealing in both the consumer and corporate PC marketplaces, he said.
I would jump at the chance to buy a 100GB SSD if it were priced at $50. What about you?
Comments welcome.
