News - Super Talent lowers price of SSDs, again

[HEXUS]

The new MasterDrive LX is coming in at $179 for 64GB and $299 for the 128GB version.

Read more.

[Webby]

My personal view is that I would want to be looking at 64GB SSD with decent read write speeds (like the OCZ Core v2) but priced at about £100 before I would be considering it, obviously long term storage will still be catered for by standard HDDs ideally I would be looking at £75 but realise that isn't going to be happening any time soon.

The real boon I can see for them will be the HTPC market where silence is really valued, eliminating HDD noise completely would be worth a premium in that situation, only problem would be capacity but perhaps networked storage would be the answer.

[s1lv3r]

Unless I'm missing something really fundamental.. why should SSD technology always be more expensive ongoing than platter based drives as suggested in the first page of this article?

Surely the manufacturing process is far easier/cost effective in SSD's?
They're not subject to the same requirements on vacuum seals, hyper accurate machining of components.. etc.

Unless the physical chips differ in significant ways from already mass market items from the major chip manufacturers I can't see why eventually the SSD would not be even lower cost than the mechanical alternatives.

[shaithis]

Unless I am missing something, that is plain wrong as you say.

Completely different manufacturing process means that at some stage, SSDs will become less then hard drives. It may take many years but it should happen (unless another technology comes along and supersedes SSDs in the mean-time)

[Scott B]

Fair point, I should have said "for the foreseeable future" instead of "always".

[Stoo]

I look forward to Scan reducing the price from £1,679.11...

[Betty_Swallocks]

OK, so $179 and $299 will convert approximately to £179 and £299 by the time they make it over here so it's still far too expensive for me. If it was just normal exchange rates it would be £99 and £165 and I'd have one tomorrrow to use as a boot drive.
As it is I think I'll have to wait for a while.

[Funkstar]

I've not checked in a while, but when I bought my laptop in the US last summer, the 250GB and 320GB laptop drives were pretty much the same price from Scan as from Newegg, no funny business with the exchange rate. I ended up getting the laptop there and the extra HD here.

[GaryRW]

I reckon 3:1 is probably a bit low? You can get 500gb drives for what, £50 these days. But you don't need 500gb for a system drive, more like 128gb at most. 64 gig should be possible if you're more eager to get a SSD).

When they hit £75-100 for a decent 128 Gb model, then count me in. I guess I'll be waiting a while...

(At the moment, I'd also be wary of the 'cheap' models after the problems that Anandtech highlighted with the jmicron?? controller on loads of the MLC drives. )

[shaithis]

At the moment I would be wary of ALL models.

The technology is still extremely new and will be constantly changing for a while yet before manufacturers find the best approach.

[s1lv3r]

On top of that, I'm sure there is significant scope for OS developers... (don't laugh) to optimise for the new thoughput potential and remove redundant code (defragmentation and possibly prefetching as examples) when installed on appropriate hardware.

To be honest I am wary, but I can certainly say I am more excited by the emergence and maturity of SSD technology than I have been about anything hardware/software related since GLQuake.

[shaithis]

Might even be worth them re-using the code from the UDF file system (currently used for CDRW and DVDRW) for SSDs to extend their life, unless its already being incorporated into the drives themselves.