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Recent discussions with memory manufacturers indicate that there will be more innovation in the Solid State Drive market place in the first half of 2015. None of us know exactly when those improvements will happen, but price drops are normally a good indicator – as older product is cleared from the channel ahead of the ‘cool new stuff'. KitGuru scans the reseller pages for clues.
When KitGuru reported on a strong price push from SSD manufacturers a couple of years ago, SanDisk and Kingston were among the earliest to push out special offers – on their older products. We then hit an extended period of relative stability. Indeed, the price of many SSDs actually jumped through the end of 2012 and through to mid-2014 – when a lot of improvements to the underlying technology were released.
Following the Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Boxing Day offers, we're now seeing stores like eBuyer push through price drops in the order of 10% on 120GB Kingston SSDNow V300 drives (£42), 128GB SanDisk Pulse drives (£44) and 128GB SK hynix SH910A drives (£45).
Overclockers have some interesting pricing on 240/256GB drives, including SK hynix at £85 and Crucial MX100 at £87. For those of you looking at big SSDs, then the 480GB OCZ Arc 100 is at £175 from OcUK and they are also carrying the Crucial M500 at £180. Lastly, the chaps over at Dabs seem to have obtained a serious deal from Samsung, with its 1TB EVO 840 drive at just £299.
That's quite a lot of bargains, so should we be expecting an evolution on the SSD production lines over the next 90 days or so? Time will tell. Against this backdrop, it's shocking that so many laptop still ship with scarily slow 5400rpm mechanical disks.
Roll on the next advances, that's what we say.
KitGuru says: When Intel launched its X25-M drives back in 2008, enthusiasts thought the £520 price point was reasonable (hoping that it would drop below the £400 level at some stage). We're now in a world where 1TB SSD is just under £300 and there will be many more deals to follow as new SSD-related technologies enter the market in 2015.
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You omitted the minor detail that the Kingston V300 price drops coincided with the public disclosure regarding their dodgy practice of substituting inferior NAND components after the initial positive reviews.
I love mine but they are quite the premium, I won’t be buying another one for a long time. But I did get a 512GB one so I wouldn’t feel constrained, thats good enough for an OS and a few games that you play the most, in some situations not gaming on an SSD can really put you at a disadvantage. I was playing Guild Wars 2 for awhile and there was a particular farming run that involved killing a boss then spawning fast at the next waypoint, I was loading on a mechanical drive and being left behind missing out on half the loot at times, because the giant zerg would already kill the “elite” before you could land a hit.
I love how people criticize HDD though with bubble memory(nand) it is unsafe to use like a plattered HDD. They are improving yes. But still have a ways to go. What I am waiting for it the memristor tech to reach its peak. then your poor SSD will be a quick thing of the past and not even last as long as the HDD did.
“Against this backdrop, it’s shocking that so many laptop still ship with scarily slow 5400rpm mechanical disks.”
Amen! My laptop has some quite decent specs, but it still locks up waaay too often. Checking out the performance section of the Win. Task Manager reveals how the HDD is being used at 100% capacity… I’m torn between the decision of either waiting till my warranty runs out or just going ahead and changing the HDD to a SSD instead, right away.
I’m pretty sure the 1 TB SSD prices will decrease by at least another 30% in the next few months. It will be a good value by that time…
I have a V300. No problems thus far but i sure wish i knew this before hand.