Just a few weeks ago, KitGuru was chatting internally and wondering what happened to all the cool SSD deals from last summer. We remembered a time when drives dropped below £70 and then headed down to settle around £60. Why were 2013's prices so much higher?
Looks like movements in the price of chips, the dollar and other factors have created downward pressure again.
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Upfront, we're gonna say that you will need to read the first few lines of the small print with the new deals we are seeing.
Example?
While the peak of performance in this are is still overwhelmingly taken by SSD products in the 500/500 (MB/sec read/write) zone, there are plenty of companies that manage to create a low cost alternative by dropping one or both of these numbers.
For general applications, you may not notice a drop if one or both of these numbers is less than 500, but there will be applications which move immense amounts of data and the fell off would make a difference. That's something you will need to decide for yourself.
We noticed the Crucial deal first thing this morning at £69:-
- Crucial M4 128GB: Which can read at 500MB/sec, but write speeds are only 175MB/sec
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A quick check around revealed a potentially better spec for less money (£66 in this case):-
- ADATA Premier Pro 128GB: Which claims 550MB/Sec Read and 520MB/Sec Write in ATTO
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KitGuru says: The difference this year, we believe, is that the smaller drives like 120/128 will remain permanently low as the new high-density drives (like the 960GB from Crucial and the 800/1600GB from Samsung) force a permanent shift in relative values.
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