Storage Pricewatch: Get out your wallet, hard drive and SSD prices have dropped

Storage Pricewatch: Get out your wallet, hard drive and SSD prices have dropped

The last time we dug into storage prices was back in April, when the trends for both hard drives and SSDs showed a modest decline for the former as prices returned to pre-flood levels and a relatively stable track for the latter. Since then, we’ve seen reports of volatility in the SSD market.

We’ve teamed up with Dynamite Dataonce again to examine long-term price trends and what they show us about the storage market.

The SSD split

SSD prices are simultaneously increasing and decreasing depending on which capacity you focus on. This is a fairly new trend. Previously, high capacity drives were typically the most expensive as these products were aimed at enterprise/business customers or offered the highest performance money could buy. Low capacity drives were typically cheaper, since they offered fewer features or lower performance. Now, that’s changing.

When we break out the price per GB at the 128, 256, and 480-512GB capacities, we see three different cost trends. The 128GB SSDs have been the most volatile, with average prices ranging between $1.05-1.13/GB over the past six months. Costs had fallen to around $1.07 from a high of $1.12 in late July. 128GB drives tend to be a touch slower than 256-512GB products since they have fewer memory channels, and they are often based on older NAND and slower controllers.

We’ve dropped 60GB drives entirely from this comparison due to age and price; 60GB drives are often $1.50 per GB or higher now as manufacturers shift to higher capacities. The 256GB drives have also edged upwards compared to where they were at the beginning of the year. Prices have peaked and fallen again several times in the past few months, with total pricing currently sitting just under $1 per GB. At the 512GB level we see the slowest, most consistent trend — a general reduction in price with current prices hovering around 80 cents per GB. There are several factors driving this. Scan NewEgg and you’ll find a number of cheap, high-capacity SSDs based on old technology as well. This has apparently become something of a popular move — build out slower versions of a drive with huge storage space and offer it at a bargain price.

Where prices go from here

There are two big reasons to be optimistic about the future of SSD pricing. First, there’s TLC NAND. While I was initially dubious about the long-term efficacy of TLC (triple level cell) memory, Samsung’s 840 and 840 Evo have convinced me that this NAND has a strong place in consumer products. The Evo, in particular, is a great example of how pairing a TLC drive with a small SLC (single level cell) NAND cache can improve performance dramatically and guard against problematic wearing.

Second, there’s vertical NAND, also called V-NAND. As the name suggests, this is NANDthat tilts the cell structure up on edge. V-NAND has only just entered production, so it’s not going to hit consumer markets yet, but the long-term feedback is promising. It’s not clear if TLC and V-NAND can currently be deployed in the same hardware, but the ITRS has made it clear that it expects V-NAND to drive SSD prices downwards over the next few years. This kind of improvement is critically important given that NAND flash faces major scaling problems below the 19nm node.

One thing to note is that while pricing in these segments as a whole has only fluctuated by ~8%, fluctuation on some drives is considerably more volatile.

The below chart shows the biggest movers and shakers for the entire SSD market since February. Keep in mind that pricing can vary dramatically depending on drive model but, again, the largest capacities tend to show less shifting than the higher ones.

I suspect the 100GB and 110GBs listed here might be OCZ’s RevoDrives, which have been volatile of late. Still, it can pay to keep an eye on favorite drives when looking for a deal.

Prices should continue to edge downwards through 2013 and into 2014. I don’t expect any enormous drops but if Samsung’s 840 Evo continues to win favor, it could push the average selling price lower.

Hard drives: Desktop in great shape, but laptop drives show troubling trends

Desktop hard drives have returned to pre-flood levels and continued downwards from that point. I don’t have an updated version of our hard drive graph from April, but a quick check of NewEgg shows 2TB drives starting at $79.99, or roughly 3 cents per GB. 4TB drives, even WD’s high performance Black family, are available for 6-7 cents per GB. That gap means hard drives remain more than an order of magnitude cheaper than SSDs. SSD performance has increased much more rapidly than spinning disc performance, but the rate of change may slow dramatically over the next few years. TLC and V-NAND are designed to improve NAND density and cost, but not its speed. This is particularly true with TLC, which is markedly slower than MLC.

There is, however, one negative trend I want to call out here, as it impacts laptop hard drives in particular. Back in 2009-2010, companies like Seagate confidently predicted that nearly 50% of laptop HDD volumes would be 7200RPM drives by now. Instead, the manufacturer has since announced that it intends to phase out 7200RPM drives altogether by the end of the year. Already, we see the trend kicking in — of the 212 laptop HDDs in stock at NewEgg, only a handful of them are 7200 RPM models. Seagate’s Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHDs) are available, but they’ve staked out a price point well above $100.

Fortunately, there are still 7200RPM drives from Western Digital, but Seagate’s decision to exit that market could be a sign of things to come. While SSDs remain a far better performance choice in mobile, 7200RPM drives are still noticeably quicker than 5400RPM counterparts, and it’s somewhat frustrating to be stuck with just two choices — bottom end, or SSD.