While I would love to be an early adopter, my frugality always gets the better of me and usually I am thankful that it did. When it comes to computers, the latest and greatest is almost always massively overpriced. Were it not for the fact that prices drop so drastically over a relatively short period of time, my thinking might be different. There are two new technologies that I am definitely interested in, but will most certainly be waiting another year or two for; Blu-ray and SSD. The two couldn’t seem more different, however, when it comes to pricing mechanics they are exactly the same.
I have said this before and I will say it a thousand times, solid state disks (SSDs) are way to expensive. While the prices have dropped a little bit, it will probably take a meaningful jump in technology to reduce the prices further. Beyond the price, however, one could argue that SSDs not quite ready for prime time.
The reason why I think that SSDs are before their time is the capacity; current flash memory capacities are the limiting factor. As soon as we start to get more capacity into flash memory chips, we will start to see higher capacity SSDs and price drops from the bottom end of the range. I have a 125 MB flash drive that I paid $80 for a few years ago, it would probably be fair to say that it is worth a tenth of that now.
The fact is that my HDD does a perfectly acceptable job. It is quiet enough that I usually can’t hear it, and it costs a fraction of what it would to put an SSD in my system. What’s more, if I did have an SSD, it would already be full.
I really can’t justify spending more than $300 on a primary hard disk and I certainly would not want to have less than 180GB of space. Some would argue that prices like that will never happen, I disagree. It might take a while, but the prices will come down, considerably. Once SSDs are reasonably close to HDDs in terms of present day HDD prices, then I will consider making the jump and not before.
When Blu-ray drives first hit the market, they were over $1,000, which is what people were paying for the first CD-R drives as well. A few months later and the price had dropped to $700 and fast-forward until now, we are paying around $300. The price has dropped to about 1/3 of the initial price and the models on the market now are far superior to the ones that were on the market then. Had I bought a $1,000 BRD, I would be pretty upset now, given the speeds and prices of the most recent models.
It took about two years to see a meaningful price drop in Blu-ray burners. Give SSDs another year and you will probably see a comparable drop and see some higher capacity models on the market to boot.
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Tags: blu-ray, ssd, UberSaturday
5 responses
Jul 27, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Nice writeup. Good advice about waiting for SSD drives. With Blu-Ray, its sales and overall deep adoption is being threatened by online services offering streaming content rental. I wonder if we could see a similar threat for SSD by online storage services?
Jul 27, 2008 at 9:45 pm
“With Blu-Ray, its sales and overall deep adoption is being threatened by online services offering streaming content rental”. When has rental ever had an impact on movie sales? What will hit Blu Ray is us being able to BUY real HD quality movies, download them at a reasonable speed, and keep/share/transport them like we do with disks. Sounds like just the job for those SSD disks, and by the time there’s a service willing to offer all that they should be affordable enough.
Jul 27, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Quote: “I have a 125 MB flash drive that I paid $80 for a few years ago, it would probably be fair to say that it is worth a tenth of that now…”
Try a hundredth. Considering a 4GB flash drive costs roughly $22 (newegg.com), which works out to $5.50/GB or $0.687 for 125 MB. This is closer to “a hundredth” (or $0.80 per 125 MB) than “a tenth” or $8 per 125 MB
Jul 28, 2008 at 12:04 am
hi. There. When. Will. We. See. A. Shift. To ssd. The. Sooner. The. Better. For. Me. Because. I. Am. A. Gammer and. Gamers. Want. There. Ssd. Flash. Drives hard. Drives. Are. Way. Too. Slow. For. Us
Jul 28, 2008 at 10:47 am
I just photographed a wedding and I have of 10 Gb. of files that I must Archive before I do any “Photoshop Magic”
Using 3 DVD’s does not make any sense at All. I don’t want to pirate any moves. I have just out grown the capacity of DVD’s as a storage medium.
I don’t think SSD offer a solution for me. A single layer DVD is all I need for today and then a dual (50Gb). In maybe 2 years the pioneer 16 layer will be on the market (400GB)
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