SSDs Finally Are Cheap And Affordale

[Cheerful Charlie]

Just was looking at prices of SSDs. Finally the prices are coming down. At my local build your own system computer supply store, I can get a Crucial MX500 500GB SSD for $89.95. Or a 1 TB for $139.95. $59.95 for 250 GB. Add a $9.95 USB enclosure to that and I have a nice back up system. I am going to have to brush up on my rsync kung fu. Large capacity SD cards and USB 3.0 thumb drives are now dirt cheap also. Unfortunately, main mother board memory is still relatively high priced.

 

[steve_bank]

Keep in mind the IBM 350 had 4k of magnetic core memory and a large room full of vacuum tape drives and huge hard disk drives. A 20 meg hard drive took two people to lift. The 360 took 3 phase power.

The PC had 64k of RAM. Floppy disk and tape for storage.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

My first serious hard disk was a Fujitsu SCSI hard disk with 528 Meg, that is half a Gigabyte. It cost me $999.95.

 

[phands]

I started using SSDs in volume as far back as 2008, when I worked for Google's Hardware Operations division. We bought hundreds of thousands of them....a significant fraction of global production. They were eye-wateringly expensive, and had small capacities, but were still faster than spinning rust. At that time, wear-levelling and write cycle limits were still a real concern, and we used a lot of effort in trying to keep them alive before before Intel came up with trim_fs.

Nowadays, they are just the best, and as you say..affordable. I have a 10Tb drive at home, made of 5 2Tb SSDs in a NAS box....amazing.

 

[steve_bank]

That is free market capitalism for you, at least the better part of it.

 

[Underseer]

That is free market capitalism for you, at least the better part of it.

If this was the result of free market capitalism, then other industries would do the same thing and automobiles would travel at the speed of sound on a thimble of gas and cost no more than cars did back in the 1960s. Computers are a new industry, and so there is lots of room for improvement in lots of areas.

Back To Topic (sorry)
Anyway, for anyone not familiar with modern SSDs, there's SATA and a couple variants of M.2.

SATA uses the same old-fashioned drive controller as spinning disk drives (HDD) and optical drives and thus isn't capable of the higher data rates of M.2.

M.2 plugs directly into the PCI bus (the same one used for your expansion cards) and thus the connection between the drive and your computer is capable of higher data rates, with NVMe being the fastest, however if you're on a budget moving from SATA to M.2 involves a large jump in price but a smaller jump in performance. If you're more worried about bang for the buck, SATA is probably fine.

SATA SSDs will work with any computer that has a SATA drive controller in it and a 2.5" drive bay (which basically means almost every computer). If you want M.2, you need to check which kind your motherboard can support and buy the right kind of drive to go with it.