14 DAY TRIAL // Back when we first predicted that SSD prices would be falling below the 0.5 dollar per gigabyte mark we were concerned that there was a considerable amount of reading, industry experience and gut feeling involved into the conclusions drawn and less mathematical calculations.
Later, we were confirmed by various SSD offers that were hitting the 0.5 dollar per gigabyte price point.
Surprisingly, these were mostly decent-performing and rather popular SSD models like OCZ’s Octane and Crucial’s M4.
Seeing that mainstream drives with competitive performance and high sales were hitting record lows, we started looking at the bigger pircture.
The price evolution was shaping the scenarios we envisioned back in April 2012, and then we knew we were only missing a real mathematical model of the SSD price evolution of the last 12 months.
Hardware experts over at TechReport compiled the price evolution of several SSD products and practically delivered the much valued exact mathematical research on what most industry experts were expecting.
The price point per gigabyte reached a mean low of 0.82 dollars, but the respective result is based on the price evolution of the last 7 days only.
In our opinion, there are two main chapters summarized in Geoff Gasior’s research.
The first point is the fact that one of the most impressive, stable and high performing SSD drives managed to get the lowest price per gigabyte.
Crucial’s M4 is a very mature product that performs right among top drives like Corsair’s Force 3 and OCZ’s Vertex 3 product lines.
Marvell’s controller offers stable performance all across the board with no downsides like lower transfer speeds when working with uncompressible data that all the SandForce powered SSDs manifest.
To see that the lowest price is actually achieved by a high performing product and not a low performance model like Patriot’s Magma or ADATA’s asynchronous SandForce implementations is quite amazing and pleasing for the PC enthusiast.
The second important point depicted by the charts is the fact that prices have fallen with an average of over 50% over the past 12 months.
Therefore, if the drop continues at this rate, we believe the 0.5 USD per gigabyte average price point will become a reality in less than 12 months.
Make sure you check out Geoff Gasior’s detalied research over at TechReport.