14 DAY TRIAL // Currently, solid state drives with a capacity of 256 GB sell for around $110 / €110, or a lot more, like in the case of high-end ones such as the Samsung 850 Pro ($170 / €170). However, one company's general manager said recently that SSDs would finally fall to a sweet spot this year.
More specifically, Apacer general manager CK Chang is credited with the statement that 256 GB SSD prices would fall under $70 / €70 this year (2015).
This will happen in the second quarter of 2015 to be more specific, while drives of 128 GB will go below $40 / €40 or so.
This is owed to several factors, one of them being the movement on the part of chip makers to newer and more productive fabrication technologies, like 14nm, 15nm and 16nm.
The smaller a chip is, the smaller the production cost gets owing to more chips being made per wafer. Quite convenient considering that more advanced nodes yield NAND chips that are better in every way. Well, mostly.
There are some engineering limitations inherent in NAND Flash chips, but they should be surmounted by the time the related fabrication nodes are reached.
Apacer's current focus
For 2015, the company will primarily deal in storage devices for cloud, mobile, gaming and industrial fields, while strengthening ties with strategic partners.
This is in line with the regular modus operandi of storage device makers. However, when tied with the previous statement by Chang, it leads to a strong suggestion that Apacer itself will see to it that at least one SSD suited for gaming will sell for under seventy bucks.
The likely landscape
No doubt the majority of low-cost SSDs will be of the mSATA or M.2 form factors. Given their size and single-board construction, they are set for a good amount of attention anyway.
2.5-inch units are all well and good, but they won't allow ultrabooks and tablets to get any thinner than they already have. With mSATA and especially M.2 PCBs taking off, all eyes will be on them.
However, performance probably won't be as high as it could be. PCI Express-based M.2 drives can reach and exceed 1-2 GB/s, but cheap versions will probably be wired through SATA, so they will be capped at 600 MB/s, if they even reach that high. Most likely performance will be on the level with 2.5-inch SATA storage devices (550 MB/s read, 450-500 MB/s write). Meanwhile, 512 GB SSDs should see some price cuts of their own.
