While prices for standard mechanical hard drives have stubbornly refused to drop back down to their pre-flooding levels, the prices for solid-state drives have dropped precipitously in the last year: according to some painstaking number-crunching over at The Tech Report, prices for the speedy storage drives have fallen an average of 46% since early 2011.
The price drops have affected SSDs of all capacities from every major manufacturer, including OCZ, Crucial, Samsung, Corsair, and Intel. OCZ's Vertex 3 is one of the most heavily discounted, with drops measuring from 50 to 73 percent depending on drive capacity, while Intel's 320 series SSDs have remained relatively stable since the drive's introduction.
These discounts are explained partly by the fact that technology becomes more affordable as it becomes more common, but there are technical reasons as well: all SSDs have controller chips that play vital part in determining the drive's stability and performance, but most SSD resellers don't manufacture their own controllers, choosing rather to use controllers from companies like Marvell or SandForce. Multiple companies using the same chips in similar products means that one of the easiest ways to differentiate your drive is by dropping prices. Case in point, the Intel 320 SSDs that have more or less retained their price premium since their introduction use one of Intel's proprietary controllers, while the Intel 520-series drives that have fallen along with everyone else use a SandForce controller also used by OCZ, Corsair, and others.
from Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com
