When will SSDs become cheaper?

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I looked on YouTube to see the speed of SSDs vs HDD and they are super fast. I plan on getting a Macbook this year and I see that Apple offers a 256GB SSD drive. The capacity is right up my alley but the cost is still too high. It's about $850 when the 250GB HDD is included. I hear that SSDs are lowering in cost about every 4 months so hopefully a 256GB SSD will only be $250 or less by November. I hear they have fast read/write speeds, are lighter, have no moving parts and have high durability but also have limited write cycles compared to HDD. Hopefully they can fix this by the time I buy one because SSDs are the future of storage. Will you guys be getting an SSD in the near future?
 

cwa107


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It depends. There are two kinds of SSDs - MLC and SLC. MLC SSDs are the drives that you're seeing drop in price, and that's because although they're faster in read speeds, they are extremely slow for write speeds (much slower than normal hard drives).

SLC drives are less prevalent and are mostly holding their values, these are the drives that are high performance both in reads and writes.

Personally, I'm waiting for the technology to mature. I think it's going to be awhile. For right now, the performance disparity is not great enough to make me want to switch.
 
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Ahh, I see. That does change things. I guess I can stick with HDD for the moment. Which ones are Apple using? The price has changed for some of them so I guess it's the MLC ones.
 

cwa107


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I honestly don't know, but with the prices they're charging, I'd hope they're SLCs.

If I were you, I'd buy it with a hard drive and replace it sometime down the road if you feel the need to. It's as simple as swapping the drive mechanism, which is a user-serviceable part on all MacBook and MacBook Pros since the latest update. And honestly, it will be a lot cheaper from a 3rd party, and you'll know exactly what you're getting.
 
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Yeah, I'm thinking of just getting a Macbook with a 320GB HDD, keep it for 4 years and when SSDs are cheaper and more developed then I'll get it. They'll most likely fix the write speeds and cycles by then so no need to get ahead of myself.
 
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They'll get cheaper when more people start buying them, thus giving manufacturers incentive to increase production, whereby increased volume will decrease manufacturing costs.
 
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Saw that. One has to wonder what they need chips in that kind of quantity for.

If they design it properly, they might all fit in a Mac Mini ;D
 

cwa107


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100 million 8GB chips. Seriously... even if they were installing 4 apiece in a new generation iPhone, that would mean 25 million units they intend to sell in fairly short order.

My guess (and I'm sure we'll see plenty of speculation on this), is that they're going to install 8 in a netbook type device.
 
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I'm wondering how much longer the Macbook Air is going to be around because if Apple makes a Macbook Mini then why would they need the Macbook Air? The Macbook Air is expensive, very light and is low on processing power. The netbook would be inexpensive, light and low on processing power. People would just go with the netbook instead.
 

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