SSDs Could Approach Cost Parity With HDDs by 2017

While the cost of solid state drives (SSDs) has been falling incrementally for the last three years, it still costs 18 cents per gigabyte more to buy an SSD than a hard disk drive (HDD). However, if price continue to plummet at the present rate then that difference could drop to a difference of 11 cents per gigabyte by 2017, according to the DRAMeXchange. While SSDs are unlikely to ever be cheaper than HDDs, the differential could become negligible.

Alan Chen, Senior Manager of DRAMeXchange, has presented figures that predict that 2.5-inch SSDs will cost 17 cents per gigabyte – compared to HHDs’ 6 cents per gigabyte – by 2017, and that SSD adoption rates in laptops and notebooks should represent 42% of the market during the same year.

“Branded PC vendors and channel distributors are holding back on their SSD purchases due to lower-than-expected notebook sales,” Chen told Computer World. “However, 256GB SSDs will be moving close to price parity with mainstream HDDs in 2016, so the adoption of SSDs in the business notebook segment will rise.”

Though SSD prices have consistently dropped over recent years, HHD prices have remained rather consistent, dropping only 3 cents per gigabyte from 2012 to 2015.