Average solid-state drive prices have fallen from 99 cents per gigabyte in 2012 and continues to fall this year as a consumer can now purchase a 1 TB SSD for only $170. Replacing HDD to SSD in a five-year-old computer would suffice to make old PCs feel like new ones.
Personal computer components have been getting faster over the last five years, including routers, memory cards, motherboards, chipsets, GPUs, CPUs and so on. By far, nothing has offered performance boosts of a solid-state drive this decade or so.
Upgrading a five-year-old PC that uses hard disk drives to solid-state drives may be enough to make computers feel brand new and performance-wise faster than it was before. However, solid-state drives have always had a high price as compared to hard disk drives with similar storage sizes. However, consumers are putting themselves at a disadvantage if they are purchasing a new PC without an SSD.
A desktop or laptop HDD that offers 1 TB of storage is priced around $50 to $80. For that sum of money, consumers can only get an SSD that offers storage space of around 120 GB to 240 GB. However, prices for SSDs have fallen over the years.
According to Computerworld, solid-state drive prices have dropped from 99¢ per gigabyte in 2012, about 68¢ per gigabyte in 2013, and around 39¢ per gigabyte in 2015. Also, the price drop in flash memory products should keep a healthy competition between NAND, SSDs and HDDs in the next couple of years as computer storage technology innovates, and costs go downward.
Projections for the price drop of HDDs according to DRAMeXchange from 24¢ per gigabyte in 2016 to as much as 17¢ per gigabyte in 2017 will force solid-state drives to lower their price to as much as $170 for a 1 TB SSD. This is good news for upgrade enthusiasts. Nevertheless, price drops will slowly spur PCs to adopt the new technology as well over time.
Hard disk drives are not getting any faster, and solid-state drives will continue to improve. Along with flash memory technology, new innovations for laptops and desktops will be continuously introduced in the future.
