While the HDD market has just a few manufacturers in total, there are now a wide range of manufacturers with their own SSD products, many of which up until recently only specialised in RAM, USB flash drives and memory cards. It has come to the point where the main leading SSD producers are concerned that these smaller peers are offering inferior products, which in turn could hurt the growth of the SSD market.
With falling NAND flash chip prices, the major SSD producers now aim to trigger a price war to force the smaller producers to leave the market. Kingston, Intel, OCZ and Crucial are main ones that intend dropping their SSD prices. These companies also aim to push the industry towards SATA3 by reducing the price difference between SATA2 and SATA3 products. As consumers look to upgrade their existing SATA2 32GB/64GB SSDs to higher capacity 128GB to 256GB SSDs, the SATA3 interface is expected to give consumers another reason to upgrade, besides increased capacity.
From a quick check on several online shops, SSD prices have already fallen quite a lot recently, especially on 240GB to 256GB models. For example, on Amazon UK, the OCZ 256GB Petrol SATAIII SSD starts at £193 inc. delivery at this time of checking. On the other hand, the price gap between low and high performance models is increasing again with the prices on high end SSDs remaining pretty constant. For example, the OCZ Vertex 4 which received many Editors Choice awards in reviews is about £269 inc. delivery on Amazon, a hefty £76 premium over the Octane.
