The Solid State Disk (SSD) market is heavily competitive and we're seeing the first signs of benefits for consumers as at the moment the prices of SSDs are rapidly declining, according to analysts. In 2010 the price per GB was about $3,- currently it's close to $1,- per GB. Especially the last four months the prices have tumbled, and went down from $1.5 to $1,- per GB. Analysts expect that prices per drive will remain the same but that the drives will have more capacity over time.
This means that we probably won't see the market flooded with $25,- 128 GB SSD drives but that the price per drive will remain at about $100,- for which you will get a 256 GB drive instead of 128 GB in the coming time. This ensures that manufacturers will continue to have healthy margins.
Although the prices of SSDs are decreasing, price wise per GB they are still not competitive to HDDs which saw a price increase at the beginning of this year due to floods in Thailand. This destroyed a large production facility which created a supply issue and resulted in increase prices of HDDs.
Prices have come down since then but even when they were high HDDs were about 9 times cheaper per GB. Although the popularity of SSD drives is rapidly growing the amount of drives sold in retail is still considered a niche and the volume of the sales can't be compared to the volumes of HDDs and DRAM sold.
The article also states that Intel and Samsung are the biggest players, followed OCZ, Crucial and Kingston and it ends with the remark that Intel drives are recognized for being dependable but slow and OCZ is struggling with reliability of their drives.
