SSD Price Trends

Community General Discussion
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It’s surprising to me seeing the downward trend on M.2 SSD prices. What’s with that? Not that I’m complaining, mind you.

With the incoming M2 Pro Mac mini @ 1TB replacing my 512GB M1, I need to double my Time Machine storage (rule of thumb according to Apple: 2x the volume you’re backing up). My current one is a nice 2TB SK Hynix Gold P31 partitioned into a 1TB Time Machine volume and 1TB exFAT for backups. I’ll transfer the backup stuff to a new SSD and delete that volume, giving Time Machine 2TB.

But I need more storage for the backup stuff… so, looking on Amazon I was pleased to see so many 2TB M.2 NVMe SSDs at a discount, lots of them “limited time deals” so I seem to have good timing. I picked up a Corsair 3rd gen that Tom’s Hardware says is a good budget 2nd drive. $120. (Plus an enclosure for half-off, $16.)

$120 for such a SSD! It was only six months or so ago that I thought it amazing to see them hovering around the $200 mark. Are they going even lower or is this a good chance to snatch up more storage before the prices increase?

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That looks awesome, and for twice that you can go 4TB - which is SO TEMPTING

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SSDs’ are another example of the tech axiom that the prices are always moving towards zero…

An additional caveat though is that larger cheap drives tend to be on the significantly slower end of the performance scale and long term durability. That may or may not matter depending on what you are doing app and OS wise.

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Yeah, I kept such things in mind on this purchase since it’s just for archiving. Occasional use so the speed isn’t all that important and longevity shouldn’t be a problem with such little use.

For comparison I have two spinning disk 1TB drives that serve the same purpose. Little portable ones that work off the USB port, no extra power needed. They’re 12 years old or so (edit: 2010 & 2012 purchases) and still going strong. But I want to do a copy of all that stuff to a new drive just in case they’re about to age out.

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I nearly did it but managed to stop myself in time. I really don’t need that much. :wink:

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I have a five year old 5TB drive that needs to be replaced and that doesn’t look bad as an alternative.

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Finally gave up my spinning rust having picked up a 4TB SSD.

The pricing hit that sweet spot. $210 for 4TB has me perfectly happy.

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Dang, I think that’s almost exactly what I paid for 2TB one year ago! :exploding_head:

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Man, I wish I could do that but I would be dropping $5K (working through discount volume purchasing) just to convert my ~100TB media storage to solid state.

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So I was watching a video review of the 2018 Intel i9 MacBook Pro 15 to gain perspective on how things have changed and storage upgrade prices in particular struck me.

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Yowzer! We complain about the upgrade costs for current Apple Silicon devices but it sure is incredibly cheaper than it used to be.

But yeah, OEMs (all of them) still stick it to us with the upsells when compared to buying and installing your own SSD upgrades. :money_mouth_face:

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This reminds me of recent scary news about Samsung SSDs:

Note to self: make more frequent backups. I have a 980 Pro 2TB model in my SLS :scream:. Supposedly the latest firmware fixes this, but very alarming nonetheless.

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Amen - uh, where is that Windows version of Time Machine??? :roll_eyes:

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@dstrauss on that note: here’s another relevant Ars article: :slight_smile:

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Interesting - been using iDrive since I started my own practice in Jan 2021

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Onedrive and a 2 TB WD spinner backing up my office. Maybe its time to take advantage of the passage of time and update to solid state.

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Speaking of that, what’s the latest on bit rot, or maybe it should be cell rot? Are these drives really suitable for archiving?

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I can’t find the link ATM, but the latest data I’ve seen is that as of about 2016, SSDs have actually become more reliable overall than spinners.

There are of course always qualifiers to something like that, but for the vast majority it’s true and matches what we’ve seen in the customer base.

Although personally, I still might avoid emmc type storage for archival purposes solely because the EMMC vendors tend to use the cheapest raw materials

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I´d have to search for the source, but a couple of months ago I saw a graph which showed that for the first three years spinners and SSD are about equally reliable, meaning the frequency of read/write errors and failures increases on the same, very shallow slope as time goes by. After that, the frequency of failures of spinners goes significantly up, wheres the failure increase of SSDs remains on the same shallow trajectory.

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@Desertlap & @Pixelpedant : Thanks for the comments. I’m concerned about SSDs used for archival storage because I’ve observed premature block failures on some units that one would have thought would be reliable (i.e., brands that you would recognize)…

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Afaik SSDs aren’t that great for archival purposes in the sense of having a drive that you fill up once and then put in a drawer for a long time because apparently they require at least some power occasionally to keep the cells “active”. However, I’m not sure how long “a long time” would be, but my understanding is that if you are going to connect the drive, say, twice a year or so, it should probably be fine. Anecdotally, I have some older msata drivers around that currently don’t see much use, but seem to still be ok - although I haven’t systematically tested all the data on them (since they don’t really contain anything important).

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