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by
Zsolt Kerekes,
editor |
Want to buy some terabytes (or
petabytes) of SSD
storage?
One confusing factor for buyers and specifiers is that
market prices for SSDs can vary more than 100x to 1 for the same
capacity! With hundreds of oems active in the SSD market and thousands of
product
news announcements - how
can you decide which SSD prices relate to your own needs? And which don't?
This article will bring a sense of clarity and order into what can seem like
a crazy market. |
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the irritating thing about
$$D
pricing!
SSDs are among the most expensive items of computer
hardware many of you will ever buy - with high end models costing more than
high end servers. There's nothing more annoying than spending a large sum of
money on something only to find that someone else you know has just bought the
same thing at a fraction of the price you paid.
Buyers in the SSD
market - who are already confused and irritated enough by the technology
aspects in the SSD shortlisting process - are liable to be stunned by
a new level of random numbers when they look into the issue of pricing.
Why is a terabyte SSD from one company 2x, 5x, 10x or even more than
100x more expensive than another? (And the companies selling those
outrageously costly SSDs keep reporting great business results - so someone
must be buying them - even though other products are much cheaper.) The simple
explanation is - that all SSDs are not the same. And SSDs can do more than
storage. That's why just looking at "capacity" like you would for a
hard drive - does not
give you a true picture of what the product can do - or what it might cost.
a transport analogy for SSD price vs capacity
Outside the SSD market we're already comfortable with
holding seemingly contradictory cost information in our heads - without getting
a headache. Because we know the invisible factors which lie behind apparently
identical purchase decisions.
Let's suppose you need to travel 400
miles for a meeting. Your options are:-
- walk
- bike
- car
- train
- canoe, yacht, raft, speedboat, or river ferry (start and end destinations
have ports on the same river)
- airline (1st class, business class, regular human)
- helicopter
- Airforce One
For the sake of this illustration - the critical distance
you're going to travel is identical. It's 400 miles. But the cost
will vary considerably depending which way you go. And although you may look
at more than one alternative for how to get there - depending what the meeting
is about and your personal resources and preferences - it's unlikely you will
get confused. When it comes to the SSD market - "distance" is like "capacity".
In the travel world - our decision making is simplified by the fact we
filter out a lot of irrelevant choices - which we know from our own experience
are not valid choices.
None of you reading this - are the
President of the USA - so you can instantly filter out the Airforce One
option. It probably never crossed your mind before reading this article.
When
you've learned more about the part of the SSD market -which relates to your
needs - you'll easily be able to filter out confusing price messages. Higher?
Or lower? Who cares? If they're irrelevant you can safely ignore them.
Factors which influence SSD Prices
The main factors which influence SSD pricing are listed in the
table below. I've placed them in order of importance - with the most significant
at the top of the list. |
| Factors which most influence SSD
Prices © 2010 StorageSearch.com |
| Speed |
"Speed" is a catch-all term which
includes latency,
random IOPS
and throughput.
Nearly all these factors can be artificially boosted
to look good in benchmarks - and the numbers don't always translate to
application performance due to
halo effects.
Despite the smoke and mirrors, however, experienced users (and this editor) know
the fastest SSDs
when they see them.
In the right circumstances
server users
will buy the fastest SSDs to achieve application acceleration which is
not technically possible without SSDs, or which costs far more - using
additional servers and hard disks.
For the same SSD storage
capacity - street prices for the fastest SSDs can be more than 200x more than
for entry level SSD products.
Before
2007 - the "Year
of SSD Revolutions" the predominant part of an SSD's cost was the
memory type and memory capacity. After that the
SSD controller too
became a significant part of the product price mix. That was the year it
became clear that even within the constraints of using the same interface, and
memory type some designers in the highly competitive
2.5" and
3.5" SSD markets
could use clever architecture
and knowledge of device characteristics to leverage significantly more
performance out of those memory chips. The result was to make their products
more attractive to users - and gave them the ability to charge a higher price.
Those factors - related to SSD IP - had always been true in the
rackmount SSD
market too - but it was in 2007 that it became easier to make like for like
comparisons. |
| Memory |
Here's a simple rule of thumb based on analyzing
published price data - for identical storage capacity - across a wide range of
commercially available SSDs.
- RAM SSDs cost 9x
more than SLC flash SSDs
- SLC flash SSDs cost 2x to 6x more than classic
MLC flash SSDs (2
bits per cell MLC)
Here are some additional price
complicating factors...
- within fast flash SSDs - the amount of
over-provisioning
could mean you've actually got twice as much memory inside the SSD (or half as
much) as you thought.
- new types of nv memory
such as PRAM, MRAM and RRAM etc could appear in some SSDs in the 2010 to 2012
timeframe - fitting between some of the price boundaries listed above.
Historically
the market ratios between these various SSD memory types has fluctuated a lot
due to demand vs supply, timing of new geometry shrinks, etc. You can get an
idea of the crazy degree of change and direction by seeing the graph in this
classic RAM
vs flash SSD pricing article. |
| Reliability |
Some SSDs have average operational lives which can be 2x, 5x, 10x or even
100x longer than entry level consumer grade SSDs - when they are used in
demanding applications.
Reliability options within the
SSD market - include
internal hardened
data
integrity, enhanced
fault
tolerance or
enhanced
endurance. |
| Interface / Form factor |
Some interfaces and form factors are supported
by more vendors than others.
That means prices may be lower for SSDs
having otherwise similar speed and memory types.
For a complete list
of SSD directories organized by interface type and form factor see the
SSD Buyers Guide. |
| Security & ruggedness |
There are some other features which can be
important in some SSD applications - but which are not present in all SSDs.
Where they are needed - they can impact system cost (for any given capacity) by
anything from 30% to over 300% compared to other devices with a similar speed.
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| Ease of installation |
For server apps - in particular - buying the SSD
is just part of the process.
Getting it to work effectively is
another hurdle to cross. I've examined these issues in a separate article -
SSD ASAPs
(Auto-tuning SSD Accelerated Pools of storage). This discusses the situations in
which it's worth paying more for an SSD ASAP - and those others where it's not -
and where human tuning is more likely to give better performance results at a
lower price. | |
Conclusion
SSD
pricing looks complicated - because it is complicated!
It would
be misleading to claim otherwise. There is no such thing as a "single SSD
market". Just as in the transportation analogy used in this article -
there is no such thing as a single way of getting from point "A" to "B".
But you can takes steps to simplify your own SSD price search. A helpful
tactic is to decide which pricing messages to filter in or out - depending
on which features within the SSD cost model are relevant to your own needs.
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...Later:-
SNIA has set up a resource
page to help users assess the
cost of ownership
factors for flash SSDs.
It includes a
spreadsheet
which was developed by Intel
and a supporting whitepaper -
SSD
TCO - An In-Depth Analysis of Many Important Factors (pdf) - written by
Esther Spanjer
and Dan Le at SMART
Modular Technologies. |
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...Later:- for
professional buyers and marketers there are lots of
market analysts who
provide guidance on the market price of SSDs.
In the consumer market
a particular specialist in real-time price tracking appears to be
PriceG2. |
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| You'll find hundreds more articles about SSD using the site search box
below. |
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Clarifying SSD Prices
Calories
count is an inconvenient issue
for storage searchers hungry to sample
the market's delicacies. | |
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See how much
RAM SSD prices have
changed!
2003
- a 1TB FC RAM SSD from
TMS (2 million IOPS)
cost $1.6 million.
2003 - a 4GB PCI SSD - from
Cenatek - (35,000 IOPS)
cost $3,599.
2008 - a
128GB SAS RAM SSD
from Solid Access
(70,000 IOPS) cost $75,000.
2009 - a 4GB
PCIe RAM SSD from
DDRdrive cost $1,495.
2011 - a
500GB FC RAM SSD from Kaminario
(150,000 IOPS) cost $50,000. | | |
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..."Not
every manufacturer takes product quality seriously.
When an SSD
manufacturer tries to downgrade Nand Flash to
lower the price and
impress consumers, they also pass on the risk
of data loss to consumers." |
...Email from
Renice Technology
(September 2011) warning about
buying SSDs from oems which don't test
and qualify the quality
and compatibility of their raw flash suppliers. | | |
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articles which look at the macro costs of
storage
The
Real Cost of Storage - this wide ranging article by Joerg Hallbauer
(published, April 2009, in GestaltIT )
looks at the lifetime cost of storage in the enterprise.
Settling
the SSD 'High-Cost' Debate - by Amyl Ahola (published June 2009)
compares SSD and HDD array solutions. The principles aren't new - but the
article brings these comparisons up to date.
The Cost of Owning and
Storing Data - by Gene Nagle (published April 1999 in
StorageSearch.com) was one of the
earliest articles which examined this important subject in a consistent way.
Looking
into the far distant future -
Reaching for the
petabyte SSD - by Zsolt Kerekes (published March 2010 in
StorageSearch.com) proposes that
the way we think about storage will change - from being a cost overhead (today)
to being a profit center. More (storage) will be better - if enterprises can
leverage their data (and automatically grow new data) with upcoming SSD and
search-engine enabled software technologies. | |
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| the fastest SSDs |
Speed isn't
everything, and it
comes at a price.
But if you do need the speediest
SSD then wading through the web sites of over 180 current SSD oems to
shortlist products slows you down.
And the SSD search problem will
get even worse as we head
towards a market
with over 1,000 SSD oems. |
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