I've noticed for quite a while now that the SDD market has outright stalled. We reached SATA6G and then everything just.....stopped. We got SATA Express, but no makers backed it because it required very high end motherboards to use, so nobody made drives for it despite being 2x faster. And now we have M.2 SSD's, but there is ONLY one drive out on the market for it for high end users, the Samsung SM951. And the kicker is the SM951 absolutely destroys any drive on the market in performance, and its the price of a regular SSD. The Vertex 3 hit the market nearly 5 years ago, and we've only marginally gone uphill since then in terms of SSD performance. Hell the article posted today, my old Crucial M4 is only 50MBps slower than the new cutting edge 6G SSD's out. It feels like to me that us as consumers are being fed lies from snake oil salesman. The promises of "FASTER FASTER FASTER!" are nary but marketing crap, where a 1MBps increase is seen as "AMAZING!" etc. While a few companies are breaking the stagnation of the SSD market with pricing (Samsung again) by offering the lowest prices on high end drives yet, I still wonder why nobody is putting pressure on these companies to make SATAE or M.2 drives. Meanwhile Intel is selling M.2 SSD'd in PCI-E format for something I see amounts to highway robbery, but at the same time They're the ONLY company that's willing to push beyond the old 6G constraints. We need to start putting pressure on SSD makers to start giving us drives worth the moniker of "AWESOME", and not just simple refreshes on products that cost nearly the same as the last ones, but just marginally faster with a new coat of paint.
Maybe I'm insane, but I'm not particularly craving more speed from my SSDs. I want higher capacity and lower $/GB. High capacity and somewhat reasonably priced 4-6TB SSDs would be spectacular for a NAS. Insane speeds without the horrible rebuild times if a drive were to go bad. Not only that but a 2TB SSD would allow me to run a single internal drive on my machine. Plenty of room for an OS, programs and any game I want to have installed, plus a bit extra for local storage.
Yep, first give us capacity, then we'll talk about speed. The only time speed would be of concern is in massive file transfers. Its not everyday I transfer 500gb of files around, and even if I could my SSDs dont have the capacity to hold it.
Except we're not given vast capacity increases for price unless one of the big names does it. So far the only huge pushes I've seen for SSD pricing have some from Samsung, Micron falling into line instantly afterwards. This is what I'm talking about, unless there's some kind of "Push" other SSD markers are just content to sit all day on current performance/pricing issues. We want better, not barely marginal better.
I think we've been moving along quite well with SSD tech so far. If you think about it, seven years ago an 80GB SSD cost $595 http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614 And now you can get an SSD that's 12.5 times bigger and costs $250 less. (1TB Samsung 850 EVO @ $341.99) Like I said, the next big SSD advancement isn't speed, but capacity. SSDs already max out SATA6 bandwidth. If you want speed, next up is M.2 and SATA Express. The problem with these two interfaces is they've yet to become mainstream. It's yet to trickle down to regular users. I'm waiting for larger capacity drives at lesser costs. I'd like to build a NAS out of SSDs but the capacity and price isn't there yet. I could build one now, but to get 18TB of space I'd need to get a 12-bay Synology unit ($3,000), then buy 11 2TB Samsung 850 EVOs ($8,800). And I can't quite justify $12,000 for 18TB of space.... When was the last time we had a large advancement in personal computing tech by a small company?
As much as I enjoy faster and faster tech, we're already at the point of diminishing returns. I run a dual array of SSD's, one for my OS and one strictly for games. Loading times are still determined by CPU, RAM, and Video cards (and the game engine) moreso than anything else. Even GTA V sees only a minor improvement when on a SSD.
That's what I would think would occur. At some point, all this crazy HD speed is going to get bottlenecked elsewhere in the system. I for one like how the prices have dropped in the past couple years. 5 years ago, an SSD was an expensive luxury, now, it's a crucial part of any new gaming build.
This. I have three 128gb ssd's becouse i dont want to spend 170€ on 256gb. 850 evo is amazing, never had that fast ssd before, now i need more capacity, not speed.
I'm more interested in the price coming down too Would love an M.2 512GB drive for my upcoming Z170 based build, but they are not cheap, much cheaper to go with a traditional 500GB SSD like a Samsung Evo 550
I want more capacity as well, my 1TB Samsung SSD was $400 when I bought it. I'm at 800GB of the formatted 932GB. Although I do have a lot of games I can just uninstall.
Except there HAS been innovation, along the lines of steadily decreasing prices, improved durability/stability, as well as increasing capacities (1TB+ now). Performance has also gone up, notably in random IO across the board. Previously, SSDs at ~0.50$/GB were only for the cheap low end drives. Now you can pick up a MX/BX, EVO, various Intel/Sandisk/etc. knowing you are getting good performance at a good price as well (just bought a 480GB Extreme Pro for <$210 a week ago). Loading times between a, say budget drive MX100 against a 850 Pro however, aren't really different. There is little point in boosting speeds (especially sequential) if we are talking about consumer workloads. The other reason why it has been stagnant is that like any other industry, a couple of years ago the SSD/flash market was still new. It has since matured, similarly to how the smartphone SoC race has largely stalled. Sure, they can slap more channels and brute force a faster SSD, but there is absolutely no use for consumers. Innovation is occurring elsewhere, like Intel's NVMe drives, but again, those are for workstations and servers. Finally, Samsung, Toshiba, and Micron commands the NAND market (in that order, with Hynix rounding it out). Therefore it isn't too hard to see why Samsung and Micron (Crucial) are leading the SSD market. Toshiba (Sandisk and recently, OCZ) was more focused on the flash drive/memory card market instead of SSDs (at least in retail), but is now taking it more seriously. This year should also be where other manufacturers are transitioning to 3D NAND.
SATA hit it limit. Now we look into PCI-express SSDs. Oh look, what is it? Skylake with UEFI PCI-express boot support! The day soon to come when we start to buy new CPUs because of better UEFI support, rather than performance.
Human nature? we want faster, because now we use to speed increases SSD offered, we now desire more. Similar with cpu's, let's face it none of us are impressed when Intel releases new cpu with 5% boost to speeds.
We need larger capacity drives with higher consistent performance and better STEADY STATE performance
