Plain and simple, solid state drives (SSDs) still cost too much for mainstream adoption. That epiphany seems to have hit Kingston’s Scott Chen, VP of sales for Asia Pacific, who says that the price premium of SSDs over hard drives needs to drop by about 20 percent from the current 40 percent to drive widespread adoption.
Great, step one is identifying the problem, and step two would be fixing it. Sometimes it takes a give-and-take between consumers and manufacturers to prove there’s a market for certain technology, but in this case, the ball is squarely in the manufacturers’ court.
As it stands, the average cost of 1GB of NAND stands at $2.50, which would explain the horrible price-to-capacity ratio of SSDs compared to hard drives. According to Chen, the cost of 1GB of NAND needs to drop below $1 before we’ll see any kind of widespread adoption of SSDs.
Chen isn’t the only one who thinks so. Back in August, market research firm pegged $0.40 per GB as the price point NAND memory will need to hit before SSDs can become competitive with traditional HDDs.
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