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Any guesses when 1TB SSD drives will drop in price?

td2243

td2243

Cancelled
Original poster
Mar 14, 2013
382
247
Santa Fe, NM
I'm about to start an editing project that is 287gb. I would love to buy the biggest internal drive available, but $1000 for 1TB is just a ton of money. Anybody have any good estimations when that might become more reasonable?

I have a ton of external space, but working off the main drive is always faster...it seems. Even a 512GB seems small nowadays.
 
I just got a Samsung 840 Evo 1TB SSD for $529, zero tax and free shipping from Amazon. That's almost 50% off your $1000. :)
 

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wonderspark said:
I just got a Samsung 840 Evo 1TB SSD for $529, zero tax and free shipping from Amazon. That's almost 50% off your $1000. :)
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Hmmm....the question now is whether we can change that out on the nMP or not. I'm assuming there is only one slot correct?
 
The nMP uses a different type of connection. Its a PCIe fitting and I am not sure its an industry standard one.

There is only the one slot tho, and it can be upgraded, but as to how much they will be and when is anyones guess.
 
I'm totally mistaken. The nMP is that PCI Flash razzamatazz, so that probably won't come down for awhile. Keep in mind, I know nothing of what I am talking about. :eek:
 
td2243 said:
I'm totally mistaken. The nMP is that PCI Flash razzamatazz, so that probably won't come down for awhile. Keep in mind, I know nothing of what I am talking about. :eek:
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Don't put yourself down - its pretty new to a lot of folks (including myself). :)

I am sure OWC will be one of the first on the case when the nMP is available anyways.

Personally if I do get one I shall likely go with the standard and lob an 2.5" SSD in a thunderbolt or USB3 external.

and its a shame as those EVO 1TB are very nice (got one of em myself - whoosh)
 
Don't forget that the nMP SSD is supposedly rated to speeds around 1.3gb/s in read/write. Thats a heck of a lot faster than the Samsung EVO :)
 
However, if you need more than 1TB, the speed is irrelevant, because you'll be using something external, and slower. I can drop three 1TB SSDs into my Mac Pro and connect them to my SATA3 RAID card, and have 3TB at 1500MB/second internally. In fact, I can hook up eight of them and have about 3600MB/second internally on a 8TB array, if I really want to go nuts. There was a guy that maxed out this Areca 1880ix-12 way back in 2011...Faster than anything on Thunderbolt today.
 
wonderspark said:
However, if you need more than 1TB, the speed is irrelevant, because you'll be using something external, and slower. I can drop three 1TB SSDs into my Mac Pro and connect them to my SATA3 RAID card, and have 3TB at 1500MB/second internally. In fact, I can hook up eight of them and have about 3600MB/second internally on a 8TB array, if I really want to go nuts. There was a guy that maxed out this Areca 1880ix-12 way back in 2011...Faster than anything on Thunderbolt today.
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Or I could just spend $800 extra to get a 1TB SSD and not have to worry about RAID, have it warranted, have it internal, and have it just as fast.
 
td2243 said:
I'm totally mistaken. The nMP is that PCI Flash razzamatazz, so that probably won't come down for awhile. Keep in mind, I know nothing of what I am talking about. :eek:
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It isn't so much PCI-e that will likely keep the Mac Pro 2013 1TB prices higher as much as the limited space on the card. The connector isn't as material as being limited to the Flash chips can use to implement the drive. The smaller card space means fewer. That can be somewhat offset in some situation by stacking more flash dies in a chip packages but that adds to costs.

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costabunny said:
The nMP uses a different type of connection. Its a PCIe fitting and I am not sure its an industry standard one.
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Up until recently there haven't been standards for PCI-e SSDs. Now there are and Apple seems to be following into step.

http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/2013-macbook-air-ngff-pcie-ssd-review/

The Mac Pro's may have some minor deviations from M.2 (NGFF) standards but probably not that far off. There are a couple competing standards way of going about SSDs over PCI-e ( SATA express and another ) but the standards are catching up to what Apple is deploying and there is much of a good reason for them to wander too far off the standards path.


There is only the one slot tho, and it can be upgraded, but as to how much they will be and when is anyones guess.
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It is still open but not completely out of the picture that it is a matter of time more so than being closed off. I'm not sure many are going to want to trade off speed for cost, so the alternatives will need some "next generation" controllers to turn in similar or better benchmarks. Those are just now trickling into the market for 3rd parties to get their hands on for volume production.
 
sboerup said:
Or I could just spend $800 extra to get a 1TB SSD and not have to worry about RAID, have it warranted, have it internal, and have it just as fast.
Click to expand...

As I said, if you need more than 1TB of space, then no, you *won't* be able to just spend $800 extra, have it internal, and have it just as fast.
 
Ohh okay, yeah I was like what the hell amazon. They had it for $489.99 on Cyber Monday...I had it in my cart and then decided to not get it, now I am kicking myself!
 
On Cyber Monday Amazon had the Crucial M500 960GB SSD for $429 which I thought was a pretty good price. Put one in my Mini along with a 1.5TB HGST hard disk. :cool:
 
costabunny said:
The nMP uses a different type of connection. Its a PCIe fitting and I am not sure its an industry standard one.

There is only the one slot tho, and it can be upgraded, but as to how much they will be and when is anyones guess.
Click to expand...

Based on the images, it's using the non-standard Apple implementation of NGFF / M.2 that's found across their entire product line. Basically they changed the key size and 2 pins.
 
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handheldgames said:
Based on the images, it's using the non-standard Apple implementation of NGFF / M.2 that's found across their entire product line. Basically they changed the key size and 2 pins.
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You are likely correct.

There are docs out there explaining the various keying options for PCIe, SATA, and WiFi/BlueTooth devices. This article covers some of the detail. From what is pictured, though, it is apparent that Apple uses their own keying:

http://www.thessdreview.com/daily-news/latest-buzz/understanding-m-2-ngff-ssd-standardization/
 

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td2243 said:
I'm about to start an editing project that is 287gb. I would love to buy the biggest internal drive available, but $1000 for 1TB is just a ton of money. Anybody have any good estimations when that might become more reasonable?

I have a ton of external space, but working off the main drive is always faster...it seems. Even a 512GB seems small nowadays.
Click to expand...

Hopefully before I buy my next computer in 2-3 years :)
 
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