Why does the 64GB SSD cost $1000?

[hotsauce]

Perhaps, but (again) this is a pointless comparison.

Flash memory such as that found in thumbdrives, iPod Touches, and iPhones is NOT THE SAME as the memory in an SSD. You're comparing a WW I Sopwith Camel to an F-22 Raptor; they're both airplanes, but one is superior to the other and costs more as a result.

Hey, enough with the analogies. We get it, they are different. Care to explain why?

 

[Sun Baked]

This is like saying why does the biggest 4GB FB-DIMMs cost so much, when I can buy 1GB of notebook memory for $30 -- plus they make me buy the FB-DIMMs in pairs, what a rip.

I haven't looked at the SSD drives, but the SW on the drive, the interface, and the memory density all likely factor in to the cost.

At least they are comparing to other products and not saying, Dell sells the same thing for $30...

 

[heatmiser]

Hey, enough with the analogies. We get it, they are different. Care to explain why?

This received a LOL IRL from me. Kudos, sir!

 

[clayj]

Care to explain why?

No, but this guy will:

http://storagemojo.com/2006/10/19/ram-based-ssds-are-toast-yippie-ki-yay/

 

[baypharm]

All new drives are expensive when they are first introduced. I recall back in the late 80's, a 20mb HD cost over 1500 dollars. Not even a gig.

What I wished Apple would have done is use SDHC card rather than SSD's. They are proven technology and 16gb cards class 6 are going for 70 bucks now. 32gb cards are just now coming onto the marketplace.

 

[Krevnik]

What I wished Apple would have done is use SDHC card rather than SSD's. They are proven technology and 16gb cards class 6 are going for 70 bucks now. 32gb cards are just now coming onto the marketplace.

A class 6 SDHC card is still slow. A class 6 only provides about half the speed as the SSD in the Air provides, less than half on paper compared to the SSD's actual read speeds. That same class 6 can't even keep up with the slowest 4200 RPM HDDs on the market on read speed!

The big reason why SSDs are really expensive right now is that they just can't take the same chips used in your SDHC card or thumb drive, and slap them onto an ATA controller. They have to use chips of high enough density that they will fit the enclosure, but also as many chips as possible to keep read/write speed up. Then you have RAM onboard for caching (more than what a traditional HDD uses), the controller chip which is brand new to the market, and so on.

Yes, you can buy 8GB flash chips with a USB microcontroller cheaply enough that you get 64GB for about a third of the price of current SSDs. One of the reasons those chips are so cheap is that /everyone/ uses them. Volumes are high. If people weren't buying them in bulk, they would easily be nearly double the price. But those same chips aren't the ones used in a 64GB SSD drive.

More expensive chips are used, and for a 64GB SSD, you have extra chips in there used for the sole purpose of providing short-term write cache and backup blocks for when flash cells eventually go bad. And of course a controller chip bringing this all together and bridging it to ATA, which is new, and not sold in any volume, since no other device uses it (unlike flash in general, and USB microcontrollers used for thumb drives).