If there was ever a question as to whether solid state drives would eventually match the price of hard disc drives, Samsung believes it has the answer.
"Flash on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis will reach price parity, at some point, with hard disk drives in the next few years," Brian Beard, Samsung's flash marketing manager, said in an interview with CNet. He explained that flash prices have dropped by 40 percent to 60 percent every year, and they should eventually catch up with HDD.
Because solid state drives rely on several flash chips to store data, adding more of them in a single drive results in a dramatic increase in price, Beard said. For instance, doubling the capaciy of a drive can nearly double the cost. By comparison, most of the components hard disk drives -- such as the spindle, motors, printed circuit board and cables -- have a fixed cost, and increasing capacity doesn't result in major price changes.
Beard said SSD manufacturers and PC makers are in a bind right now, because the pressure's on to match the price of HDD. The cost of chips continues to drop, but it's tough to make a profit. That said, it's not clear what will happen to the price of flash and SSD this year.
The "price-per-gigabyte sweet spot," as CNet describes it, will move from 64 GB to 128 GB on the business side, and from 128 GB to 256 GB for consumers, Baird said. Samsung announced last November that it was putting 256 GB drives into mass production.
