Black Friday could be your last chance for a SSD deal before price rises kick in

[ZLoth]

From TechRadar:

Black Friday could be your last chance for a great SSD deal before price rises kick in
Thinking of buying an SSD? Get one for Black Friday, or your wallet may regret it

Earlier this year, SSD prices were falling, but of late, we've heard some buzz about this situation being reversed – and here's another piece of chatter about the cost of solid-state drives potentially heading upwards.

Tom's Hardware brought our attention to a DigiTimes report which claims (add seasoning, as ever) that Phison, a manufacturer of memory controllers for SSDs (and some drives too), is prepaying chip suppliers to ensure that it has enough NAND chips in stock for its needs going forward.

FULL ARTICLE HERE

[Max Rockatansky]

There isn't a compelling enough reason yet found by humanity to get me to shop in a Big Box retail store on Black Friday.

[ZLoth]

Just as a reality check, I thought I would check the prices from one year ago to now...

• Solidigm P41 Plus Series 1TB - ~$90 one year ago, Ordered on Nov 8 2023 for $49.99
• Solidigm P41 Plus Series 2TB - $168.77 on Nov 14 2022, Ordered on Nov 9 2022 for $129.99, Current Price $106.99
• Samsung 990 PRO 1TB (No Headsink) - ~189-$199 one year ago, Currently $79.99, was as low as $59.99
• Samsung 990 PRO 2TB (No Headsink) - ~289-$313 one year ago, Ordered on Nov 3 2023 for $129.99 which is near it's all time low

When I build my main computer one year ago, I purchased the Soidigm P41 2TB because, at $130, it was still a decent performer with a sequential read speed of 3929 MB/second and sequential write speed of 3279 MB/second. I figured I would wait until the prices dropped in a year's time, and they sure did. I purchased two Samsung 990 PROs with a much faster with a sequential read speed of 7083 MB/second and a sequential write speed of 6806 MB/second and put them in my main box. I then moved the 2TB P41 to my secondary box for ripping and displaying weather forecasts and replacing a recycled PNY 960GB SSD which I had purchased in 2016 with a read speed of 550 MB/second and a write speed of 535 MB/second.

Ironically, I also located an order for a Samsung SM951 128GB NVMe drive purchased in mid-June, 2016 as a boot drive for my TrueNAS box for $100. That PCI-Express 3.0 drive had a Max sequential read of "Up to 2000 MBps" and a Max Sequential write of "Up to 600 MBps", The motherboard is a SuperMicro X11SAE-M which only supports PCIe 3.0 x4 anyways, plus in actual use, it isn't used much beyond boot-up.

Still, it's is surprising how much solid state drives have dropped in the past few years. We'll see what happens next year.

[ZLoth]

There isn't a compelling enough reason yet found by humanity to get me to shop in a Big Box retail store on Black Friday.

Then... don't.

From my experience, Amazon often matches the brick-and-morter stores when it comes to Black Friday pricing. For the 990 Pro 2TB drive, the price was $130 at Amazon, $135 at Best Buy and Newegg, and $150 at Walmart.

[Rothman]

Just bought a 1TB thumb drive.  Works for me...

[kalvado]

Just bought a 1TB thumb drive.  Works for me...

Losing more data at once is now easier than ever!

[Rothman]

Just bought a 1TB thumb drive.  Works for me...

Losing more data at once is now easier than ever!

*shrug*.  Never lost data with a thumb drive.  I've only had to upgrade for more space and my old ones are still functioning after a decade or even decades.

[kalvado]

Just bought a 1TB thumb drive.  Works for me...

Losing more data at once is now easier than ever!

*shrug*.  Never lost data with a thumb drive.  I've only had to upgrade for more space and my old ones are still functioning after a decade or even decades.

[Max Rockatansky]

Just bought a 1TB thumb drive.  Works for me...

Losing more data at once is now easier than ever!

Every SSD I've owned has failed eventually.  I've never had a flash drive or SD card fail though. 

[Rothman]

Just bought a 1TB thumb drive.  Works for me...

Losing more data at once is now easier than ever!

*shrug*.  Never lost data with a thumb drive.  I've only had to upgrade for more space and my old ones are still functioning after a decade or even decades.

I don't understand why anyone would let that happen.

[kalvado]

Just bought a 1TB thumb drive.  Works for me...

Losing more data at once is now easier than ever!

*shrug*.  Never lost data with a thumb drive.  I've only had to upgrade for more space and my old ones are still functioning after a decade or even decades.

I don't understand why anyone would let that happen.

Nobody does until it happens to them. And they still don't understand why

[ZLoth]

Every SSD I've owned has failed eventually.  I've never had a flash drive or SD card fail though.

I've had hard disks, SSDs, microSDs, and even USB flash drives crash. Thats why I have my computers back up to a file server in my home, and that file server, in turn, backs up to a cloud backup service while I'm sleeping at night.

Just bought a 1TB thumb drive.  Works for me...

Different use case. A USB "thumb drive" is used for the transfer of files and is often limited by the port you are hooking up to (USB 2 is slower than USB 3). NVMe and SSDs help speed up the start of your computer in comparison with hard disc drives. In terms of transfer speeds, NVMes are the fastest, followed by SSDs, followed by Hard Drives.

[NWI_Irish96]

There isn't a compelling enough reason yet found by humanity to get me to shop in a Big Box retail store on Black Friday.

It takes a pretty compelling reason just to get me to leave my house on Black Friday.

[jeffandnicole]

There isn't a compelling enough reason yet found by humanity to get me to shop in a Big Box retail store on Black Friday.

It takes a pretty compelling reason just to get me to leave my house on Black Friday.

Ive Black Friday'ed shopped before, but now there's just nothing terribly interesting out there that I need. And honestly based on Black Friday of a year ago, it's pretty much any other ordinary shopping day. Certainly nowhere near the lines and traffic there used to be.

[Rothman]

Just bought a 1TB thumb drive.  Works for me...

Losing more data at once is now easier than ever!

*shrug*.  Never lost data with a thumb drive.  I've only had to upgrade for more space and my old ones are still functioning after a decade or even decades.

I don't understand why anyone would let that happen.

Nobody does until it happens to them. And they still don't understand why

Things don't just happen.  People must make silly decisions first to allow such things to happen.

[vdeane]

Just bought a 1TB thumb drive.  Works for me...

Might want to check that you actually have 1 TB.  Fraudulent thumb drives are all over the place, and they even report the fraudulent storage amount to Windows.  Of course, once you try to read files that are beyond the real storage capacity, you find that there's nothing there...

https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm

[Rothman]

Just bought a 1TB thumb drive.  Works for me...

Might want to check that you actually have 1 TB.  Fraudulent thumb drives are all over the place, and they even report the fraudulent storage amount to Windows.  Of course, once you try to read files that are beyond the real storage capacity, you find that there's nothing there...

https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm

Yeah, I made sure.  Staying away from the no-name drives mentioned in that link cuts down the probability considerably.

[ZLoth]

From Tom's Hardware:

PSA: Why Black Friday Might Be Your Last Chance for Years to Get a Great SSD Deal
SSDs are likely to get a lot more expensive in 2024, thanks to production cuts and increasing demand.

For the past few years, falling solid-state drive (SSD) prices have been one of the few bright spots for PC component consumers (or PS5 upgraders) looking for a sweet deal. As capacities increased and faster PCIe 4.0 (and then PCIe 5.0) drives became readily available, the best SSDs steadily became more and more affordable. And then in early 2023, prices basically fell off a cliff, dropping 15-30% in the first few months and another 25% in the three months after that. The middle months of this year have literally been the best time to buy an SSD ever.

But as nice as that kind of price dropoff is for consumers, it's terrible for companies who have to saddle the massive costs of the equipment and fabs required to make SSDs. So throughout the year, we've seen Samsung, Micron, and Kioxia (formerly Toshiba) cut production of the NAND flash that SSDs are built around. And Western Digital and Kioxia attempted a merger that, when it fell apart, saw WD announce plans to split its hard drive and SSD divisions into two companies – a surprising move given WD only solidified itself as a major player in SSDs when it bought SanDisk in 2016. Clearly, things aren't great in the memory business, with multiple players reporting losses and Samsung profits tanking 95% earlier this year.

FULL ARTICLE HERE

SSD Price Index: Cheapest Price on 1TB, 2TB and 4TB Models
Updated daily, this list shows the lowest US prices on major SSD models.

You can almost always use more or faster SSD storage. Whether that's upgrading from a PCIe 3.0 drive to a faster, PCIe 4 or 5 boot drive or adding on a second, 2TB disk for data storage, you want to get the lowest SSD Price possible.

FULL ARTICLE HERE

[ZLoth]

Just bought a 1TB thumb drive.  Works for me...

Losing more data at once is now easier than ever!

*shrug*.  Never lost data with a thumb drive.  I've only had to upgrade for more space and my old ones are still functioning after a decade or even decades.

The reason why they seem to last "forever" is that you are probably not using them continuously for storage. You are plugging in the device, copying the data, and taking it out again. I'm talking about system-level drives that are internal to your computer that speed up the boot time and the launch of programs. These tend to have faster read/write speeds than USB flash drives. It also depends on the make/model of the USB drives... the lower the price, the slower the speeds. Plus, the small size of a USB thumb drive makes it easier to lose. I picked up two 256GB USB sticks to use as emergency boot drives for $15 each, with multiple repair utilities managed by YUMI.

Like I said, I had SSD drives fail, I had HDD fail, and I had USB thumb drives fail or get lost. The only drive that I did not have fail is a NVMe drive, and the only drive that has been in use for over a year has been the boot drive of my TrueNAS server. I'm currently investigating one of the HDDs in a RAIDZ2 configuration that started to throw I/O errors an hour ago. A reboot seemed to clear the issue, and I'm running tests now, but a run to Microcenter tomorrow for a standby replacement is on the agenda. This is on a personal TrueNAS server that has run continuously since 2016 minus a week-long period where it was moved from Sacramento to Dallas, and a complete drive swapout occurred in September, 2021 when one of the drives failed and I upgraded all the drives to larger sizes.

[ZLoth]

Several months later.... and those Samsung 990 Pro 2TB drives that I paid $130 each for are now $189. The price of a 1TB drive is now $115. Looks like I'm going to make due for a while.

[Scott5114]

Meanwhile the company probably spent $6 to make them. It's all a racket.

[Bruce]

The Walmarts in my area recently decided to clearance most of their WD SSDs. I picked up a 1TB SATA SSD for $25, which is a pretty decent deal.

[ZLoth]

Meanwhile the company probably spent $6 to make them. It's all a racket.

It's the NAND Flash memory prices that are jumping like crazy.

[ZLoth]

From TechSpot: SSD Pricing Update, Q2 2024: A Rising Trend for Storage

[Bobby5280]

Regarding those cheap USB memory sticks (or jump drives, thumb drives or whatever anyone wants to call them): I would not store any files on those things that wasn't already backed up separate volumes elsewhere. Those devices can and do fail.

Yesterday at my workplace our large format RIP printing application was crashing only 20 or so seconds after launch because of a corrupt file that was loaded into the print queue from a failing USB memory stick. A few years ago I bought a SanDisk 128GB USB memory stick that went bad only about a month after buying it.

When I'm driving my pickup I'll sometimes play albums of music from a portable SSD plugged into one of the USB ports. I have at least several hundred full albums stored in the SSD in 320kb MP3 format. I tried dubbing off my collection onto a 128GB USB memory stick to give to my brother. His vehicle and even the media player in mine would index only so many song files off that memory stick. I had to divide it onto multiple 32GB sticks for him to see all the song files. Those memory sticks have far slower access times than a SSD.