So here we are, early December, and you know now is the season for good hardware prices. Maybe you’re looking for new ways to improve your department/business’s productivity or storage potential. The development team has been hankering for another test machine, a couple more TBs, and the latest upgrades. And of course, the prices on Newegg are looking good for that nice home computing setup. And few pieces of hardware are looking snazzier than solid-state drives.
SSD’s have been around for a while, of course. But maybe this year you’re noticing how the storage space has increased per the prices, and the drives are looking more efficient and longer living. There are a lot of sales this year, and more brands involved for more choice. And you really, really want systems that boot in under 10 seconds. You even find yourself perusing articles discussing the best SSD per price point.
Hear that? That’s your financially sound conscience talking to you, and you should listen. Because despite the improvements, now is not the time to get that tantalizing SSD upgrade, especially for enterprise use.
Things are undeniably better in today’s SSD market than last year’s. And next year, it will be better again. It’s one of the oldest axioms of technology. But you’ve got to upgrade sometime, right? Don’t worry – before too many years optical disc drives will be a thing of the past, and we’ll all be upgraded to SSD. But we’re not there yet, and today SSD’s are still too pricy and unreliable for most enterprise use.
For one thing, now is just a particularly bad time to be buying hard drives. Last month’s devastating floods in Thailand have significantly hampered the country that supplies 40% of the world’s hard drives. This alone has driven up drive prices, with Western Digital only restoring operations to their flooded factories a week ago.
Moreover, the price per gigabyte is still simply too high. Prices of course vary, but still are hovering around $1.50 – $2.00 per GB. And of course, opting for lower cost drives could lead to reliability issues and raising the chance of catastrophic data loss.
So while the future is definitely in solid state, we think the time is still a but premature to pull the trigger on the big expensive upgrade. While it is the season to buy, it isn’t the year. But hold tight, because that milestone is most assuredly on its way.