How To Test New Cellular Stuff in the Wild?
Slowly but steadily the SSDs in the notebooks in the family keep filling up so at some point in the not too distant future I either migrate from 1 TB to 2 TB SSDs or have to think about strategies to put some of the files to offline/home storage. While I would obviously prefer the first option the reality is that SSD prices haven't dropped much over the past 3 years. Where's Moore's law?
Let's have a look at my SSD history. According to my Amazon account record I bought the first 512 GB SSD back in January 2013 for 323 euros. My capacity needs soon grew beyond this limit so I bought a 1 TB SSD about two years later in September 2014 for 357 euros. Twice the capacity for about the same price, that looked like Moore's law in action.
I've been on a 1 TB drive since but now in August 2017 upgrading to a 2 TB SSD would hurt. Amazon currently has a 2 TB Samsung EVO SSD for around 600 euros and a 1 TB Samsung SSD for 333 euros. In other words, almost three years later the price is still on the same level and twice the capacity would still cost twice as much.
In addition SSDs have become a lot faster and smaller and new notebooks with PCIe NVMe interfaces now support datarates of 3500 MB/s, up from the theoretical 600 MB/s on SATA III that I'm currently using. 1 TB SSDs of Samsung with that interface cost well over 550 euros and 2 TB are only to be had for 1100 euros. Yikes!
So even if we see a significant decline of SSD prices in the next years I'm afraid it will be a long way off before I see a 1 TB PCIe NVMe based SSD for a new notebook for less than 350 euros, let alone a 2 TB drive that will not wait until then.
I suppose the prices will start to drop when most of the notebook manufacturers start using NVMe in their products, which will not be so far in the future.