Hardware Crucial M500 SSD 480GB Review

Can Crucial's latest SSD take the mainstream market crown?
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2013/09/16/crucial-m500-ssd-480gb-review/1

 

I have used ssd's for my op sys drive since the first samsung drives were sold on eWiz years ago. Reviewers seem to have become ok with the disparity between the price of ssd's and hard drives like a frog in a pot of slowly heating water. For me at least, using an ssd for storage is still too expensive an option. The other thing that is disturbing is how readily reviewers seem to accept low endurance TLC nand in exchange for marginal reductions in price per gig. TLC nand ssd's should be in price parity with hard drives already. I hope I am not the only poor enthusiast out there who thinks as I do. I just wish reviewers would push the ssd makers to significantly lower the price and not give such high value scores for storage at these prices.

 

I'm not sure SSD's will ever come close to the cost per GB of traditional HDD.
The following article on price trends in the storage market shows that HDDs are back to pre-flood prices, and SSDs grow as $/GB holds steady.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/153879-storage-pricewatch-hdds-back-to-pre-flood-prices-ssds-grow-as-gb-holds-steady

 

Personally I feel that SSDs are steadily reaching the sweet-spot for mainstream adoption. Whilst they may not reach the same price as traditional HDDs for a long time, they certainly have the capability to reach very high adoption rates before then. They offer significant real-world benefits in an office scenario, which is where things could really push manufacturers forward. I've found having an SSD in my work laptop has increased my productivity by a huge margin as opening large PDF files and spreadsheets is now near instantaneous, rather than the 5-15 seconds per document it used to be. This is really handy for naming/labeling purposes, as it not only saves actual time, but it's simply less annoying. It's a lot less painful naming 250 documents when they open really quickly.

Obviously it's too expensive for most businesses to adopt this kind of storage en masse currently, but I don't think they'll need to fall to HDD levels to become competitive.

Once we start getting 500gig drives for say £150, then I believe things will pick up even further. This isn't even taking into account how things like ReRAM could change the sector dramatically in the coming years.