Toshiba Does Not Expect SSDs to Become Commodity in Short Term.

07/23/2012, by Anton Shilov

While some of the manufacturers of solid-state drives advertize $0.65/per gigabyte price on the new SSDs, Toshiba Corp. believes that it will take time for solid-state storage to become a commodity. To summarize, SSDs are not going to get cheaper than they are today.

"The NAND memory community is continuing to develop new technology which will improve capacity and lower cost per GB in each lithography change. As we move to SSDs based upon 1x nm NAND, we will enable higher capacity and lower cost SSDs. However, there are significant costs required to increase NAND Fab capacity and technical challenges must be overcome to make lithography changes. Because of this, there will continue to be a significant difference between the cost per GB of SSDs and HDDs, said Joel Hagberg: Joel Hagberg, vice president of marketing at Toshiba America, in an interview with X-bit labs .

Although the average selling price of SSDs is impossible to tell, the ASP of hard drives is still much lower than the price of solid-state drives. Apparently, it is not going to get lower soon.

"Even though SSD prices will continue to drop over time, they will not approach the commodity storage range of hard disk drives for a very long time," added Mr. Hagberg.