"When NAND pricing first fell below the $1 level at the end of 2008, many observers opined that its would sound the starting gun for solid state storage, allowing the technology to be cost competitive with Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) in PCs for the first time," says Yang. "However, during the following quarters, pricing rose because of strong demand and constrained production capacity, limiting the appeal of SSDs to low-volume servers in data centers and preventing widespread adoption in high-volume business and consumer PCs."
While any price drop in SSDs will probably help sales, at $1 per gigabyte the technology is still much, much more expensive than conventional hard drives. Hard drive space costs less than $0.10 per gigabyte on average, making it just a tenth as expensive as SSD space. While the speed advantages of SSDs are tempting, so is the prospect of either paying less for the same amount of space, or paying more for ten times the amount of space. The $1 per gigabyte price might stimulate OEM sales and encourage laptop and even desktop manufacturers to use them in systems, but it's still a hefty price to pay for consumers to accept.
