Am I going nuts or is memory prices getting stupid cheap lately?

I haven't been looking at memory prices the last couple months but this morning I get the usual email about the amazon gold box deals and find this:
http://www.amazon.com …camp=1789&creat​ive=390957

32gb SD card for 21 bucks... DAMN! I remember it wasn't all that long ago a 32gb card would run you 150 or more... especially a class 10 rated card.

I know after a lot of areas over seas had all that flooding hard drive prices had scky rocketed for a while. I saw the price of the WD scorpion blue drives had sky rocketed for a while during the shortages because their main manufacturing facility over there was destroyed. Maybe things are starting to get back on track over there and we will see prices for memory start to plummet to new lows again.

I'm also seeing prices on Solid state drives starting to come to more reasonable numbers as well. That in and of itself if pretty cool seeing as even the worst solid state HDD is still a world of faster than the best standard disk based HDD. I can't wait to start replacing all my computers Hard Disk Drives with solid state ones. I might have to order myself a SS drive here to start using as my main drive for my tower. I've been itching to do that for the last 2 years now but prices have been prohibitive until recently.

Yep! Memory prices have been dropping and will continue to drop in the future.

On the topic of SSD's, I upgraded to a SSD about 6 months ago to use as a boot drive and it's amazing! Boot times and programs start up extremely quick, and I still have a standard HDD and an external HDD for storage.

Memory prices are always going stupid cheap unless there is a fire, flood, patent fight or similar that creates a short-term dip in availability and hence a bump in the prices.

But as the memory prices goes down, our toys adapts and new sw/hw wants more memory. So whatever price the memory is sold at, we will just buy more until we still invest a reasonable chunk of money/year to fill our needs.

Once upon a time, the flash size decided number of contacts and SMS messages in our phones. Then it was number of mails and MP3 tracks. Now it's number of videos.

Our cameras no longer records low-res 8-bit images. And as if it isn't enough to increase spatial resolution and number of bits/pixel, we now also have video in most cameras. And some have audio and maybe data loggers.

In the end, falling memory prices represents huge possibilities for companies that have ideas.

The one thing that HASN'T changed with memory card prices is the inequality between Canada and the USA. I just picked up two 32GB SanDisk Extreme CF cards from B&H. They cost me $221.77 shipped and border fees included. If I were to buy them in Canada, I'd pay $427.26... and that's the sale price. Full price I'd pay $560.40!

It's the same old story told again really - we used to pay a premium for a megabyte!

They go down all the time. Look at SSD, remember when they came out and 32gb was a couple of thousand and now you can pick up a 128 for around $150. And that was maybe 3-4 years ago.

joeblack2022 wrote in post #14478687
It's the same old story told again really - we used to pay a premium for a megabyte!

very true... I remember my first computer, a 386dx or something like that... windows 3.1 OS... lol. That thing had like a 40mb drive or something like that.

RHChan84 wrote in post #14478725
They go down all the time. Look at SSD, remember when they came out and 32gb was a couple of thousand and now you can pick up a 128 for around $150. And that was maybe 3-4 years ago.

So true, it's crazy how much cheaper things have gotten in only the last couple of years and recently the last year. It seems some major break throughs have occurred and now we are looking at massive amount of memory in the same space as only a year or so it seems memory has gone to 6 times the amount of space for the same price. It's insane anymore.

I'm hoping to have the extra funds to replace as many of my hard drives as possible by the end of the year with SSDs. I'd love to get some 500gb SSDs but those are still pretty damn expensive, hell 250gb is pretty expensive still.

I'd like to get at least 2 120ish gb drives, one for OS and all my insane programs and another as a scratch disk, would be nice to have a 3rd as the save to disk as well....

It's a very competitive market. I recall a meeting I had with the VP at intel who ran the memory business. He described it like this "the winner in this segment is the company that can afford to lose money the longest"

Newegg has 256GB SSD for $219. http://www.newegg.com …d&Order=PRICE&P​ageSize=20

I'm still looking daily/weekly for good deals since I want to move to SSD. 256 is not enough for me unless I want to store around 150GB of stuff to an external HD.

If only HDD prices would be doing the same.

ben_r_ wrote in post #14479200
If only HDD prices would be doing the same.

They have been, with the exception of this little snag with Thailand factories getting flooded by water. But look over time at the progression of hard drives.

My first HDD was a 42MB drive for over $900 => $21 / MB
My second HDD was a 320MB drive for $2100 => $6,5 / MB
My third HDD was a 1.37GB drive for $1400 => $1 / MB
My fourth HDD was a 5GB drive for $2700 => $0,54 / MB

A recent disk was 3TB and $200 => $67 / TB => $0,067 / GB => $0,000067 / MB

So a reduction in media cost with a factor of > 300 000.

The impressive thing is that a mechanical HDD contains lots of mechanics - and still they fight and keep up with the electronics competitors in constantly introducing larger and larger disks at a lower and lower introductory price.

pwm2 wrote in post #14479259
They have been, with the exception of this little snag with Thailand factories getting flooded by water. But look over time at the progression of hard drives.

My first HDD was a 42MB drive for over $900 => $21 / MB
My second HDD was a 320MB drive for $2100 => $6,5 / MB
My third HDD was a 1.37GB drive for $1400 => $1 / MB
My fourth HDD was a 5GB drive for $2700 => $0,54 / MB

A recent disk was 3TB and $200 => $67 / TB => $0,067 / GB => $0,000067 / MB

So a reduction in media cost with a factor of > 300 000.

The impressive thing is that a mechanical HDD contains lots of mechanics - and still they fight and keep up with the electronics competitors in constantly introducing larger and larger disks at a lower and lower introductory price.

Ha ha what did you just take it back 30 years there?!! I was talking about the last 2!

ben_r_ wrote in post #14479287
Ha ha what did you just take it back 30 years there?!! I was talking about the last 2!

Yes, but the only reason you haven't seen a large drop in price for a 2-year span is the flooding in Thailand, resulting in a huge lack of disks. The costs are already dropping again but the drop restarted from a higher price.

Doesn't it make you wonder why some folks seem to be afraid to purchase large fast card? Always purchase 2 of the largest, fastest cards you can afford. And at least for CF, that means UDMA 7 cards and a companion UDMA 7 reader hooked up on USB 3.

MCAsan wrote in post #14479347
Doesn't it make you wonder why some folks seem to be afraid to purchase large fast card? Always purchase 2 of the largest, fastest cards you can afford. And at least for CF, that means UDMA 7 cards and a companion UDMA 7 reader hooked up on USB 3.

paranoia is a SOB. But I do like to carry multiple cards, it's always nice to have a back up or 2 around...