Price War Starts In The SSD Market, Expect Massive Price Drops

word that a price was is starting among the makers of solid state drives. And these are now bound to get a lot more attention from users in the coming months — as street prices drop, and newer, more improved models make their way to the market. What are the signs, you ask? For starters, Micron, one of the primary suppliers of NAND Flash chips (used in these drives) has started to reduce shipment to other manufactures. Instead, the company wants to promote its own line of SSDs that is marketed as Crucial. The idea is to double shipments on quarter, a worthwhile goal. At the same time Kingston, Samsung and SanDisk are also aggressively competing against one another. And the most interesting reason here is the rise of the M.2 form factor. It offers pretty much the same benefits as 2.5-inch SATA drives in a much smaller physical package. And some that make use of PCI Express instead of SATA even reach the insane transfer speeds of 1.8 GB/s. There are suggestions that shipments of M.2 SSDs will exceed those of 2.5-inch SATA. Which could ultimately help the PC industry overall, but manufacturers of tablets, and hybrid machines will also be able to offer increased capacities and speeds at minimum price premiums. Good times, I say.]]>