Price comparison service Idealo has been carefully looking at how the flooding in Thailand has had an effect on hard drives, and has found during the manufacturing SNAFU solid state drives were getting even cheaper.
By looking in the channel and monitoring price increases in European retail outlets, it noticed that hard drives suffered a 150 percent price increase. Idealo noticed that the main impact was on 2.5" hard drives, commonly used in notebooks, because the larger 3.5" models are usually manufactured in Malaysia or China. As prices for HDDs rocket, 2.5" SSDs have been falling instead.
70 percent of the top 50 popular SSD drives it monitored on its networks had falling price trends in a wide range of capacities, from 60GB to 1TB. Although SSD prices were already getting cheaper, between 14 - 31 October there was a 10 percent price decrease, falling $1.17 per day. Then, in November, prices dropped five percent more, losing 33 cents from the price tag per day.
Idealo says that SSD prices per GB have dropped five times quicker than before the floods, and that the average between 14 October and 1 December dropped 15 percent. That means that if the rate of decline for SSD prices stayed the same, within a year they'd be competitve with HDDs.
In general, it seems that the flooding in Thailand has proved useful for increasing the adoption of SSDs. The full report, with plenty of graphs to look at, is available here.
A fact also, large capacity SSDs are scarce to find in America since Black Friday (TigerDirect are none, BestBuy nope and on Amazon the prices of older technology of OCZ and others have never fallen, and are ridiculously too high to begin with). So basically, the "This is not my beautiful Super Sexy Drive" is unobtainium for the Hometree; and you suspect that what you’re witnessing is an elaborate price-fixing hoax.
So no. I can't agree that SSDs are cheaper as a rule, and arguably, there are numerous pitfalls out there for punters to get taken for their money caught out when buying SSDs, and especially if they do not know what the "State of the Art" specifications and current values are.
The consumers have still a long way to voyage to wait out this obvious anti-trust conspiracy by the NAND'vi merchant clans who must be out to keep large capacity SSD prices as high as the Hallelujah Mountains and uncompetitive to boot, and all only for their own pie in the sky greed's sake.
Ironically, this has the unintended(?) effect of propping up the blue chip HDD diskeridoo (not that one should be advised to ever forsake HDDs for backups and clone storage and FTL drives).
So in the least for the time being and that for Crimbo, avoid these Super Star Destroyers like the light-plague. It is not the common knowledge, but I heard it from a stranger who knows somebody who should know, "SSDs may cause your Blu Ray to warp into hyperspace". Also, I got a wake-up call this mornin from Higgs Boson__ they say "cut that sh!t out".