Since 2010, solid state drive (SSD) prices have plummeted 300% since 2010, this year reaching what researchers call the magic price point of $1-per-gigabyte of capacity.
After dropping 20% in the second quarter of 2012 alone, SSD prices fell another 10% in the second half of the year, according to data from IHS iSupply.
The better deals for SSDs are now around 80- to 90-cents-per-gigabyte of capacity, though some sale prices have been even lower, according to Ryan Chien, an IHS SSD and storage analyst.

Oversupply of NAND flash memory is primarily behind the price drops over the past couple of years, but manufacturing is now more in line with demand and prices have begun to stabilize, Chien said.
Last year, SSD prices dropped 23%, according to commerce tracking site Dynamite Data.
Dynamite Data said it has monitored the price, rebate and stock status of more than 600 individual SSDs at hundreds of e-commerce merchants over the past three years. In August, it noted in a blog post that SSDs had finally broken the “magic” $1-per-gigabyte price point, proclaiming it “the new normal.”
The average commodity SSD price was $3 per gigabyte in 2010, when capacities were rarely above 128GB.
“We first saw low-budget SSDs hit the $1 mark in April, with heavy mail-in-rebates,” Kristopher Kubicki, chief architect at Dynamite Data, wrote in the blog post. “However, the industry has been very consistent and extremely fast in its direction. The bigger and newer players pushed the bottom quartile [price] from $1.5/GB to $1/GB in just four months!
“We’re currently experiencing the fastest decline in SSD prices in three years,” he added. “If history has anything to say, we will now see prices per drive stabilize and the size of the drives substantially grow over the next few years.”
Storage and memory tracking site DRAMeXchange reported similar SSD price drops. As of November, it said SSD prices were down 24% from the beginning of 2012. At the same time, hard disk drive prices have remained “inflated” — about 47% higher than they were prior to the 2011 Thai floods.
Full Story: SSD prices continue to plunge | PCWorld.