SSD Prices Will Drop 20-30% in 2014

[Geek-9pm]

This no longer speculation. It is now a reliable rumor.

Likely you already know that solid-state drives are considered to be better to hard disk drives. At the present time, solid-state drives cost a lot more than hard drives of the same capacity. However, there is reason to believe that solid-state drive prices will come down, but it'll be a while before the solid-state drive is really competitive with the hard disk drive for price in the low-end range .
Two reasons for prices to go down as follows. The first is the hard drive manufacturers are going to fight back with hybrid drives. These drives will combine a little bit of a solid-state device and a large amount of hard drive storage. This would give users more bang for the buck at the lower end. But there's another reason. This reason is very simple, look at the sales prices over the past few years. Solid-state drives have been dropping steadily and price every year until 2013. Last year the prices begin to level off, and even rise. That is unexplainable, except that market pressures have driven the price is up due to high demand. Logically, it's time for a solid-state disk drives to drop in price. Now, don't think this is my idea, is based on reports inside the industry. You can check it out yourself.

Solid-state drives may still be a lot more expensive than hard disk drive units, but they are getting better because the NAND chips they are made of are getting cheaper. That's why Transcend has high hopes from 2014.

Here is a link to a report that represents the industry.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Transcend-SSD-Prices-Will-Drop-20-30-in-2014-433882.shtml
Required reading. 

[jannugimes]

Other then for absolute budget machines, it's hard to not recommend a SSD for the vast majority of users if the prices continue to drop as they have been.

[DaveLembke]

I was thinking the other day that with the prices falling as they have for SSD's, it may actually make more sense to make an External SSD drive than have a thumb drive with the same capacity because the thumb drives seems to lag seriously in speed while a SSD would be seriously bottlenecked through USB, but faster than a thumb drive because they will act as fast or slightly faster than an external HDD, and best of all they are not sensitive to vibration and so I can bring it on the road with me and if it gets dropped or bumped it will keep on working vs have the clunk of death or scratched platters causing data loss or corruption.

 I picked up a 240GB Crucial M500 SSD for $125 and have been tempted to pick up another to install into an external drive enclosure for data on the go with much lower risk of data loss getting bumped around between sites.

[Geek-9pm]

The industry still has room to gram.  Well, room  to get smaller. In the Personal Mobile Device area, smaller is better.  SSD will soon get some competition from other technologies. This is a principal reason for the SSD people to keep the price down. Otherwise the other stuff will work into the market.

The 'other stuff'  are some special volatile  and non-volatile memory devices. Some take so little standby power that they can run a  alive for months  on a small  battery. So far don't  know f anyone bringing them to the mass market. They are presently used in devices that have no public advertising.  Industrial devices.

An no, I and not  giving references.     Well, maybe one. But it is nebulous.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/182096-ibm-demonstrates-next-gen-phase-change-memory-thats-up-to-275-times-faster-than-your-ssd

Phase change memory is one of a number of alternative memory structures that’s been proposed as a replacement for NAND. Phase change memory works by rapidly heating chalcogenide glass, shifting it between its crystalline and amorphous state.

EDIT: Phase-change memory (PCM, PCME, PRAM, PCRAM) is a type of non-volatile random-access memory