What's up with memory prices?

[Dan H]

Thankfully I maxed out a while back and don't need anymore, but I found a receipt the other day . . . couple of years ago I paid $80 at Fry's for 16GB of DDR3, now the same speed is going for $160?!?

 

[BillsCarnage]

DDR3 is in high demand now, some of the suppliers went under and to top it off one of the major ram plants went up in smoke late last year.

http://www.extremetech.com/computin...spikes-in-wake-of-hynix-fire-but-for-how-long

 

[Dan H]

Interesting, thanks. On the bright SSDs are nicely cheap, even the high-end ones.

 

[Shaggy]

I didn't notice RAM going up, but I did notice SSDs coming down. Need to get one put into my older laptop and have been pricing them out.

 

[jw7]

When I was in college in the 90's memory used to cost $40/meg.

Now you can get 12 GB for $10.

 

[Russ Smith]

Yes memory is definitely too expensive right now.

On SSD's, instead of a new thread what do people actually think? we've tried them a few times at work and frankly aren't impressed, they don't last nearly as long as projected, they are faster but you have to make concessions, we don't see nearly the improvement we thought we would.

Because the prices are down we're probably going to buy more of them but so far they're not the big jump forward we hoped at least at work.

 

[Dan H]

Yes memory is definitely too expensive right now.

On SSD's, instead of a new thread what do people actually think? we've tried them a few times at work and frankly aren't impressed, they don't last nearly as long as projected, they are faster but you have to make concessions, we don't see nearly the improvement we thought we would.

Because the prices are down we're probably going to buy more of them but so far they're not the big jump forward we hoped at least at work.

Really? I'm running SSDs in pretty much every one of my computers. They make a world of difference in laptops. My HTPC has an M.2 interface SSD that tops out at 770 MBps reads. Most of the mainstream SATA3 drives are saturating the SATA bus, so they're going to have to move to PCIe to increase the available bandwidth. I've had one SSD ever go bad on me and it was one of the very first ones I bought.

 

[Russ Smith]

Really? I'm running SSDs in pretty much every one of my computers. They make a world of difference in laptops. My HTPC has an M.2 interface SSD that tops out at 770 MBps reads. Most of the mainstream SATA3 drives are saturating the SATA bus, so they're going to have to move to PCIe to increase the available bandwidth. I've had one SSD ever go bad on me and it was one of the very first ones I bought.

We buy refurbished Dell laptops so maybe that has something to do it with it but we've had 3 and 2 of them had issues within 6 months with the SSD.

We have 2 guys who have desktops where the guy built it himself with an SSD and those are both stable. So overall 2 out of 5 with early problems both in refurbished machines.

Good to hear though my boss was just saying the other day he's going to consider buying more because the prices have come down and I have to admit I was nervous given earlier issues but maybe I'm worrying about nothing.

 

[AZ Native]

When I was in college in the 90's memory used to cost $40/meg.

Now you can get 12 GB for $10.

That was crazy. I remember paying $160 for 4 meg on my measly salary and being thrilled about it since I was doubling my RAM.

 

[BillsCarnage]

We buy refurbished Dell laptops so maybe that has something to do it with it but we've had 3 and 2 of them had issues within 6 months with the SSD.

We have 2 guys who have desktops where the guy built it himself with an SSD and those are both stable. So overall 2 out of 5 with early problems both in refurbished machines.

Good to hear though my boss was just saying the other day he's going to consider buying more because the prices have come down and I have to admit I was nervous given earlier issues but maybe I'm worrying about nothing.

SSD's are one piece of hardware it's probably best to go with a name/quality brand. SSD's primarily fail(ed) because of their controller. Everyone except OCZ and Samsung used 3rd party controllers so those two were inherently better than all other brands. I haven't kept up on SSD's over the last year so I don't know if that has changed with any other mfgs. Personally I wouldn't recommend any other brand aside from OCZ or Samsung w/o knowing if the mfg builds their own controller.

Tomshardware - i think it was - had a great detailed write up a year or two ago about SSD's and why they were failing.

Also, there are a few tips to know about maintaining SSD life span.
- Disable hibernate - this affects read/write cycles
- Don't EVER defrag - there is no need with SSD's and it also kills the life span.

There are a few others and you can search SSD tips or similar, but those two are the big ones.