A couple years ago, more than a few folks stated again and again that SSD were here and everyone would quickly switch to Flash-based storage. It would come down to SSD’s better performance and better power consumption and management characteristics. Until now, however, price was the biggest inhibiting factor in SSD adoption.

Call it a perfect storm — in 2011, floods in Thailand crippled hard drive component products, causing supplies to shrink and prices rise accordingly. All the while, Flash memory supply and prices kept improving, allowing Apple and others to drive adoption — check out the new MacBook Air (Apple Store) and MacBook Pro configured with big beefy SSDs.

“Just look at all those drives [Ed: Table below] under a dollar per gig,” writes Tech Report’s Geoff Gasior. “The higher-capacity models offer the best value in virtually every family,” adding that though “the 40-64GB variants don’t look quite so good on this scale, they have asking prices under 100 bucks.”

No traditional spinning disk hard drives won’t disappear over night if ever (i.e. tape drives). Nevertheless, with SSDs at $1 per gigabyte and falling, we’ve clearly reached a tipping point…

What’s your take?

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