SSD Price: I intend to purchase a larger SSD, currently I have a 120gb and wish to upgrade to 500gb. My question is why a 480gb SSD (£72=$93) is so much cheaper than a 512gb (£92=$118)...

johneccles Loc: Leyland UK

I intend to purchase a larger SSD, currently I have a 120gb and wish to upgrade to 500gb.

My question is why a 480gb SSD (£72=$93) is so much cheaper than a 512gb (£92=$118) that's a difference of £20($26) for only an extra 32gb.
480gb is my choice as that is ample for my use.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Who's selling a 480?
That's not a standard multiple.
Kinda reminds me of a 512Gb hard drive with 32Gb flagged as "unusable" (bad sectors).

Strodav Loc: Houston, Tx

Longshadow makes a good point, also check the speed. The slower the less expensive, the faster the more expensive.

johneccles Loc: Leyland UK

Longshadow wrote:

Who's selling a 480?
That's not a standard multiple.
Kinda reminds me of a 512Gb hard drive with 32Gb flagged as "unusable" (bad sectors).

480 SSD are available from:
Toshiba
Sandisc
Transcend
Crucial
PNY
Adata
Kingston
Patriot
The speeds in every make are all well over 500mb and up to 560. Seagate and WD are nowhere to be found in this league.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Longshadow wrote:

Who's selling a 480?
That's not a standard multiple.
Kinda reminds me of a 512Gb hard drive with 32Gb flagged as "unusable" (bad sectors).

I think you’ve hit on a possible/likely answer. Memory and disk manufacturers for years have sold silightly smaller sizes for less as the ones with bad sectors that fall out in testing/QC are the sold with a smaller capacity at a lower price.

johneccles Loc: Leyland UK

For some reason SSD's increase in multiples of 120gb such as 240,480 and 960 compared with the older spinning HDD's which had slightly higher GB multiple of 125, 500, 750 and 1Tb etc.
I don't think there is an ulterior motive in this case.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

TriX wrote:

I think you’ve hit on a possible/likely answer. Memory and disk manufacturers for years have sold silightly smaller sizes for less as the ones with bad sectors that fall out in testing/QC are the sold with a smaller capacity at a lower price.

And the "32" happens to be a normal "block" of memory.

Strodav Loc: Houston, Tx

johneccles wrote:

For some reason SSD's increase in multiples of 120gb such as 240,480 and 960 compared with the older spinning HDD's which had slightly higher GB multiple of 125, 500, 750 and 1Tb etc.
I don't think there is an ulterior motive in this case.

HDD stated size is only the amount of usable storage. The size of the physical drive is actually larger because they need to reserve some of the drive space for formatting, directories, etc., ... The larger the drive, the more overhead space is needed. On mem cards they show the total size of the card rounded off which is almost always a power of 2 or 2^N memory addresses. So 2^30 = 1,073,741,842 = 1GB ; 2^31 = 2,147,483,648 = 2GB ; 2^32 = 4,294,967,296 = 4GB ; ...

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

johneccles wrote:

I intend to purchase a larger SSD, currently I have a 120gb and wish to upgrade to 500gb.

My question is why a 480gb SSD (£72=$93) is so much cheaper than a 512gb (£92=$118) that's a difference of £20($26) for only an extra 32gb.
480gb is my choice as that is ample for my use.

I've seen pricing like that, and I can only assume that there is a difference in quality. What I usually do is Google SSD1 vs SSD2.