If you have wondered what caused SSD prices to drop so dramatically in the last few years, it has more to do than just competition. Higher density NAND is what has led the charge in plummeting prices; with the ability to cram more storage onto a package, the overall price goes down.

This comes with some drawbacks, however. As you know from reading our SSD reviews, controllers need to be able to access as much memory in parallel as possible. How much it takes to fully saturate a controller (and the SATA bus) depends on various factors, but generally the more channels it has to work with, the better, to a certain point.

This can be easily demonstrated by reading our Intel SSD 525 review, where we tested the exact same product in five different capacities ranging from 30GB to 240GB. The Sandforce controller in each drive gets to access either 4, 8, 16, 24, or 32 channels depending on capacity, and it seems to cap out at 24. Anything lower than that, and performance suffers. This has been the case for years ? SSD performance generally reached its peak at 180 GB or so. Anything above that won't be any faster, but anything below will be slower.