Since 2010, solid state drive (SSD) prices have plummeted 300%, this year reaching what researchers call the magic price point of $1-per-gigabyte of capacity.

After dropping 20% in the second quarter of 2012 alone, SSD prices fell another 10% in the second half of the year, according to data from IHS iSupply.

The better deals for SSDs are now around 80- to 90-cents-per-gigabyte of capacity, though some sale prices have been even lower, according to Ryan Chien, an IHS SSD and storage analyst.

Oversupply of NAND flash memory is primarily behind the price drops over the past couple of years, but manufacturing is now more in line with demand and prices have begun to stabilize, Chien said.

Seagate Technology on Thursday announced the Seagate Video 2.5” hard disk drive specifically engineered for use in 24/7 video applications like digital video recorders (DVRs), set-top boxes (STBs), and surveillance applications.

The Video 2.5 HDD provides home entertainment manufacturers one and two disk, cost-optimized solutions for today’s high-definition (HD) video recording applications. Featuring capacities up to 500GB, manufacturers can benefit from its lower-power performance and slim form factor without sacrificing the streaming capabilities or reliability of Seagate’s 3.5” video drives. Its low power consumption, 24/7 operation, and support of up to 12 streams of simultaneous HD content also make it ideal for surveillance DVR applications.

Facebook vice president of hardware design and supply chain Frank Frankovsky described Intel's new low-power Atom processor as "wimpy" in comparison to Xeon-class chips, which he called "brawny", as he announced the new chip yesterday.

Intel released a 64-bit, 32nm dual-core Atom processor, the S1200. The 6W chip is designed for the emerging microserver market. Microservers are being designed to handle tasks that aren't necessarily compute-intensive, like serving up billions of photos, as Facebook does.

DRAMeXchange, a research division of TrendForce market tracker, said Monday that while the contract price of commodity computer memory remained on low level in the second half of November, it demonstrated a slight decline.

According to DRAMeXchange, average 4GB DDR3 memory module contract price was $15.25, a 3.17% decline compared to the first half of November, whereas average 2GB contract price fell below the $9 mark to $8.75, a 2.78% decrease. While the lowest 4GB contract price remained at $15, as PC shipment figures continue to get lower Q4 2012, DRAM makers are facing significant inventory pressure.