111–120 of 204 posts
We bought a 2TB Sandisk SSD back in 2024 for around $95 from best buy. Today 1TB ssd by sandisk is $166(the cheapest that i found, and it goes for $199 in walmart). Market is forcing people to become renters than buyers and there is no force countering that idea. Its a market failure that people will study 10-15 years from now. EDIT- The same 2TB ssd is now $329.99 at bestbuy.
When I was 18 I was hoping we'd have 500TB hard drives by now.
Meanwhile I'm still dreaming about any consumer and affordable 32TB or even 16TB portable SSD. Innovation and market for consumers are going backwards. Funny thing is that one of the best you can get is the Crucial (Micron) 8TB one but even that one gets more expensive. I have the feeling it will be gone completely soon.
Nobody is stopping anyone from buying a USB-C powered and connected very portable 2 or 4 slot external NVMe enclosures. The old SATA SSD form factor is dead and wont come back. OWC ThunderBlades exist, but 32TB will set you back 9 grand. You should be able to assemble something with USB-C for under 5k. That's not a mass consumer market thing, but perfectly doable, if your use case warrants it. We are stuck with 2021…
That's more expensive than buying a single large capacity drive. It's also a terrible idea. I would never trust a low cost chinese controller with terabytes of my data.
>The old SATA SSD form factor is dead and wont come back.
That's true and very unfortunate.
We bought a 2TB Sandisk SSD back in 2024 for around $95 from best buy. Today 1TB ssd by sandisk is $166(the cheapest that i found, and it goes for $199 in walmart). Market is forcing people to become renters than buyers and there is no force countering that idea. Its a market failure that people will study 10-15 years from now. EDIT- The same 2TB ssd is now $329.99 at bestbuy.
Things will normalize, semis are a boom and bust industry, and it takes a massive amount of capital investment to increase supply. Because of that boom and bust, the producers are wary of growing their supply to keep up in lockstep with demand, because they might end up with a glut that they have a hard time selling, and a large pile of debt from building out that glut. Semiconductors at the leading edge take very large, very expensive, very rube goldbergian machines to make them, and a very skilled workforce to make those work.
If this stuff stays this expensive/profitable, industry will grow capacity to boost earnings until they overshoot, there's not some grand conspiracy to make you rent everything. We're just in a massive dislocation right now because we've discovered this awesome new tool that's boosting demand by a ridiculous degree. Last year we were at ~$300B of capital investment in DCs in the US, this year it's looking like ~$750B.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kind of usage do you envision for 245TB drive with read speed of 3GB/sec?
I believe it has read speeds of 13GB/s, not 3 (unless you are referring to an equivalent array of 10 HDD). It will almost certainly be used to store training datasets and model weights. Which I assume are good use cases for fast sequential reads.
We bought a 2TB Sandisk SSD back in 2024 for around $95 from best buy. Today 1TB ssd by sandisk is $166(the cheapest that i found, and it goes for $199 in walmart). Market is forcing people to become renters than buyers and there is no force countering that idea. Its a market failure that people will study 10-15 years from now. EDIT- The same 2TB ssd is now $329.99 at bestbuy.
When I was 18 I was hoping we'd have 500TB hard drives by now.
what happens is that the industry goes through certain discrete technical upgrades. for instance, EUV in fabs, or GMR disk heads. none of these are really planned, none of them are exponential. and they usually interact with other phenomena (such as Dennard scaling).
in a sense, the phenomenon is more like "expectations are exponential, and this motivates manufacturers to schedule updates".
hard disks are still improving, arguably similar to how they have in the past, but there are limits to demand. the consumer market has mostly dropped out, for instance due to flash.
even in flash, there is no exponential scaling in devices. people got excited in the initial startup, when for instance, mature TLC is so much better than early SLC. but all that's over: it's both mature and we'll probably never see PLC. even QLC is interesting in that it illustrates that most of our storage is very cold.
We bought a 2TB Sandisk SSD back in 2024 for around $95 from best buy. Today 1TB ssd by sandisk is $166(the cheapest that i found, and it goes for $199 in walmart). Market is forcing people to become renters than buyers and there is no force countering that idea. Its a market failure that people will study 10-15 years from now. EDIT- The same 2TB ssd is now $329.99 at bestbuy.
Same a consumers (car drivers) subsidizing businesses (trucks). Road damage is almost entirely caused by trucks, 4th power of weight, but the cost is borne by us.
We bought a 2TB Sandisk SSD back in 2024 for around $95 from best buy. Today 1TB ssd by sandisk is $166(the cheapest that i found, and it goes for $199 in walmart). Market is forcing people to become renters than buyers and there is no force countering that idea. Its a market failure that people will study 10-15 years from now. EDIT- The same 2TB ssd is now $329.99 at bestbuy.
It's not a market failure, it's just supply and demand. There are many computer components competing for the same resources (fabs, wafers). Demand for GPUs, RAM etc. has increased a lot due to AI, but supply is still the same due to new fabs being huge investments that take years to build. Of course the price goes up.
Meanwhile I'm still dreaming about any consumer and affordable 32TB or even 16TB portable SSD. Innovation and market for consumers are going backwards. Funny thing is that one of the best you can get is the Crucial (Micron) 8TB one but even that one gets more expensive. I have the feeling it will be gone completely soon.
there is no sign of any impending breakthroughs that would change flash economics much.
slc-mlc-tlc-qlc was very nice but plc will not happen. layer-based flash was also nice but it is ultimately linear (more layers, more cost, lower yield). dimensional shrinks are already stalled because of a tragic electron shortage (per cell).
I guess there's no harm in pining for some other NVRAM technology (spins, etc).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a market failure, it's just supply and demand. There are many computer components competing for the same resources (fabs, wafers). Demand for GPUs, RAM etc. has increased a lot due to AI, but supply is still the same due to new fabs being huge investments that take years to build. Of course the price goes up.
The demand side is the world's "investors" buying up a product without producing profit. This results in locking out companies operating without such "investors" from accessing the product and using it to produce profit. This is a failure.