We're not going to get under 10c/GB anytime soon, will we? SATA SSDs seem to be stagnant - performance is OK, power consumtion is OK, price is $100 for 1TB, endurance is the usual 0.3 WPD - and yet there are constantly new products with different components and basically the same performance/power/price.
Is there a limitation that currently causes stagnation? (I know that SATA is inherently limited in performance, but price shouldn't be stagnant if the main need in that sector is more capacity for less money, with performance/power/endurance being the same)
"price shouldn't be stagnant if the main need in that sector is more capacity for less money"
all of these companies face the Tyranny of Fixed Cost, i.e. the BoM is almost all amortization of the plant and equipment to make the various bits and pieces. sand, some chemicals, and a watchman or two to hover over the machines amount to the variable cost. in such a situation, the only way to lower *average cost* (and shut up the bean counters) is to ship more product and thus spread the fixed cost a tad thinner. lots more product. but that, in turn, is strictly limited by user demand. they're caught between a rock and a hard place. they end up viewing the situation as zero-sum game; one can win only if the other(s) lose when there's little to no global (in every sense of the word) growth. welcome to Earthly Stagnation.
SSD prices have been basically flat since October/November 2018. Check the price tracking for a 500GB/1TB MX500 or 860 Evo and there have been a few variations but nothing substantial or permanent.
I'd love to pick up more large capacity solid state to replace some of my HDDs, but I bought two 2TB SSDs over a year ago and they're actually a few dollars *more* expensive now.
At this point, it may actually be cheaper to build a large NAS using MicroSD cards...
I paid the same amount for my 2 TB 970 evo as I did my 1 TB 960 evo 2.5-3 years ago. Also, don't track specific drivers, look at charts. NAND is coming down. It just takes time.
we might PLC coming soon, so we might see some 1 TB/1.5 TB/2TB/3TB sata's soon and as they are 20% bigger after amortization wears off, almost 20% cheaper it will become. main focus will go to PCIE4.0 now though. so I would say next December expect 2 or 3 products with same nand. 120GB/240 will not go lower than its is now.
in there on the article. We already did on 1 TB ones. and PLC will go even lower. ADATA SU800 $34.99 (14¢/GB) $57.99 (11¢/GB) $91.99 (9¢/GB) $209.99 (10¢/GB)
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How about we get some capacity bumps while we are at it too! I’d love to toss a 4TB QLC m.2 SSD in my laptop, one less thing to carry like the portable rust for my extensive Steam library.
Your laptop likely has a 2.5" sata bay. I expect we shot ourselves in the foot with m.2. There is quite a bit less space for the nand and controller, and m.2 drives are harder to cool. I personally had to buy a heatsink for my 970 evo.
At 4tb your drive cost is going to have pretty much linear scaling with the size as the cost of the NAND becomes the dominating factor which is what we see in the pricing chart even for 2.5' drives where space shouldn't be an issue. The 250 gb drives have a higher cost per gb reflecting the costs for the enclosure, the controller and dram, and circuit board. By 512gb or 1tb the cost per gb has become flat. A 4tb M2 drive would be a little bit harder to do than a 2.5' drive but I still think the main limitation is the relatively limited market for 400-500 SSD drives and currently 2.5' drives address more of that market.
Don't confuse M.2, NVME and SATA. There's a difference between protocoll and form factor. And I have no cooling on 2 out of 3 of my desktop M.2 NVME drives, just normal case ventilation for an upper midrange build, and they are fine around 40 to 50°C idle and never above 60°C when doing things (copy, extract, compress). What sort of situation led to your Evo throttling?
Always loved the Corsair Neutron. While not giving peak performance, it gave very stable performance. It seems that this legacy is still existing with this controller.
I see the moaning comments re. these drives, stagnation, low speeds etc.Then I get handed a customers laptop which still has a 500GB spinner in it and I remember how far from reality some of us have come. You've never had it so good!
True, but "You've never had it so good!" has been true for decades. That 500 GB spinner is so much better than a 40 GB spinner from a few years before, and despite that 500 GB spinner being the "never had it so good" of its time, we got bigger, faster, cheaper drives.
That doesn't mean we should just be happy with what we've got and stop asking for more :) I want to see 5c/GB as soon as possible, 2 TB/$100 drive, and maybe some 4 TB/$200 drive would be welcome.
I think the thing is we are now at the point of diminishing returns. I find it hard to tell the everyday difference between running a desktop on a 550MBps SATA or a 3000MBps NVMe (NVMe was a real disappointment for the boost it gives). 20+ years ago if I got another 5FPS in Quake I could tell. Now if my games jump from 130FPS to 140FPS...meh.
I was upgrading my CPU every 6 months at one point many years ago. Now it's lucky if i change it every 6 years...
Actually a pretty impressive drive. The steady state performance is excellent. When I'm pushing out images to new PC's it's ridiculous a lot of the SSD's bottleneck even the network connection (which is realistically around 160MB/sec via (1Gbps Multicast) as you see it write VERY fast for the first half of a 15GB image then fall off.
Imaging over USB 3.0 is totally brutal and only slightly faster than via the network. The SSD's are a mix of Intel OEM 540/545s drives and Micron 1100/1300 OEM drives, depending on the vendor. HP seems to use the Intel and Dell the Micron's. They're such shit all around drives for my job, but as you can imagine the users don't care because they're writing maybe a few GB a day via Outlook OST caching and general paging in Windows.
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MenhirMike - Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - link
We're not going to get under 10c/GB anytime soon, will we? SATA SSDs seem to be stagnant - performance is OK, power consumtion is OK, price is $100 for 1TB, endurance is the usual 0.3 WPD - and yet there are constantly new products with different components and basically the same performance/power/price.Is there a limitation that currently causes stagnation? (I know that SATA is inherently limited in performance, but price shouldn't be stagnant if the main need in that sector is more capacity for less money, with performance/power/endurance being the same)
FunBunny2 - Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - link
"price shouldn't be stagnant if the main need in that sector is more capacity for less money"all of these companies face the Tyranny of Fixed Cost, i.e. the BoM is almost all amortization of the plant and equipment to make the various bits and pieces. sand, some chemicals, and a watchman or two to hover over the machines amount to the variable cost. in such a situation, the only way to lower *average cost* (and shut up the bean counters) is to ship more product and thus spread the fixed cost a tad thinner. lots more product. but that, in turn, is strictly limited by user demand. they're caught between a rock and a hard place. they end up viewing the situation as zero-sum game; one can win only if the other(s) lose when there's little to no global (in every sense of the word) growth. welcome to Earthly Stagnation.
dromoxen - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
Having Dr ManHattan looking after your machines is a very expensive business , Rorschach is very unreliable too.eek2121 - Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - link
Except prices have been falling. You just don't realize it because it happens over time.These drives are as cheap as Samsung's QLC drives, without the disadvantages.
Slash3 - Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - link
SSD prices have been basically flat since October/November 2018. Check the price tracking for a 500GB/1TB MX500 or 860 Evo and there have been a few variations but nothing substantial or permanent.I'd love to pick up more large capacity solid state to replace some of my HDDs, but I bought two 2TB SSDs over a year ago and they're actually a few dollars *more* expensive now.
At this point, it may actually be cheaper to build a large NAS using MicroSD cards...
eek2121 - Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - link
I paid the same amount for my 2 TB 970 evo as I did my 1 TB 960 evo 2.5-3 years ago. Also, don't track specific drivers, look at charts. NAND is coming down. It just takes time.Slash3 - Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - link
/s implied with respect to the MicroSD card NAS, if it weren't obvious.Although that would be fun to build.
nandnandnand - Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - link
Sale prices are hitting 8c/GB. Don't pay 10c/GB if you live in America. As the average drive capacity goes up, the prices will continue to go down.Thankfully, 100 GB and larger games are a thing, so that should create some demand.
deil - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
we might PLC coming soon, so we might see some 1 TB/1.5 TB/2TB/3TB sata's soon and as they are 20% bigger after amortization wears off, almost 20% cheaper it will become.main focus will go to PCIE4.0 now though. so I would say next December expect 2 or 3 products with same nand. 120GB/240 will not go lower than its is now.
deil - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
in there on the article. We already did on 1 TB ones. and PLC will go even lower.ADATA SU800 $34.99
(14¢/GB) $57.99
(11¢/GB) $91.99
(9¢/GB) $209.99
(10¢/GB)
bananaforscale - Sunday, November 17, 2019 - link
And PLC will probably suck even more than QLC.netzflickzz - Friday, October 2, 2020 - link
On the off chance that you are intending to switch the versatile organization, at that point it is the correct opportunity to https://netflicsaccounthack.club/ go for somebody who pays for your Netflix account. T-Mobile has dispatched an arrangement where you can utilize their administrations while profiting Netflix represent free or for an insignificant charge.Charlie22911 - Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - link
How about we get some capacity bumps while we are at it too! I’d love to toss a 4TB QLC m.2 SSD in my laptop, one less thing to carry like the portable rust for my extensive Steam library.eek2121 - Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - link
Your laptop likely has a 2.5" sata bay. I expect we shot ourselves in the foot with m.2. There is quite a bit less space for the nand and controller, and m.2 drives are harder to cool. I personally had to buy a heatsink for my 970 evo.kpb321 - Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - link
At 4tb your drive cost is going to have pretty much linear scaling with the size as the cost of the NAND becomes the dominating factor which is what we see in the pricing chart even for 2.5' drives where space shouldn't be an issue. The 250 gb drives have a higher cost per gb reflecting the costs for the enclosure, the controller and dram, and circuit board. By 512gb or 1tb the cost per gb has become flat. A 4tb M2 drive would be a little bit harder to do than a 2.5' drive but I still think the main limitation is the relatively limited market for 400-500 SSD drives and currently 2.5' drives address more of that market.Death666Angel - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
Don't confuse M.2, NVME and SATA. There's a difference between protocoll and form factor. And I have no cooling on 2 out of 3 of my desktop M.2 NVME drives, just normal case ventilation for an upper midrange build, and they are fine around 40 to 50°C idle and never above 60°C when doing things (copy, extract, compress). What sort of situation led to your Evo throttling?firewrath9 - Saturday, November 16, 2019 - link
You can fit the exact same controller, nand, and dram on M.2 ssd as you can in a 2.5" one.Have seen the PCB on any recent SSD, 2.5" or M.2?
Besides, I'd rather have a larger battery, lighter/smaller laptop, or better cooling system or a combination of those than a 2.5" bay.
milli - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
Always loved the Corsair Neutron. While not giving peak performance, it gave very stable performance. It seems that this legacy is still existing with this controller.jabber - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
I see the moaning comments re. these drives, stagnation, low speeds etc.Then I get handed a customers laptop which still has a 500GB spinner in it and I remember how far from reality some of us have come. You've never had it so good!MenhirMike - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
True, but "You've never had it so good!" has been true for decades. That 500 GB spinner is so much better than a 40 GB spinner from a few years before, and despite that 500 GB spinner being the "never had it so good" of its time, we got bigger, faster, cheaper drives.That doesn't mean we should just be happy with what we've got and stop asking for more :) I want to see 5c/GB as soon as possible, 2 TB/$100 drive, and maybe some 4 TB/$200 drive would be welcome.
jabber - Friday, November 15, 2019 - link
I think the thing is we are now at the point of diminishing returns. I find it hard to tell the everyday difference between running a desktop on a 550MBps SATA or a 3000MBps NVMe (NVMe was a real disappointment for the boost it gives). 20+ years ago if I got another 5FPS in Quake I could tell. Now if my games jump from 130FPS to 140FPS...meh.I was upgrading my CPU every 6 months at one point many years ago. Now it's lucky if i change it every 6 years...
Samus - Friday, November 15, 2019 - link
Actually a pretty impressive drive. The steady state performance is excellent. When I'm pushing out images to new PC's it's ridiculous a lot of the SSD's bottleneck even the network connection (which is realistically around 160MB/sec via (1Gbps Multicast) as you see it write VERY fast for the first half of a 15GB image then fall off.Imaging over USB 3.0 is totally brutal and only slightly faster than via the network. The SSD's are a mix of Intel OEM 540/545s drives and Micron 1100/1300 OEM drives, depending on the vendor. HP seems to use the Intel and Dell the Micron's. They're such shit all around drives for my job, but as you can imagine the users don't care because they're writing maybe a few GB a day via Outlook OST caching and general paging in Windows.