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Ignoring that it's a wholly new flash/storage chip just being introduced to the market, scaling up flash storage is not a great mystery or difficulty -- add mor

Ignoring that it's a wholly new flash/storage chip just being introduced to the market, scaling up flash storage is not a great mystery or difficulty -- add more chips. The reason consumer drives are at the sizes they are is a matter of consumer tolerance for pricing levels, and we saw all of the noise when 1TB flash drives were announced, people annoyed that it isn't for less than $100.

jaawn 11y ago
I don't see much justification for the "consumer tolerance" argument. It seems like most people are holding off on SSD purchases, or choosing lower capacities because they think the drives are too expensive.
- inversionOf 11y ago
  Your conspiratorial argument is that they're holding off higher capacity consumer drives (note that in the Enterprise market you have been able to get multi-TB solutions for years) for some reason, but that the existing options are too expensive. This is a very entitled argument where your core complaint is that you can't have difficult, expensive technology for cheap.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >your core complaint is that you can't have difficult, expensive technology for cheap. That's a circular way of putting it, where you incorporate "expensive" (the thing that is under question) into your argument. His core argument is that it shouldn't be that expensive, and maybe they are using their monopoly / cartel power to fix the prices, so they can milk the < 2TB consumer market first AND charge way higher in the enterprise for "premium" drives that aren't. That might or might not be the case (they could still be as expensive to manufacture as they claim), but price fixing is something that disk and memory companies have been found guilty of doing in the past (in courts et al).
    - inversionOf 11y ago
      His core "argument" is that it's fishy that a device can appear that has 16x the storage space. That is precisely what they said, so this really isn't open to debate. But that device will be unfathomably expensive. We all know it will be. It's meant for extraordinarily rich tech companies that need hyper-density, and has positively nothing to do with the consumer market.
      - jaawn 11y ago
        What it has to do with the consumer market is that they have the ability to manufacture a drive in the same form factor as the consumer space, at a large enough scale to offer it for sale. That has a lot of implications for the capabilities of their manufacturing processes. In the past (and I think still currently), the true "bleeding edge" of the SSD market is made up of drives that take up full rack units. So, if this 16TB SSD was in a funky form factor, or even just 3.5", it would make way more sense to me and be less fishy.
        inversionOf 11y ago
        So now we're on to completely different argument #3, which is that you don't like the form factor they use. Again, aside from the fact that it's a new manufacturing process of flash cells, which is rather an important point, the people willing to pay the big dollars -- enterprises -- didn't want flash in hard drive/SSD form. When you're paying 10s of thousands for an extremely high performance system, you don't drop it behind an abstraction of SAS/ATA, but stick it in a PCI-E slot to get extraordinary performance and direct access. The choice of form factor was targeting the market, just as the choice of how much flash to put in a SSD drive is targeting a market. And the truth is that Samsung didn't even announce a price for this, and it's unlikely this iteration ever becomes a real product. They put it in an SSD case to get press because it's neat, not because it makes sense.
        coldtea 11y ago
        >So now we're on to completely different argument #3, which is that you don't like the form factor they use. Please stop putting words in his mouth (first you dismissed his accusation of price fixing as "your core complaint is that you can't have difficult, expensive technology for cheap", which was far for his "core complaint"). And, no, we're not "on to completely different argument". This isn't a rhetorical competition and he didn't put forward false argument to trick anyone. He just explained further the reason behind his original objection.

jaawn 11y ago

I don't see much justification for the "consumer tolerance" argument. It seems like most people are holding off on SSD purchases, or choosing lower capacities because they think the drives are too expensive.

inversionOf 11y ago
Your conspiratorial argument is that they're holding off higher capacity consumer drives (note that in the Enterprise market you have been able to get multi-TB solutions for years) for some reason, but that the existing options are too expensive. This is a very entitled argument where your core complaint is that you can't have difficult, expensive technology for cheap.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >your core complaint is that you can't have difficult, expensive technology for cheap. That's a circular way of putting it, where you incorporate "expensive" (the thing that is under question) into your argument. His core argument is that it shouldn't be that expensive, and maybe they are using their monopoly / cartel power to fix the prices, so they can milk the < 2TB consumer market first AND charge way higher in the enterprise for "premium" drives that aren't. That might or might not be the case (they could still be as expensive to manufacture as they claim), but price fixing is something that disk and memory companies have been found guilty of doing in the past (in courts et al).
  - inversionOf 11y ago
    His core "argument" is that it's fishy that a device can appear that has 16x the storage space. That is precisely what they said, so this really isn't open to debate. But that device will be unfathomably expensive. We all know it will be. It's meant for extraordinarily rich tech companies that need hyper-density, and has positively nothing to do with the consumer market.
    - jaawn 11y ago
      What it has to do with the consumer market is that they have the ability to manufacture a drive in the same form factor as the consumer space, at a large enough scale to offer it for sale. That has a lot of implications for the capabilities of their manufacturing processes. In the past (and I think still currently), the true "bleeding edge" of the SSD market is made up of drives that take up full rack units. So, if this 16TB SSD was in a funky form factor, or even just 3.5", it would make way more sense to me and be less fishy.
      - inversionOf 11y ago
        So now we're on to completely different argument #3, which is that you don't like the form factor they use. Again, aside from the fact that it's a new manufacturing process of flash cells, which is rather an important point, the people willing to pay the big dollars -- enterprises -- didn't want flash in hard drive/SSD form. When you're paying 10s of thousands for an extremely high performance system, you don't drop it behind an abstraction of SAS/ATA, but stick it in a PCI-E slot to get extraordinary performance and direct access. The choice of form factor was targeting the market, just as the choice of how much flash to put in a SSD drive is targeting a market. And the truth is that Samsung didn't even announce a price for this, and it's unlikely this iteration ever becomes a real product. They put it in an SSD case to get press because it's neat, not because it makes sense.
        coldtea 11y ago
        >So now we're on to completely different argument #3, which is that you don't like the form factor they use. Please stop putting words in his mouth (first you dismissed his accusation of price fixing as "your core complaint is that you can't have difficult, expensive technology for cheap", which was far for his "core complaint"). And, no, we're not "on to completely different argument". This isn't a rhetorical competition and he didn't put forward false argument to trick anyone. He just explained further the reason behind his original objection.