10 ms·

From the article: "In a world where SSDs have become more and more common, one might ask what the point of even developing newer and bigger HDDs is." Solid sta

From the article: "In a world where SSDs have become more and more common, one might ask what the point of even developing newer and bigger HDDs is." Solid state drives still cost about 10 times more per gigabyte. I'm just a web developer, but a spinning-disk drive looks 100 times more complicated to me to manufacture. I know at the beginning that hard drives would be cheaper, simply because SSDs were newer, and there was R & D to amortize. But by now I would have thought that SSDs might have matched hard drives or even undercut them. Not only has it been over a decade, but hard drives themselves are using new R & D too. For example this article mentions that this new hard drive uses a new technique, called HAMR. Can the old factory machinery from 2005 be used to manufacture these new HAMR disks?

Skunkleton 8y ago
The fabs where NAND chips are produced are hugely expensive, and in very high demand.
amelius 8y ago
I suspect it has to do with die area and yield. Also, a hard drive head and electronics has to be made once for each platter, so its cost does not scale with the number of bits on the platter.
pixl97 8y ago
NAND demand is insanely high. You aren't just building computer SSDs, you have phones, in particular, and hundreds of other devices that use it competing for the manufacturing capacity. Another issue with demand is IOPS. Enterprise is rarely limited by storage capacity, but instead by reliable operations per second. Pretty much every enterprise wants every SSD it can get at the right price point, which is much higher than consumers will pay. For the time being it will be worthwhile for NAND makers to sell drives to companies at a much higher price point.
- projectramo 8y ago
  By that logic things should get more expensive, not cheaper, as the demand increases. To put it another way, why wouldn't someone undercut the current suppliers and sell at just above their marginal cost and take over the whole market.
  - quickben 8y ago
    Because factories for that are hard and very expensive to build?
  - bluGill 8y ago
    You need excess supply before you can try that. The question is can anyone raise prices and still sell out. This is a complex question (and often the answer is yes in the short term but you shouldn't because your customers might invest in an alternative and not buy at all in a couple years)
  - pixl97 8y ago
    Things do get more expensive as demand increases. Have you not bought enterprise SSDs up until 6 months ago? https://cdn.pcpartpicker.com/static/forever/images/trends/trend.storage.0.256000.950749ef7906d3eaf3fb11c5a421507a.png https://cdn.pcpartpicker.com/static/forever/images/trends/tr... This is the average price of a 256GB SSD. In May 2017 they were just above $100. Soon after that demand pushed that near $175. Just recently that price has dropped as new processes have increased inventories. > why wouldn't someone undercut the current suppliers Why would you when all your production is sold out for the next six months? You don't understand supply and demand curves at all, do you?
    - projectramo 8y ago
      It seems you are much smarter than the rest of us when it comes to understanding supply and demand curves, but why don't you help us walk through an example, okay? Suppose it costs -- and I am making this up -- $10 to produce the first 1000 units, but only $1 after that. Suppose people are charging a lot of money, say $50 for a unit. Won't you increase production to try to capture that demand. After that, because you have increased production you enjoy economies of scale, and the price comes down. If you are the only producer, you have no incentive to come down, but if there are other producers you will want to undercut them. In this case, you will bring down your price to gain more market share. Please help us understand what we are missing with your shrewd understanding of supply and demand curves.
the_jeremy 8y ago
AFAIK, HAMR is just about using heat to allow for more targeted writes. Write density increases but the actual disk composition doesn't change, just the write head.
rbanffy 8y ago
> Can the old factory machinery from 2005 be used to manufacture these new HAMR disks? Probably yes, for everything except the heads. These HDs are built upon many decades of investments in manufacturing capacity.
ghaff 8y ago
I agree with the other comments. I'd add that just because the end product can be easily seen to be a complex mechanical artifact, doesn't make it inherently more complex to manufacture than something solid state. A lot of complexity goes into making the solid state device too; it just happens out of sight in the fab. It's (somewhat) the same situation as with EV and ICE automobiles. The engine and drivetrain in a modern ICE vehicle is extremely complex. Much more so at a macro level than EVs. But we're actually pretty good at building reliable complex mechanical systems. More things shift to solid state over time but it's a long process.
sand500 8y ago
Don't forget the cheapest storage is actually tapes.
secabeen 8y ago
Big data also needs to be stored somewhere, especially all the environmental data, video data, and photographic data we are creating all the time with our smart phones and youtube uploads.
sixothree 8y ago
I always thought that at some point the price/gb lines would cross. I am starting to believe this will never actually happen.
- reitzensteinm 8y ago
  It will. SSDs counter intuitively scale down in price much better than hard drives at small sizes; there's no cost advantage to making a HDD with less storage than a single platter, or about 1/5 to 1/8 (in the case of helium drives) of the largest on the market. Eventually, an SSD with cost parity with a low end HDD will be big enough, after which there's no reason for the low end consumer market not to switch over. The high end will have already as well (I certainly will never buy another laptop containing a HDD). At that point, HDDs will essentially only be found in external drives and data centers. The writing will be on the wall, and R&D will slow down, starting a cycle that will lead to collapse.
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    "Eventually, an SSD with cost parity with a low end HDD will be big enough, after which there's no reason for the low end consumer market not to switch over. The high end will have already as well (I certainly will never buy another laptop containing a HDD)." Reliability and mean time between failures figure in to the equation as well -- at both the low end and the high end. Data centers don't want to be swapping out bad drives all the time, and low-end consumers can't afford to buy new drives all the time. Both want to stretch the drives they have as long as they can, and at least in the past SSDs were less reliable and failed a lot sooner than mechanical drives did. I personally do like to buy laptops with mechanical drives in them, because I can get a lot of storage without paying insane prices, and because I want the drive to last as long as possible. And just in general, I don't trust SSDs. They have yet to prove themselves to me.
    - wtallis 8y ago
      > Both want to stretch the drives they have as long as they can, and at least in the past SSDs were less reliable and failed a lot sooner than mechanical drives did. > And just in general, I don't trust SSDs. They have yet to prove themselves to me. I'm pretty sure you're cherry-picking the data you're willing to look at. It's definitely not true that any datacenter ever avoids SSDs due to worries about drive failure rates. These days, high-end consumer or enterprise SSDs are warrantied to survive more writes than it is physically possible to send to a hard drive during the same 5-year span. Flash memory write endurance stopped being a serious concern by the time consumer SSDs reached capacities that made them sufficient for use as the sole storage device in a mainstream laptop. Controller/firmware bugs are the only source of SSD failure that you have a non-negligible chance of encountering in the wild, but the rate of such failures is very small, especially if you stick to the major reputable SSD brands. And that's in the consumer market where the vendors aren't specifically validating each SSD model with your specific servers before you put anything into production.
Thetawaves 8y ago
An added complication is that pure silicon in the required quantities is not cheap.
- 6nf 8y ago
  The amount of silicon we're talking about here is only a couple of cents per device
  - Thetawaves 8y ago
    '16TB' of silicon at current rates is not a few cents, not even close.
    - 6nf 8y ago
      Sure it is, where do you buy your silicon wafers?
      - Thetawaves 8y ago
        64L 3D NAND flash is about 4.40Gb/mm^2. 16TB = 131,072Gb. 29,789mm^2. 70,686mm^2/std 300mm wafer. Roughly 2 dies/wafer, with exceptional packing, and don't account for defect rates. Average $0.74/in^2 109.56in^2/std 300mm wafer 81$/std 300mm wafer roughly 40$ in materials BEFORE you even start talking about the processes to build up 64 layers, and everything else.
        6nf 8y ago
        Big fabs don't pay $80 for one 300mm wafer
trhway 8y ago
Me and some other teammates switched our dev machines from SSD to HDD arrays. 2-3 years of heavy usage - huge C++ - and SSD start silently fail in various ways - from slow down at 60-70% capacity to final outright failure even to read from. Note: the hardware is top line enterprise, pretty expensive. The perf difference between sdd and hdd is imperceptible for our use case as we are cores hungry and have enough RAM.
- wtallis 8y ago
  By "dev machines" do you mean workstations or CI servers? There's no way you could have been burning out top of the line enterprise SSDs in 2-3 years with developer workstation usage patterns. (I could maybe believe that you ran into trouble if you used low-end enterprise SSDs that also force themselves to go read-only as soon as the warrantied write endurance is exhausted, rather than continuing until the flash itself is actually starting to fail.)
  - trhway 8y ago
    It is dev workstations. >top of the line enterprise SSDs i wasn't precise here. It isn't top of the line enterprise SSDs (like the ones you'd use for databases and which cost accordingly). I meant the top-tier corporate enterprise vendor with top-tier hardware in the corresponding categories ( we're a BigCo ).
    - wtallis 8y ago
      > I meant the top-tier corporate enterprise vendor with top-tier hardware in the corresponding categories ( we're a BigCo ). So what you're probably getting is ordinary cheap consumer-grade SSDs, but perhaps with encryption capabilities actually turned on. I'd be surprised if you were getting something like the Samsung 850 PRO without specifically ordering premium SSDs.
      - trhway 8y ago
        >So what you're probably getting is ordinary cheap consumer-grade SSDs, but perhaps with encryption capabilities actually turned on. I'd be surprised if you were getting something like the Samsung 850 PRO without specifically ordering premium SSDs. we've got various models through the years, yet still a notch higher - the 850 PRO has TBW at 300x-500x capacity where is the ones we've been getting got TBW around 1000x, and i think the earlier hardware was even close to 2000-3000x.
skykooler 8y ago
Hard drives are cheap because, regardless of capacity, you make a bunch of moving bits and electronics, and then cover a disk with iron oxide and that holds all the data. When manufacturing SSDs, you need to make circuitry for each bit.
- officialjunk 8y ago
  sounds similar to the CRT to LCD evolution of displays.
Brockenstein 8y ago
>Solid state drives still cost about 10 times more per gigabyte I think you should go shopping, because the time where SSDs cost 10x as much as an HDD is over. When a WD Blue 1TB SATA 6 Gb/s 7200 RPM 64MB is $46 on Amazon and a Crucial MX500 1TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch is $134. Unless you're comparing the cheapest 1TB HDD you can find to a Samsung 970 pro 1TB or something... which really isn't a reasonable comparison imo.
- dagw 8y ago
  I agree that for 0.5-1 TB disk there really is no reason to not to get an SSD. However the price difference jumps significantly once you're looking at larger disks though. The cheapest 4TB SSD costs about to 8 times more than the cheapest 4TB HDD for example.
- gruez 8y ago
  >When a WD Blue 1TB SATA 6 Gb/s 7200 RPM 64MB is $46 on Amazon and a Crucial MX500 1TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch is $134. those are cherrypicked numbers because 1TB is at the very low end for HDD sizes. compare with a more typical HDD size (3TB or 4TB) and you'll see the differences become more obvious.
  - loeg 8y ago
    I don't know about you, but 500-1000 GB is more than enough for my SSD needs, so the comparison at 1TB is much more relevant to me than at 4TB.
    - saltcured 8y ago
      Wasn't the parent discussion about a new high-capacity HDD and the per-capacity cost of HDD vs SSD? I don't think that people satisfied with under 1TB are relevant to that topic. In that market, people are comparing a pile of disks in an array to a pile of solid state storage needed to replace its capacity. The bulk price of storage inverts when it is cheaper to store hundreds of TB on huge SSDs rather than on huge HDDs. That would be the death of HDD, since nobody really wants spinning disks in their datacenter.
gammateam 8y ago
Regarding SSD technology, its just demand still being greater than the supply at this point. Companies are overbidding at the fabrication lines to get their latest phones built. Data centers want SSD offerings for customers with insatiable demand for SSD servers at a premium. The whole thing is just demand demand demand and the chips cant come out fast enough. Will last for a while at the current rate.
rb808 8y ago
On a related note - are there any small nas devices that take m.2 size drives? Seems like a good product which I haven't seen.
paulmd 8y ago
Semiconductor lithography is a lot more expensive than plain old manufacturing. Fabs cost tens of billions of dollars to build or expand and have limited capacity, coating a glass disc in rust is cheap. Also, fabs have investors who want returns on their money, so they're not super keen on crashing the market either. There are not-so-secret cartels between all the major players that conspire to keep DRAM and NAND prices high. We could certainly have the government dump a half-trillion dollars and bring up a bunch of fabs though. That's exactly what China is doing. Their economy runs on assembling the goods, not lithographing the chips (which is largely done in Taiwan or South Korea or sometimes Malaysia).
megaremote 8y ago
You seem to think price is set due to cost, when this is not how it works at all. Price is set by what people will pay. As a web developer, do you charge based on how much it costs for your to eat and pay rent for the day?
InclinedPlane 8y ago
The big difference is that the overall performance of spinning disks is not much different than what it was 10 years ago. However, a best-in-class 2018 SSD is an entirely different beast than a 2008 model. They are somewhere around 5-30x faster now with significantly better write endurance, wear leveling, and capacity (you can get up to 4TB in consumer models for reasonable prices). The market hasn't pushed for solid state drives replacing bulk hard drive storage, instead it's pushed for much, much faster drives (yielding 1-2 orders of magnitude improvement over just the last decade alone) along with small form factor portable storage (SD cards and USB drives). The technology is there for someone to manufacture slow SSDs with the same capacity as hard drives at around the same cost, but the market demand isn't.
- rasz 8y ago
  > 2008 ...They are somewhere around 5-30x faster now with significantly better write endurance, Thats because 2008 to SSDs was like 1982 to HDDs. If you look at 2011 both of your promises are false. SATA SSD in 2011 was as fast as SATA SSD in 2018, but with about 10x more endurance. The technology to produce crappy SSD is there, but it will "forget" its contents in couple of months when kept unplugged, or burn thru erase cycles in a year while sitting idle, just keeping content alive.
  - InclinedPlane 8y ago
    > SATA SSD in 2011 was as fast as SATA SSD in 2018 That's a meaningless distinction, M.2 SSDs are incredibly popular and are nearly 10x faster than anything you could get in 2011 (for example, an OCZ Vertex 3 would max out at 550/500 MB/s sequential read/write speeds while a Samsung 960 EVO can do 3.2/1.8 GB/s).
    - rasz 8y ago
      and the real world difference when loading a game? or word document? non existent.
blattimwind 8y ago
> but a spinning-disk drive looks 100 times more complicated to me to manufacture. Fun-fact: The "head fly height", i.e. the distance from the underside of the R/W head to the platter surface, is less than a handful nanometers in most hard drives; this makes the gap not just smaller than any production transistor, but also smaller than any production feature size.
- iamgopal 8y ago
  How?
  - captainperl 8y ago
    Boundary-layer aerodynamics. The head is literally flying on a cushion of air.
  - 6nf 8y ago
    If two surfaces are flat enough and moving fast enough, the tiny amount of air (or helium these days) causes them to act hydrodynamically and float across each other which is great cause there's zero friction which means they never wear out. The spindle in a hard drive is also an air bearing.
ru999gol 8y ago
nobody (especially not all the ultra capitalist pigs here) would like to admit this but in reality the reason this is the case is price fixing. There are very few companies that do manufacture and hold the necessary patents to do so. You can thank the free market for it. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/30/dram_vendors_sued_again_for_price_fixing_again/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/30/dram_vendors_sued_a...

Skunkleton 8y ago

The fabs where NAND chips are produced are hugely expensive, and in very high demand.

amelius 8y ago

I suspect it has to do with die area and yield. Also, a hard drive head and electronics has to be made once for each platter, so its cost does not scale with the number of bits on the platter.

pixl97 8y ago

NAND demand is insanely high. You aren't just building computer SSDs, you have phones, in particular, and hundreds of other devices that use it competing for the manufacturing capacity. Another issue with demand is IOPS. Enterprise is rarely limited by storage capacity, but instead by reliable operations per second. Pretty much every enterprise wants every SSD it can get at the right price point, which is much higher than consumers will pay. For the time being it will be worthwhile for NAND makers to sell drives to companies at a much higher price point.

projectramo 8y ago
By that logic things should get more expensive, not cheaper, as the demand increases. To put it another way, why wouldn't someone undercut the current suppliers and sell at just above their marginal cost and take over the whole market.
- quickben 8y ago
  Because factories for that are hard and very expensive to build?
- bluGill 8y ago
  You need excess supply before you can try that. The question is can anyone raise prices and still sell out. This is a complex question (and often the answer is yes in the short term but you shouldn't because your customers might invest in an alternative and not buy at all in a couple years)
- pixl97 8y ago
  Things do get more expensive as demand increases. Have you not bought enterprise SSDs up until 6 months ago? https://cdn.pcpartpicker.com/static/forever/images/trends/trend.storage.0.256000.950749ef7906d3eaf3fb11c5a421507a.png https://cdn.pcpartpicker.com/static/forever/images/trends/tr... This is the average price of a 256GB SSD. In May 2017 they were just above $100. Soon after that demand pushed that near $175. Just recently that price has dropped as new processes have increased inventories. > why wouldn't someone undercut the current suppliers Why would you when all your production is sold out for the next six months? You don't understand supply and demand curves at all, do you?
  - projectramo 8y ago
    It seems you are much smarter than the rest of us when it comes to understanding supply and demand curves, but why don't you help us walk through an example, okay? Suppose it costs -- and I am making this up -- $10 to produce the first 1000 units, but only $1 after that. Suppose people are charging a lot of money, say $50 for a unit. Won't you increase production to try to capture that demand. After that, because you have increased production you enjoy economies of scale, and the price comes down. If you are the only producer, you have no incentive to come down, but if there are other producers you will want to undercut them. In this case, you will bring down your price to gain more market share. Please help us understand what we are missing with your shrewd understanding of supply and demand curves.

the_jeremy 8y ago

AFAIK, HAMR is just about using heat to allow for more targeted writes. Write density increases but the actual disk composition doesn't change, just the write head.

rbanffy 8y ago

> Can the old factory machinery from 2005 be used to manufacture these new HAMR disks? Probably yes, for everything except the heads. These HDs are built upon many decades of investments in manufacturing capacity.

ghaff 8y ago

I agree with the other comments. I'd add that just because the end product can be easily seen to be a complex mechanical artifact, doesn't make it inherently more complex to manufacture than something solid state. A lot of complexity goes into making the solid state device too; it just happens out of sight in the fab. It's (somewhat) the same situation as with EV and ICE automobiles. The engine and drivetrain in a modern ICE vehicle is extremely complex. Much more so at a macro level than EVs. But we're actually pretty good at building reliable complex mechanical systems. More things shift to solid state over time but it's a long process.

sand500 8y ago

Don't forget the cheapest storage is actually tapes.

secabeen 8y ago

Big data also needs to be stored somewhere, especially all the environmental data, video data, and photographic data we are creating all the time with our smart phones and youtube uploads.

sixothree 8y ago

I always thought that at some point the price/gb lines would cross. I am starting to believe this will never actually happen.

reitzensteinm 8y ago
It will. SSDs counter intuitively scale down in price much better than hard drives at small sizes; there's no cost advantage to making a HDD with less storage than a single platter, or about 1/5 to 1/8 (in the case of helium drives) of the largest on the market. Eventually, an SSD with cost parity with a low end HDD will be big enough, after which there's no reason for the low end consumer market not to switch over. The high end will have already as well (I certainly will never buy another laptop containing a HDD). At that point, HDDs will essentially only be found in external drives and data centers. The writing will be on the wall, and R&D will slow down, starting a cycle that will lead to collapse.
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  "Eventually, an SSD with cost parity with a low end HDD will be big enough, after which there's no reason for the low end consumer market not to switch over. The high end will have already as well (I certainly will never buy another laptop containing a HDD)." Reliability and mean time between failures figure in to the equation as well -- at both the low end and the high end. Data centers don't want to be swapping out bad drives all the time, and low-end consumers can't afford to buy new drives all the time. Both want to stretch the drives they have as long as they can, and at least in the past SSDs were less reliable and failed a lot sooner than mechanical drives did. I personally do like to buy laptops with mechanical drives in them, because I can get a lot of storage without paying insane prices, and because I want the drive to last as long as possible. And just in general, I don't trust SSDs. They have yet to prove themselves to me.
  - wtallis 8y ago
    > Both want to stretch the drives they have as long as they can, and at least in the past SSDs were less reliable and failed a lot sooner than mechanical drives did. > And just in general, I don't trust SSDs. They have yet to prove themselves to me. I'm pretty sure you're cherry-picking the data you're willing to look at. It's definitely not true that any datacenter ever avoids SSDs due to worries about drive failure rates. These days, high-end consumer or enterprise SSDs are warrantied to survive more writes than it is physically possible to send to a hard drive during the same 5-year span. Flash memory write endurance stopped being a serious concern by the time consumer SSDs reached capacities that made them sufficient for use as the sole storage device in a mainstream laptop. Controller/firmware bugs are the only source of SSD failure that you have a non-negligible chance of encountering in the wild, but the rate of such failures is very small, especially if you stick to the major reputable SSD brands. And that's in the consumer market where the vendors aren't specifically validating each SSD model with your specific servers before you put anything into production.

Thetawaves 8y ago

An added complication is that pure silicon in the required quantities is not cheap.

6nf 8y ago
The amount of silicon we're talking about here is only a couple of cents per device
- Thetawaves 8y ago
  '16TB' of silicon at current rates is not a few cents, not even close.
  - 6nf 8y ago
    Sure it is, where do you buy your silicon wafers?
    - Thetawaves 8y ago
      64L 3D NAND flash is about 4.40Gb/mm^2. 16TB = 131,072Gb. 29,789mm^2. 70,686mm^2/std 300mm wafer. Roughly 2 dies/wafer, with exceptional packing, and don't account for defect rates. Average $0.74/in^2 109.56in^2/std 300mm wafer 81$/std 300mm wafer roughly 40$ in materials BEFORE you even start talking about the processes to build up 64 layers, and everything else.
      - 6nf 8y ago
        Big fabs don't pay $80 for one 300mm wafer

trhway 8y ago

Me and some other teammates switched our dev machines from SSD to HDD arrays. 2-3 years of heavy usage - huge C++ - and SSD start silently fail in various ways - from slow down at 60-70% capacity to final outright failure even to read from. Note: the hardware is top line enterprise, pretty expensive. The perf difference between sdd and hdd is imperceptible for our use case as we are cores hungry and have enough RAM.

wtallis 8y ago
By "dev machines" do you mean workstations or CI servers? There's no way you could have been burning out top of the line enterprise SSDs in 2-3 years with developer workstation usage patterns. (I could maybe believe that you ran into trouble if you used low-end enterprise SSDs that also force themselves to go read-only as soon as the warrantied write endurance is exhausted, rather than continuing until the flash itself is actually starting to fail.)
- trhway 8y ago
  It is dev workstations. >top of the line enterprise SSDs i wasn't precise here. It isn't top of the line enterprise SSDs (like the ones you'd use for databases and which cost accordingly). I meant the top-tier corporate enterprise vendor with top-tier hardware in the corresponding categories ( we're a BigCo ).
  - wtallis 8y ago
    > I meant the top-tier corporate enterprise vendor with top-tier hardware in the corresponding categories ( we're a BigCo ). So what you're probably getting is ordinary cheap consumer-grade SSDs, but perhaps with encryption capabilities actually turned on. I'd be surprised if you were getting something like the Samsung 850 PRO without specifically ordering premium SSDs.
    - trhway 8y ago
      >So what you're probably getting is ordinary cheap consumer-grade SSDs, but perhaps with encryption capabilities actually turned on. I'd be surprised if you were getting something like the Samsung 850 PRO without specifically ordering premium SSDs. we've got various models through the years, yet still a notch higher - the 850 PRO has TBW at 300x-500x capacity where is the ones we've been getting got TBW around 1000x, and i think the earlier hardware was even close to 2000-3000x.

skykooler 8y ago

Hard drives are cheap because, regardless of capacity, you make a bunch of moving bits and electronics, and then cover a disk with iron oxide and that holds all the data. When manufacturing SSDs, you need to make circuitry for each bit.

officialjunk 8y ago
sounds similar to the CRT to LCD evolution of displays.

Brockenstein 8y ago

>Solid state drives still cost about 10 times more per gigabyte I think you should go shopping, because the time where SSDs cost 10x as much as an HDD is over. When a WD Blue 1TB SATA 6 Gb/s 7200 RPM 64MB is $46 on Amazon and a Crucial MX500 1TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch is $134. Unless you're comparing the cheapest 1TB HDD you can find to a Samsung 970 pro 1TB or something... which really isn't a reasonable comparison imo.

dagw 8y ago
I agree that for 0.5-1 TB disk there really is no reason to not to get an SSD. However the price difference jumps significantly once you're looking at larger disks though. The cheapest 4TB SSD costs about to 8 times more than the cheapest 4TB HDD for example.
gruez 8y ago
>When a WD Blue 1TB SATA 6 Gb/s 7200 RPM 64MB is $46 on Amazon and a Crucial MX500 1TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch is $134. those are cherrypicked numbers because 1TB is at the very low end for HDD sizes. compare with a more typical HDD size (3TB or 4TB) and you'll see the differences become more obvious.
- loeg 8y ago
  I don't know about you, but 500-1000 GB is more than enough for my SSD needs, so the comparison at 1TB is much more relevant to me than at 4TB.
  - saltcured 8y ago
    Wasn't the parent discussion about a new high-capacity HDD and the per-capacity cost of HDD vs SSD? I don't think that people satisfied with under 1TB are relevant to that topic. In that market, people are comparing a pile of disks in an array to a pile of solid state storage needed to replace its capacity. The bulk price of storage inverts when it is cheaper to store hundreds of TB on huge SSDs rather than on huge HDDs. That would be the death of HDD, since nobody really wants spinning disks in their datacenter.

gammateam 8y ago

Regarding SSD technology, its just demand still being greater than the supply at this point. Companies are overbidding at the fabrication lines to get their latest phones built. Data centers want SSD offerings for customers with insatiable demand for SSD servers at a premium. The whole thing is just demand demand demand and the chips cant come out fast enough. Will last for a while at the current rate.

rb808 8y ago

On a related note - are there any small nas devices that take m.2 size drives? Seems like a good product which I haven't seen.

paulmd 8y ago

Semiconductor lithography is a lot more expensive than plain old manufacturing. Fabs cost tens of billions of dollars to build or expand and have limited capacity, coating a glass disc in rust is cheap. Also, fabs have investors who want returns on their money, so they're not super keen on crashing the market either. There are not-so-secret cartels between all the major players that conspire to keep DRAM and NAND prices high. We could certainly have the government dump a half-trillion dollars and bring up a bunch of fabs though. That's exactly what China is doing. Their economy runs on assembling the goods, not lithographing the chips (which is largely done in Taiwan or South Korea or sometimes Malaysia).

megaremote 8y ago

You seem to think price is set due to cost, when this is not how it works at all. Price is set by what people will pay. As a web developer, do you charge based on how much it costs for your to eat and pay rent for the day?

InclinedPlane 8y ago

The big difference is that the overall performance of spinning disks is not much different than what it was 10 years ago. However, a best-in-class 2018 SSD is an entirely different beast than a 2008 model. They are somewhere around 5-30x faster now with significantly better write endurance, wear leveling, and capacity (you can get up to 4TB in consumer models for reasonable prices). The market hasn't pushed for solid state drives replacing bulk hard drive storage, instead it's pushed for much, much faster drives (yielding 1-2 orders of magnitude improvement over just the last decade alone) along with small form factor portable storage (SD cards and USB drives). The technology is there for someone to manufacture slow SSDs with the same capacity as hard drives at around the same cost, but the market demand isn't.

rasz 8y ago
> 2008 ...They are somewhere around 5-30x faster now with significantly better write endurance, Thats because 2008 to SSDs was like 1982 to HDDs. If you look at 2011 both of your promises are false. SATA SSD in 2011 was as fast as SATA SSD in 2018, but with about 10x more endurance. The technology to produce crappy SSD is there, but it will "forget" its contents in couple of months when kept unplugged, or burn thru erase cycles in a year while sitting idle, just keeping content alive.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  > SATA SSD in 2011 was as fast as SATA SSD in 2018 That's a meaningless distinction, M.2 SSDs are incredibly popular and are nearly 10x faster than anything you could get in 2011 (for example, an OCZ Vertex 3 would max out at 550/500 MB/s sequential read/write speeds while a Samsung 960 EVO can do 3.2/1.8 GB/s).
  - rasz 8y ago
    and the real world difference when loading a game? or word document? non existent.

blattimwind 8y ago

> but a spinning-disk drive looks 100 times more complicated to me to manufacture. Fun-fact: The "head fly height", i.e. the distance from the underside of the R/W head to the platter surface, is less than a handful nanometers in most hard drives; this makes the gap not just smaller than any production transistor, but also smaller than any production feature size.

iamgopal 8y ago
How?
- captainperl 8y ago
  Boundary-layer aerodynamics. The head is literally flying on a cushion of air.
- 6nf 8y ago
  If two surfaces are flat enough and moving fast enough, the tiny amount of air (or helium these days) causes them to act hydrodynamically and float across each other which is great cause there's zero friction which means they never wear out. The spindle in a hard drive is also an air bearing.

ru999gol 8y ago

nobody (especially not all the ultra capitalist pigs here) would like to admit this but in reality the reason this is the case is price fixing. There are very few companies that do manufacture and hold the necessary patents to do so. You can thank the free market for it. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/30/dram_vendors_sued_again_for_price_fixing_again/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/30/dram_vendors_sued_a...