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Aside from lack of demand, there are some significant technical reasons that contribute to 8TB M.2 drives being expensive niche products, both stemming from the
by wtallis 3y ago
Aside from lack of demand, there are some significant technical reasons that contribute to 8TB M.2 drives being expensive niche products, both stemming from the fact that 8TB of flash is still a lot of chips: PC OEMs prefer M.2 SSDs that are single-sided because many thin laptop designs require that, and many low-end SSD controllers literally don't have the pin count necessary to interface with that many flash chips.
- Salgat 3y agoThe lack of demand vanishes once prices come down to something reasonable.
- wtallis 3y agoI think this might be an appropriate time to make the economist's distinction between the quantity demanded at current prices vs the overall shape and location of the demand curve. Lower prices would shift the market equilibrium to a different point along the demand curve, but there would still be far less demand for 8TB drives than for 1TB drives. Shifting the demand curve itself upward would require something like a big change in usage patterns causing more consumers to need 8TB of local storage. Without such a shift, consumers will mostly be happy to save money on 1-2TB drives rather than move up to higher capacities they don't need.