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So you trust the companies that have less competitors and outsized market power?

• mlyle 3y ago
  They trust the companies that have ownership of key parts of the stack, rather than picking vendors for each piece and slapping them together. Such companies have a lot more internal expertise. Yes, it'd be nice to have more vendors like this, but you don't necessarily build a more robust industry just by having more vendors that buy NAND and a controller, make a few firmware tweaks for differentiation, and slap together a design based on an app note.
  • hakfoo 3y ago
    The presence of the second-tier manufacturers forces an interoperable world at the component level. If Samsung made flash that only worked with Samsung controllers and Samsung-exclusive PCB designs, they'd have a far smaller addressable market. I'm surprised we aren't seeing more flexibility out of the third-party market though. I could see someone saying "I'm willing to spend $100 for the most bestest possible 256Gb SSD for an industrial use case", and they'd sell you the parts that are normally sold as a 2TB MLC drive, but with a controller permalocked to using it all in psuedo-SLC cache mode, for example.
    • mlyle 3y ago
      > The presence of the second-tier manufacturers forces an interoperable world at the component level. This is ignoring that there was a market for flash before we had NVME SSD controllers, and that there still is one. NVME is a big chunk of where flash goes now, but I don't think vertical integration is going to make flash disappear in the secondary market. In any case, -- yes, it's good to have a lot of manufacturers around for the industry. But it may not be as safe of a bet to buy from those other guys. There's enough gotchas in the design and support, and there's also the whole issue of supply chains and component quality.