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The floor for hard disks is the cost of the case, motor, controller board, etc. The floor for SSDs is the controller and the PCB.
by wmf 1y ago
The floor for hard disks is the cost of the case, motor, controller board, etc. The floor for SSDs is the controller and the PCB.
- dopa42365 1y agoPrice/TB is nearly identical for ancient SATA and new "high-end" PCIe 4 M.2 SSDs. The cost is EVERYTHING except the controller and the PCB. Which would be the memory, shockingly.
- ggm 1y agoDo you think they have a yield problem? The price on chips usually drops when the production tech matures. I could believe the fab lines are running smoking hot, but surely by now lower density fab in all kinds of economies could be making this tech.
- ggm 1y agoWe're nowhere near floor cost in SSD because the cost of the PCB and controller is cents. We're not even tracking the chipcost for the storage. There's no linear function between them in terms of numbers, or die space. The price is just "the price"
- DevelopingElk 1y agoNot true. High end controllers need DRAM for caching indexes. That's at least a few dollars. Flash storage is a commodity, we are paying close to the amortized cost of manufactured and sales.
- ggm 1y agoMate, if you think we're paying amortised costs you either work in American pharma or marketing. We're paying fat shareholder returns. "A few dollars" forsooth. My 2TB SSD cost $150 AUD and was (I believe) immensely profitable to everyone down the supply chain. The same spend gets you 16GB of packaged DDR ram and I think we can both see there is no linear relationship between the DDR chip cost, in GB and the 100x denser storage needed for SLC flash. This is not about vlsi density or number of chips. I'm not paying $15,000 more for my SSD. "The prices are the prices"
- fh973 1y agoAn SSD with 2TB flash typically contains 2GB RAM for lookup tables.
- AtlasBarfed 1y agoWe are talking about Samsung and Micron here?
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoThe cost of manufacturing a 276 layer (!!!) NAND chip must also be significant, and a I dare say takes longer than the mechanical components given that we're talking 276 sequential steps of applying photo resist, UV exposure, then etching ...
- wtallis 1y agoThe whole reason why 3D NAND happened and higher layer counts enable cheaper, higher density storage is that it doesn't require an etch step per layer to build the memory cells. It's just deposit several dozen layers then etch holes down through all of those layers in one step, followed by filling in those holes with different materials. (Though at 276 layers, it's a stack of more than one deck of layers built as separate batches. The aspect ratio of the holes is the limiting factor.) But aside from that, the cost of the NAND is the variable portion of the drive's cost, not part of the fixed floor of cost necessary for a drive of any capacity.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoInteresting - thanks. I wasn't aware 3D NAND was built multiple layers at a time in this way. How are the layers made different, without individual masking and etch?
- wtallis 1y agoThe layers largely aren't different. The end result is a vertical string of (theoretically identical) NAND memory cells filling the holes that were etched through the stack, with contacts at the top and bottom. At the edge of the stack, at the end of the fabrication process, they etch a staircase to expose one contact with each layer. See https://thememoryguy.com/3d-nand-how-do-you-access-the-control-gates/ https://thememoryguy.com/3d-nand-how-do-you-access-the-contr...