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Meanwhile I'm still dreaming about any consumer and affordable 32TB or even 16TB portable SSD. Innovation and market for consumers are going backwards. Funny t

Meanwhile I'm still dreaming about any consumer and affordable 32TB or even 16TB portable SSD. Innovation and market for consumers are going backwards. Funny thing is that one of the best you can get is the Crucial (Micron) 8TB one but even that one gets more expensive. I have the feeling it will be gone completely soon.

devttyeu 5mo ago
Enterprise NVMe on the high end is now starting to ship batches at $1000/TB with existing stock around $500/TB. No consumer is going to pay that. But if you're buying a $500k GPU server putting 100TB of nvme in there for $50-100k is justifiable.
- therealmarv 5mo ago
  There was once a 2.5" SSD Mushkin Source 16TB SATA drive. At its cheapest it was ~1700 USD (or 1500 EUR). That was mid 2023 (like 3 years ago!). Nowadays it feels like that this time and price region is like decades away in the future. I was hoping I can store more data in future on modern tech like SSDs and not less.
  - radicality 5mo ago
    Yeah it sucks :( Almost exactly a year ago, I got a brand new 15.36TB Kioxia CD-6R (u.3 pcie4x4 drive) for $1450+tax from serverpartdeals.com - that same drive is now listed for ~$4600 (and it’s also out of stock there)
close04 5mo ago
The prices aren't going down for large consumer drives because the market is so small, and because the AI DC market is swallowing up everything. There's little demand from your average consumer to have 30TB of storage, let alone specifically SSDs. The average user doesn't have that much data, and if they do a HDD is fine for any practical purpose. Despite the recent AI bubble you can still buy HDDs in the tens of TBs for a few hundred EUR/USD and you still don't see them in every computer. How high could the 30TB SSD demand be to justify the kind of volumes that drive price down? In the DC it's the opposite, large and efficient drives are a must to save support all those fancy workloads while driving down space, power, cooling needs.
- chiph 5mo ago
  A few months ago I finished building a new media server based on UnRaid. I populated it with WD 26TB drives. At the time they were about $400 (steep, but a decent capacity/dollar buy). Now they are nearly $1000 on Amazon, a 250% increase. I just hope I don't have a drive failure. With regards to the new Micron SSD - I wonder how they keep it cool? I don't see coolant ports on it so they must strap a heatsink on.
  - close04 5mo ago
    The product brief says maximum 30W and it looks like the whole enclosure is a heatsink, even has ribs on the back. The expected operating temp is 50C but it's probably rated to operate at higher than that. P.S. I had to shuck 20TB WD drives that cost 350EUR on sale (now at 400EUR). 26TB drives are now ~700EUR. These external drives were the cheap option. Standalone drives usually cost more.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
  >The average user doesn't have that much data The average user consumes that much quite regularly. They've been taught to stream it off of someone else's computer, mostly so that the next time they stream it they can be compelled to pay for it again. It's fun going back to dumb terminals.
  - NewsaHackO 5mo ago
    But they don't local store that much data, which is what would be relevant for a discussion above local storage costs.
  - close04 5mo ago
    Consuming and needing to store are very different things. Most media is disposable, one-time consumption. How many people stored the newspapers they read? Why would you want to store every movie or series you watch? 30TB of data is something like 1 year of uninterrupted streaming at average Netflix 4K bitrates. Even more at HD bit rates. How many people would ever store years worth of movies on SSDs no less? Enough for it to drive huge sales in the market?
mxfh 5mo ago
Nobody is stopping anyone from buying a USB-C powered and connected very portable 2 or 4 slot external NVMe enclosures. The old SATA SSD form factor is dead and wont come back. OWC ThunderBlades exist, but 32TB will set you back 9 grand. You should be able to assemble something with USB-C for under 5k. That's not a mass consumer market thing, but perfectly doable, if your use case warrants it. We are stuck with 2021 pricing, but now with options of 8TB per NVMe drive at way higher speed. 36TB+ HHD external WD drive combos were always around EUR 1000 over last 5 years. With a short low end around EUR 600 in 2023 https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderblade?sku=OWCTB3TBL8X32 https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderblade?sku=OWCTB3TBL8X32
- wao0uuno 5mo ago
  >Nobody is stopping anyone from buying a USB-C powered and connected very portable 2 or 4 slot external NVMe enclosures. That's more expensive than buying a single large capacity drive. It's also a terrible idea. I would never trust a low cost chinese controller with terabytes of my data. >The old SATA SSD form factor is dead and wont come back. That's true and very unfortunate.
  - MrDrMcCoy 5mo ago
    I will not miss the awful, half-duplex protocol that never should have won over SAS. I just wish that PCIe switches and cheaper eMMC/UFS flash on M.2 were available for more flexible and cost effective storage options.
    - wao0uuno 5mo ago
      Yeah, the problem is most consumer motherboards don't come with that many PCIe lanes. Building storage servers for home use with M.2 SSDs is just not feasible.
      - MrDrMcCoy 5mo ago
        PCIe is a switched protocol. We ought to have had better options to make better use of the limited lanes by now. There are a few cards with switches that can give you multiple M.2 slots on x4, but that's only with gen3, which the latest GPUs won't init on, and trying to cable that is hell. Better PCIe switch options for external enclosures exist, but aren't available to mortals that I've seen.
markhahn 5mo ago
I find it very odd that there is so much faith in "innovation" (and probably "economies of scale"). there is no sign of any impending breakthroughs that would change flash economics much. slc-mlc-tlc-qlc was very nice but plc will not happen. layer-based flash was also nice but it is ultimately linear (more layers, more cost, lower yield). dimensional shrinks are already stalled because of a tragic electron shortage (per cell). I guess there's no harm in pining for some other NVRAM technology (spins, etc).
- MrDrMcCoy 5mo ago
  I'm still pining for Optane to make a comeback.
  - Melatonic 5mo ago
    Didn't help that they used "Optane" for two very different products. I agree on the good one though !

devttyeu 5mo ago

Enterprise NVMe on the high end is now starting to ship batches at $1000/TB with existing stock around $500/TB. No consumer is going to pay that. But if you're buying a $500k GPU server putting 100TB of nvme in there for $50-100k is justifiable.

therealmarv 5mo ago
There was once a 2.5" SSD Mushkin Source 16TB SATA drive. At its cheapest it was ~1700 USD (or 1500 EUR). That was mid 2023 (like 3 years ago!). Nowadays it feels like that this time and price region is like decades away in the future. I was hoping I can store more data in future on modern tech like SSDs and not less.
- radicality 5mo ago
  Yeah it sucks :( Almost exactly a year ago, I got a brand new 15.36TB Kioxia CD-6R (u.3 pcie4x4 drive) for $1450+tax from serverpartdeals.com - that same drive is now listed for ~$4600 (and it’s also out of stock there)

close04 5mo ago

The prices aren't going down for large consumer drives because the market is so small, and because the AI DC market is swallowing up everything. There's little demand from your average consumer to have 30TB of storage, let alone specifically SSDs. The average user doesn't have that much data, and if they do a HDD is fine for any practical purpose. Despite the recent AI bubble you can still buy HDDs in the tens of TBs for a few hundred EUR/USD and you still don't see them in every computer. How high could the 30TB SSD demand be to justify the kind of volumes that drive price down? In the DC it's the opposite, large and efficient drives are a must to save support all those fancy workloads while driving down space, power, cooling needs.

chiph 5mo ago
A few months ago I finished building a new media server based on UnRaid. I populated it with WD 26TB drives. At the time they were about $400 (steep, but a decent capacity/dollar buy). Now they are nearly $1000 on Amazon, a 250% increase. I just hope I don't have a drive failure. With regards to the new Micron SSD - I wonder how they keep it cool? I don't see coolant ports on it so they must strap a heatsink on.
- close04 5mo ago
  The product brief says maximum 30W and it looks like the whole enclosure is a heatsink, even has ribs on the back. The expected operating temp is 50C but it's probably rated to operate at higher than that. P.S. I had to shuck 20TB WD drives that cost 350EUR on sale (now at 400EUR). 26TB drives are now ~700EUR. These external drives were the cheap option. Standalone drives usually cost more.
NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
>The average user doesn't have that much data The average user consumes that much quite regularly. They've been taught to stream it off of someone else's computer, mostly so that the next time they stream it they can be compelled to pay for it again. It's fun going back to dumb terminals.
- NewsaHackO 5mo ago
  But they don't local store that much data, which is what would be relevant for a discussion above local storage costs.
- close04 5mo ago
  Consuming and needing to store are very different things. Most media is disposable, one-time consumption. How many people stored the newspapers they read? Why would you want to store every movie or series you watch? 30TB of data is something like 1 year of uninterrupted streaming at average Netflix 4K bitrates. Even more at HD bit rates. How many people would ever store years worth of movies on SSDs no less? Enough for it to drive huge sales in the market?

mxfh 5mo ago

Nobody is stopping anyone from buying a USB-C powered and connected very portable 2 or 4 slot external NVMe enclosures. The old SATA SSD form factor is dead and wont come back. OWC ThunderBlades exist, but 32TB will set you back 9 grand. You should be able to assemble something with USB-C for under 5k. That's not a mass consumer market thing, but perfectly doable, if your use case warrants it. We are stuck with 2021 pricing, but now with options of 8TB per NVMe drive at way higher speed. 36TB+ HHD external WD drive combos were always around EUR 1000 over last 5 years. With a short low end around EUR 600 in 2023 https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderblade?sku=OWCTB3TBL8X32 https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderblade?sku=OWCTB3TBL8X32

wao0uuno 5mo ago
>Nobody is stopping anyone from buying a USB-C powered and connected very portable 2 or 4 slot external NVMe enclosures. That's more expensive than buying a single large capacity drive. It's also a terrible idea. I would never trust a low cost chinese controller with terabytes of my data. >The old SATA SSD form factor is dead and wont come back. That's true and very unfortunate.
- MrDrMcCoy 5mo ago
  I will not miss the awful, half-duplex protocol that never should have won over SAS. I just wish that PCIe switches and cheaper eMMC/UFS flash on M.2 were available for more flexible and cost effective storage options.
  - wao0uuno 5mo ago
    Yeah, the problem is most consumer motherboards don't come with that many PCIe lanes. Building storage servers for home use with M.2 SSDs is just not feasible.
    - MrDrMcCoy 5mo ago
      PCIe is a switched protocol. We ought to have had better options to make better use of the limited lanes by now. There are a few cards with switches that can give you multiple M.2 slots on x4, but that's only with gen3, which the latest GPUs won't init on, and trying to cable that is hell. Better PCIe switch options for external enclosures exist, but aren't available to mortals that I've seen.

markhahn 5mo ago

I find it very odd that there is so much faith in "innovation" (and probably "economies of scale"). there is no sign of any impending breakthroughs that would change flash economics much. slc-mlc-tlc-qlc was very nice but plc will not happen. layer-based flash was also nice but it is ultimately linear (more layers, more cost, lower yield). dimensional shrinks are already stalled because of a tragic electron shortage (per cell). I guess there's no harm in pining for some other NVRAM technology (spins, etc).

MrDrMcCoy 5mo ago
I'm still pining for Optane to make a comeback.
- Melatonic 5mo ago
  Didn't help that they used "Optane" for two very different products. I agree on the good one though !