6 ms·

We bought a 2TB Sandisk SSD back in 2024 for around $95 from best buy. Today 1TB ssd by sandisk is $166(the cheapest that i found, and it goes for $199 in walma

by dwa3592 6mo ago

We bought a 2TB Sandisk SSD back in 2024 for around $95 from best buy. Today 1TB ssd by sandisk is $166(the cheapest that i found, and it goes for $199 in walmart). Market is forcing people to become renters than buyers and there is no force countering that idea. Its a market failure that people will study 10-15 years from now. EDIT- The same 2TB ssd is now $329.99 at bestbuy.

mxfh 6mo ago
You were not are renter in 2021 when NVMe were same price as now by TB, stuff is just becoming more expensive on market shortages. Last half year ate up three to four years of earlier price regression, that's about it. As long as this plateaus here, as prices did for last 4 months, that's just the new equilibrium where it has the chance to get better again, would no be all doom and gloom about personal computing yet.
- downrightmike 6mo ago
  The dollar is losing value, we cant hit equilibrium, it will always cost more dollars. And that is assuming the mfg are not price maximizing (they are).
kjs3 6mo ago
Ug. I picked up a 16TB hard disk last year for about $250. Went looking for another one last month and the same disk is about $500. Painful.
- Scoundreller 6mo ago
  At least the fun part with these situations is that the prices of old crap goes up and I can sell that old crap I have for actual $. I remember selling some ancient GPUs that I was going to throw away during one of the previous booms.
  - kjs3 6mo ago
    Indeed. Now...where did I put that pile of PC3 memory...
hikarudo 6mo ago
It's not a market failure, it's just supply and demand. There are many computer components competing for the same resources (fabs, wafers). Demand for GPUs, RAM etc. has increased a lot due to AI, but supply is still the same due to new fabs being huge investments that take years to build. Of course the price goes up.
- paulnpace 6mo ago
  The demand side is the world's "investors" buying up a product without producing profit. This results in locking out companies operating without such "investors" from accessing the product and using it to produce profit. This is a failure.
  - bigbuppo 6mo ago
    And it's exacerbated by the companies that have to invest their own Real Money to produce factories to make the chips. Same goes with the power utilities. Everyone knows it's a bubble and they don't want to be the one left holding the hundred billion dollar bag like back when Enron went belly up.
    - paulnpace 6mo ago
      But they create a new problem for themselves of converting consumers into non-brand loyalty pure price hunters. I don't think I'm speaking for myself when I say I will use the other guy if it saves me a penny for the rest of my life. The counter-example I hold up is Harley-Davidson. They could hardly pay a bill in the late '70 through the '80s. They'd even get free samples from suppliers and put them into production. They survived with very strong brand loyalty from customers and after-market companies. Samsung sells directly to customers of all sizes, so they have a very good idea as to where products end up. Cutting the legs off of innumerable small businesses is despicable behavior. I don't care if Samsung is literally starving to death, where I was previously at least a marginally loyal customer not even looking at other brands because prices were fine.
- mrtksn 6mo ago
giancarlostoro 6mo ago
When I was 18 I was hoping we'd have 500TB hard drives by now.
- ndr42 6mo ago
  And you are now how old? 19? 79?
  - giancarlostoro 6mo ago
    36 ;)
- markhahn 6mo ago
  the interesting thing is that scaling laws (at least Moore's and the like) are complete lies. (Moore is fine if you treat it as a weak observation that shrinking features to half gives you 4x as many devices in the same area.) what happens is that the industry goes through certain discrete technical upgrades. for instance, EUV in fabs, or GMR disk heads. none of these are really planned, none of them are exponential. and they usually interact with other phenomena (such as Dennard scaling). in a sense, the phenomenon is more like "expectations are exponential, and this motivates manufacturers to schedule updates". hard disks are still improving, arguably similar to how they have in the past, but there are limits to demand. the consumer market has mostly dropped out, for instance due to flash. even in flash, there is no exponential scaling in devices. people got excited in the initial startup, when for instance, mature TLC is so much better than early SLC. but all that's over: it's both mature and we'll probably never see PLC. even QLC is interesting in that it illustrates that most of our storage is very cold.
ericd 6mo ago
Are things too expensive now, or was that miraculously cheap because of a glut of supply relative to demand at the time? I think my first SSD was something like $600 for 160 gigs, one of those intel drives that came with a speed demon sticker, so let's appreciate what we have for a sec. Or we could go back to 5 megs of spinning rust for $thousands. Things will normalize, semis are a boom and bust industry, and it takes a massive amount of capital investment to increase supply. Because of that boom and bust, the producers are wary of growing their supply to keep up in lockstep with demand, because they might end up with a glut that they have a hard time selling, and a large pile of debt from building out that glut. Semiconductors at the leading edge take very large, very expensive, very rube goldbergian machines to make them, and a very skilled workforce to make those work. If this stuff stays this expensive/profitable, industry will grow capacity to boost earnings until they overshoot, there's not some grand conspiracy to make you rent everything. We're just in a massive dislocation right now because we've discovered this awesome new tool that's boosting demand by a ridiculous degree. Last year we were at ~$300B of capital investment in DCs in the US, this year it's looking like ~$750B.
- overfeed 6mo ago
  > If this stuff stays this expensive/profitable, industry will grow capacity to boost earnings until they overshoot, there's not some grand conspiracy to make you rent everything Production cartels exist to prevent individual greed from "ruining" it for the rest of the group. OPEC does it in the overtly, memory manufactures do it covertly, and have been convicted of conspiring in multiple jurisdictions, on multiple occasions.
  - ericd 6mo ago
    Good point re cartels. But I still don’t think there’s a shadowy group trying to make owning things impossible for normal people as an explicit goal.
    - overfeed 6mo ago
      It's not a goal, but a secondary effect. Companies that build long-lasting products for sale to customers will have lower profits than those that rent-out cheaply made goods. Over a multi-decade window, with some bankruptcies, consolidation roll-ups and astute leadership, you can guess which model will win, based on nothing but market forces and imperfect information. The collusion is based purely on P&L performance.
thelastgallon 6mo ago
When people talk about AI investments of trillions of dollars, its never mentioned how high a price we are paying at a planetary scale in externalities. Billions of people are now paying a lot more for these components, memory, ssd, cpu; all these costs must be factored into the total cost of AI. AI companies are being subsidized at the expense of consumers. The current supply chains were built for consumer demand, which is hijacked by the AI grifters. Same a consumers (car drivers) subsidizing businesses (trucks). Road damage is almost entirely caused by trucks, 4th power of weight, but the cost is borne by us.
- Adachi91 6mo ago
  True, I've been searching for 2 weeks now for components to get a PC back online. I suspect the VRM blew in my motherboard, and trying to find x570 or b550 old Gen tech is drying up because that's the only thing affordable. Meanwhile decent 3D cache CPU + motherboard combos afe going cheap because they can't move stock. The price looks nice but the second you add DDR5 RAM it is just a gut punch. Scalpers are taking advantage of this as well, as well as Chinese "Brand New" x570 motherboards listed as gaming consoles on Amazon. This is the first time I've had a computer have a complete failure and no way to fix it as I look around at the used market and the latest generation market. I'm kind of just disillusioned.
  - lostlogin 6mo ago
    So you pay for parts that are all very expensive due to AI in order to get the machine online so that you can pay for AI subscriptions to do work that is disappearing due to job cuts due to AI.
didgetmaster 6mo ago
When I upgraded my computer a little over a year ago, I got 128GB of DDR5 RAM instead of just 64GB. Glad I did. I also thought about upgrading my gen4 SSD at the same time. It was still meeting all my needs, so I thought if I waited, I could get a bigger, faster one for cheap later. Mistake!
Aurornis 6mo ago
> Market is forcing people to become renters than buyers and there is no force countering that idea. The doomerism surrounding this topic is wild. Gas prices have also gone up recently, but I don't see the same claims about how it's the end of personal vehicles, that the prices are never coming down, or that we're all becoming renters instead of buyers. Saying that there isn't a force countering this is peak doomerism. New factories take a long time to build. These companies didn't have spare production lines waiting for demand to go up.
- hephaes7us 6mo ago
  If you don't see people talking about the "end of personal vehicles", it could just be that you haven't looked very hard. It's intuitively obvious to a lot of people that the era of personal, wholly owned transportation is waning. A lot of people seem to miss the second clause of that old "you'll own nothing" phase, the part where most people are happy about it! When vehicles drive themselves, and there's a large enough pool that one can show up pretty reliably within a few minutes of your needing one, how many people are going to choose to own when renting is cheaper and easier?
  - sandworm101 6mo ago
    Because renting will likely never be cheaper. Maybe the occasional city dweller may see a profit, but those of us who spend hours in our cars each day will not.
    - Jyaif 6mo ago
      Perhaps additional financial incentives for people to not spend hours of their day in cars is a good thing?
  - BizarroLand 6mo ago
    Probably everyone that doesn't live in a dense metropolitan area, and anyone that can do the math that "Owning my vehicle for 100,000 miles costs an average of $0.50/mile compared to the $1+/mile getting a lift costs, and once it's done I still have whatever value remains in my vehicle"
yieldcrv 6mo ago
and 2TB SSD's in 2020 were expensive too, after dropping to lows late last decade ebbs and flows
walrus01 6mo ago
I remember buying a 80GB Intel SATA SSD (which was $450 USD at the time) and putting it into the DVD drive bay in a 2009 17" Macbook Pro. At the time there was no official SSD support, but there was an aluminum holder you could buy to remove the slimline slot loading DVD drive, and put a 2.5" form factor (7.5 or 9.5mm?) height SSD or HDD in its place. Was a huge performance increase for the OS/boot drive.
- Modified3019 6mo ago
  I just bought a few more Intel 310 Series 40GB mSATA ssd’s on eBay for $10 each. They are ancient and comparatively slow, but reliable and extremely low power, so much so they can be perfectly powered by a USB 2.0 port in an enclosure if needed, and don’t need a heat sink. My original 80GB version ($190) that I put in my W520 thinkpad in 2011 is still going strong. Basically I like to use them as a cheap “better” thumb drive, putting ventoy on them with no concern for space, along with a fat32 partition for bios updates. These along with a nanoKVM box my siblings can attach to the computers I built for them makes remote troubleshooting relatively painless when rustdesk isn’t sufficient.
nirav72 6mo ago
Last fall I bought a 4tb Samsung 990 pro drive for $260. Now it retails between $800-900.
naveen99 6mo ago
Are you sure it’s the same ssd. The new nvme5 disks are 3x faster

by dwa3592 6mo ago

mxfh 6mo ago

You were not are renter in 2021 when NVMe were same price as now by TB, stuff is just becoming more expensive on market shortages. Last half year ate up three to four years of earlier price regression, that's about it. As long as this plateaus here, as prices did for last 4 months, that's just the new equilibrium where it has the chance to get better again, would no be all doom and gloom about personal computing yet.

downrightmike 6mo ago
The dollar is losing value, we cant hit equilibrium, it will always cost more dollars. And that is assuming the mfg are not price maximizing (they are).

kjs3 6mo ago

Ug. I picked up a 16TB hard disk last year for about $250. Went looking for another one last month and the same disk is about $500. Painful.

Scoundreller 6mo ago
At least the fun part with these situations is that the prices of old crap goes up and I can sell that old crap I have for actual $. I remember selling some ancient GPUs that I was going to throw away during one of the previous booms.
- kjs3 6mo ago
  Indeed. Now...where did I put that pile of PC3 memory...

hikarudo 6mo ago

It's not a market failure, it's just supply and demand. There are many computer components competing for the same resources (fabs, wafers). Demand for GPUs, RAM etc. has increased a lot due to AI, but supply is still the same due to new fabs being huge investments that take years to build. Of course the price goes up.

paulnpace 6mo ago
The demand side is the world's "investors" buying up a product without producing profit. This results in locking out companies operating without such "investors" from accessing the product and using it to produce profit. This is a failure.
- bigbuppo 6mo ago
  And it's exacerbated by the companies that have to invest their own Real Money to produce factories to make the chips. Same goes with the power utilities. Everyone knows it's a bubble and they don't want to be the one left holding the hundred billion dollar bag like back when Enron went belly up.
  - paulnpace 6mo ago
    But they create a new problem for themselves of converting consumers into non-brand loyalty pure price hunters. I don't think I'm speaking for myself when I say I will use the other guy if it saves me a penny for the rest of my life. The counter-example I hold up is Harley-Davidson. They could hardly pay a bill in the late '70 through the '80s. They'd even get free samples from suppliers and put them into production. They survived with very strong brand loyalty from customers and after-market companies. Samsung sells directly to customers of all sizes, so they have a very good idea as to where products end up. Cutting the legs off of innumerable small businesses is despicable behavior. I don't care if Samsung is literally starving to death, where I was previously at least a marginally loyal customer not even looking at other brands because prices were fine.
mrtksn 6mo ago

giancarlostoro 6mo ago

When I was 18 I was hoping we'd have 500TB hard drives by now.

ndr42 6mo ago
And you are now how old? 19? 79?
- giancarlostoro 6mo ago
  36 ;)
markhahn 6mo ago
the interesting thing is that scaling laws (at least Moore's and the like) are complete lies. (Moore is fine if you treat it as a weak observation that shrinking features to half gives you 4x as many devices in the same area.) what happens is that the industry goes through certain discrete technical upgrades. for instance, EUV in fabs, or GMR disk heads. none of these are really planned, none of them are exponential. and they usually interact with other phenomena (such as Dennard scaling). in a sense, the phenomenon is more like "expectations are exponential, and this motivates manufacturers to schedule updates". hard disks are still improving, arguably similar to how they have in the past, but there are limits to demand. the consumer market has mostly dropped out, for instance due to flash. even in flash, there is no exponential scaling in devices. people got excited in the initial startup, when for instance, mature TLC is so much better than early SLC. but all that's over: it's both mature and we'll probably never see PLC. even QLC is interesting in that it illustrates that most of our storage is very cold.

ericd 6mo ago

Are things too expensive now, or was that miraculously cheap because of a glut of supply relative to demand at the time? I think my first SSD was something like $600 for 160 gigs, one of those intel drives that came with a speed demon sticker, so let's appreciate what we have for a sec. Or we could go back to 5 megs of spinning rust for $thousands. Things will normalize, semis are a boom and bust industry, and it takes a massive amount of capital investment to increase supply. Because of that boom and bust, the producers are wary of growing their supply to keep up in lockstep with demand, because they might end up with a glut that they have a hard time selling, and a large pile of debt from building out that glut. Semiconductors at the leading edge take very large, very expensive, very rube goldbergian machines to make them, and a very skilled workforce to make those work. If this stuff stays this expensive/profitable, industry will grow capacity to boost earnings until they overshoot, there's not some grand conspiracy to make you rent everything. We're just in a massive dislocation right now because we've discovered this awesome new tool that's boosting demand by a ridiculous degree. Last year we were at ~$300B of capital investment in DCs in the US, this year it's looking like ~$750B.

overfeed 6mo ago
> If this stuff stays this expensive/profitable, industry will grow capacity to boost earnings until they overshoot, there's not some grand conspiracy to make you rent everything Production cartels exist to prevent individual greed from "ruining" it for the rest of the group. OPEC does it in the overtly, memory manufactures do it covertly, and have been convicted of conspiring in multiple jurisdictions, on multiple occasions.
- ericd 6mo ago
  Good point re cartels. But I still don’t think there’s a shadowy group trying to make owning things impossible for normal people as an explicit goal.
  - overfeed 6mo ago
    It's not a goal, but a secondary effect. Companies that build long-lasting products for sale to customers will have lower profits than those that rent-out cheaply made goods. Over a multi-decade window, with some bankruptcies, consolidation roll-ups and astute leadership, you can guess which model will win, based on nothing but market forces and imperfect information. The collusion is based purely on P&L performance.

thelastgallon 6mo ago

When people talk about AI investments of trillions of dollars, its never mentioned how high a price we are paying at a planetary scale in externalities. Billions of people are now paying a lot more for these components, memory, ssd, cpu; all these costs must be factored into the total cost of AI. AI companies are being subsidized at the expense of consumers. The current supply chains were built for consumer demand, which is hijacked by the AI grifters. Same a consumers (car drivers) subsidizing businesses (trucks). Road damage is almost entirely caused by trucks, 4th power of weight, but the cost is borne by us.

Adachi91 6mo ago
True, I've been searching for 2 weeks now for components to get a PC back online. I suspect the VRM blew in my motherboard, and trying to find x570 or b550 old Gen tech is drying up because that's the only thing affordable. Meanwhile decent 3D cache CPU + motherboard combos afe going cheap because they can't move stock. The price looks nice but the second you add DDR5 RAM it is just a gut punch. Scalpers are taking advantage of this as well, as well as Chinese "Brand New" x570 motherboards listed as gaming consoles on Amazon. This is the first time I've had a computer have a complete failure and no way to fix it as I look around at the used market and the latest generation market. I'm kind of just disillusioned.
- lostlogin 6mo ago
  So you pay for parts that are all very expensive due to AI in order to get the machine online so that you can pay for AI subscriptions to do work that is disappearing due to job cuts due to AI.

didgetmaster 6mo ago

When I upgraded my computer a little over a year ago, I got 128GB of DDR5 RAM instead of just 64GB. Glad I did. I also thought about upgrading my gen4 SSD at the same time. It was still meeting all my needs, so I thought if I waited, I could get a bigger, faster one for cheap later. Mistake!

Aurornis 6mo ago

> Market is forcing people to become renters than buyers and there is no force countering that idea. The doomerism surrounding this topic is wild. Gas prices have also gone up recently, but I don't see the same claims about how it's the end of personal vehicles, that the prices are never coming down, or that we're all becoming renters instead of buyers. Saying that there isn't a force countering this is peak doomerism. New factories take a long time to build. These companies didn't have spare production lines waiting for demand to go up.

hephaes7us 6mo ago
If you don't see people talking about the "end of personal vehicles", it could just be that you haven't looked very hard. It's intuitively obvious to a lot of people that the era of personal, wholly owned transportation is waning. A lot of people seem to miss the second clause of that old "you'll own nothing" phase, the part where most people are happy about it! When vehicles drive themselves, and there's a large enough pool that one can show up pretty reliably within a few minutes of your needing one, how many people are going to choose to own when renting is cheaper and easier?
- sandworm101 6mo ago
  Because renting will likely never be cheaper. Maybe the occasional city dweller may see a profit, but those of us who spend hours in our cars each day will not.
  - Jyaif 6mo ago
    Perhaps additional financial incentives for people to not spend hours of their day in cars is a good thing?
- BizarroLand 6mo ago
  Probably everyone that doesn't live in a dense metropolitan area, and anyone that can do the math that "Owning my vehicle for 100,000 miles costs an average of $0.50/mile compared to the $1+/mile getting a lift costs, and once it's done I still have whatever value remains in my vehicle"

yieldcrv 6mo ago

and 2TB SSD's in 2020 were expensive too, after dropping to lows late last decade ebbs and flows

walrus01 6mo ago

I remember buying a 80GB Intel SATA SSD (which was $450 USD at the time) and putting it into the DVD drive bay in a 2009 17" Macbook Pro. At the time there was no official SSD support, but there was an aluminum holder you could buy to remove the slimline slot loading DVD drive, and put a 2.5" form factor (7.5 or 9.5mm?) height SSD or HDD in its place. Was a huge performance increase for the OS/boot drive.

Modified3019 6mo ago
I just bought a few more Intel 310 Series 40GB mSATA ssd’s on eBay for $10 each. They are ancient and comparatively slow, but reliable and extremely low power, so much so they can be perfectly powered by a USB 2.0 port in an enclosure if needed, and don’t need a heat sink. My original 80GB version ($190) that I put in my W520 thinkpad in 2011 is still going strong. Basically I like to use them as a cheap “better” thumb drive, putting ventoy on them with no concern for space, along with a fat32 partition for bios updates. These along with a nanoKVM box my siblings can attach to the computers I built for them makes remote troubleshooting relatively painless when rustdesk isn’t sufficient.

nirav72 6mo ago

Last fall I bought a 4tb Samsung 990 pro drive for $260. Now it retails between $800-900.

naveen99 6mo ago

Are you sure it’s the same ssd. The new nvme5 disks are 3x faster