Another issue with demand is IOPS. Enterprise is rarely limited by storage capacity, but instead by reliable operations per second. Pretty much every enterprise wants every SSD it can get at the right price point, which is much higher than consumers will pay. For the time being it will be worthwhile for NAND makers to sell drives to companies at a much higher price point.
To put it another way, why wouldn't someone undercut the current suppliers and sell at just above their marginal cost and take over the whole market.
[1] https://bit-tech.net/news/tech/memory/samsung-micron-sk-hyni...
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261330-china-investiga...
And the Chinese accusations of price fixing need to be understood in the context that they're trying very hard to get their own NAND fabs up and running, almost certainly using at least some stolen tech. Even without Chinese influence, NAND prices have fallen dramatically since that article was written, due to ordinary healthy market forces.
Moat. Or the Entry Barrier. You can't built a Fab, ignore the yield and expect it to be profitable. TSMC famously said they will never enter the NAND and DRAM market and thought of those as commodities. In 2017 that look utterly stupid when NAND and DRAM prices were sky high, while not widely reported, making Samsung Electronics the most profitable company in the world ( They own ~60% of the world's DRAM and NAND market ), even more so than Apple. By 2018, a 5% drop in World Wide Smartphone shipment trigger a knock on effect, the prices has seen been plummeting. Still profitable, just not as much as they were.
It was once thought the $100B USD from China would have solve this problem. Even if they make 50% less yield, and earned net zero margin, along with forcing Chinese Smartphone companies to use a percentage of those components, should have been enough to sustain those Chinese based NAND fab. Turns out it wasn't quite as easy as they thought. Most of the DRAM and NAND were far too inferior. 3D NAND, or Multilayer Stacked NAND along with leading edge node is a huge barrier of entry.
One reason why you keep hearing there are lots of IP theft going on.
Note: All the Apple product sold in China are using Chinese bases NAND.
This is... exactly what everyone expects, and the assumption of every economic graph in the world?
The stupidest, most basic supply-demand model is:
Prices fall with falling demand and/or rising supply.
Prices rise with rising demand and/or falling supply.
There are actually markets where the opposite holds. Basically anything with high fixed costs, because the more units sold, the less of the fixed costs each unit has to cover.
But fabs don't really work like that because, while very expensive, they have finite capacity. A fab that can produce a million units costs a billion dollars. If you want two million units, that'll be two billion dollars and be available a few years from now. And if you build more capacity than there is demand, you're bankrupt. So they purposely build somewhat less than expected, which when demand is higher than expected results in much more demand than supply.
In Oligopoly markets, because there are only a few producers, the producers have more leverage over their buyers and are therefore able to charge prices higher than the marginal cost of production.
To your suggesstion, lets say I realize this and I want to start a NAND factory that undercuts my competitors by a little bit but leave me plenty of profit, I have to first build a factory large enough to reach the economy of scales that my competitors have. Reason for that is for a period of time, the marginal cost of production decreases as sheer production increases because the process gets more streamlined and automated. However to do that I need to hire engineers who know how to make a NAND, and maybe I need permission from the Chinese communist party. Then I need to get a bank to agree to give me a loan so I can have enough money to build my factory and hire my engineers. Banks probably are not going to be too keen on lending an unknown quantity and will likely charge me a higher interest rate to compensate for that risk. Only then can I enter the market.
So as you can see while its not impossible to enter the market, its not easy either. Since thats the case, the few existing producers can, without any nefarious activity (which is not to say there isn't any, but its not required), charge prices higher than the marginal cost of production.
pretty nefarious if you ask me. we gotta own the means of production! take-over these oligopolies and turn them into worker-owned-and-directed cooperatives!
On the other hand it means the technology is established and people prefer to buy SSDs over HDs. Speaking of myself, I wouldn't consider buying an HD laptop ever again.
This means companies can invest in very long-term endeavours to transform their HDD production businesses into SSD production businesses. The costs are high but the risk is low, lower or at best equally high of continuing with HDDs if you ask me.
I would have guessed SSDs surpassed HDDs already since 2 years on the Client.
Suppose it costs -- and I am making this up -- $10 to produce the first 1000 units, but only $1 after that.
Suppose people are charging a lot of money, say $50 for a unit.
Won't you increase production to try to capture that demand.
After that, because you have increased production you enjoy economies of scale, and the price comes down.
If you are the only producer, you have no incentive to come down, but if there are other producers you will want to undercut them. In this case, you will bring down your price to gain more market share.
Please help us understand what we are missing with your shrewd understanding of supply and demand curves.
Customer demand is not smooth. I will buy precisely 0 SSDs at prices > $125 per 1T drive, and I will suddenly buy 4 as soon as the price drops below there. There are thousands to millions of other customers will scattered plot points around that area, but while you can draw a smoothed graph over them and be reasonably correct, they do not actually represent a mathematical law.
Further - Information is imperfect and markets, for all their elasticity, are only trending towards efficiency.
This all assumes you're arguing in good faith. This in itself is an unreasonable assumption - Your last, mocking line seems to belie it. As does this line.
OP was talking about 10 year lags! Please read the whole thread in context.
https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2017/9/24/9577541-15...
Samsung et al do build new fabs, but at a significant lag to demand for logistic and risk-mitigation reasons.
But if it is not the case, and lowering your price only wins you _some_ but not all customers, then there is no reason to expect that the price point that balance gaining new customers vs selling each product for less will be equal to the marginal cost and not above.
It's (somewhat) the same situation as with EV and ICE automobiles. The engine and drivetrain in a modern ICE vehicle is extremely complex. Much more so at a macro level than EVs. But we're actually pretty good at building reliable complex mechanical systems. More things shift to solid state over time but it's a long process.
Fun-fact: The "head fly height", i.e. the distance from the underside of the R/W head to the platter surface, is less than a handful nanometers in most hard drives; this makes the gap not just smaller than any production transistor, but also smaller than any production feature size.
The spindle in a hard drive is also an air bearing.
Thats because 2008 to SSDs was like 1982 to HDDs. If you look at 2011 both of your promises are false. SATA SSD in 2011 was as fast as SATA SSD in 2018, but with about 10x more endurance.
The technology to produce crappy SSD is there, but it will "forget" its contents in couple of months when kept unplugged, or burn thru erase cycles in a year while sitting idle, just keeping content alive.
That's a meaningless distinction, M.2 SSDs are incredibly popular and are nearly 10x faster than anything you could get in 2011 (for example, an OCZ Vertex 3 would max out at 550/500 MB/s sequential read/write speeds while a Samsung 960 EVO can do 3.2/1.8 GB/s).
Also, fabs have investors who want returns on their money, so they're not super keen on crashing the market either. There are not-so-secret cartels between all the major players that conspire to keep DRAM and NAND prices high.
We could certainly have the government dump a half-trillion dollars and bring up a bunch of fabs though. That's exactly what China is doing. Their economy runs on assembling the goods, not lithographing the chips (which is largely done in Taiwan or South Korea or sometimes Malaysia).
Probably yes, for everything except the heads. These HDs are built upon many decades of investments in manufacturing capacity.
Also, a hard drive head and electronics has to be made once for each platter, so its cost does not scale with the number of bits on the platter.
(I could maybe believe that you ran into trouble if you used low-end enterprise SSDs that also force themselves to go read-only as soon as the warrantied write endurance is exhausted, rather than continuing until the flash itself is actually starting to fail.)
>top of the line enterprise SSDs
i wasn't precise here. It isn't top of the line enterprise SSDs (like the ones you'd use for databases and which cost accordingly). I meant the top-tier corporate enterprise vendor with top-tier hardware in the corresponding categories ( we're a BigCo ).
So what you're probably getting is ordinary cheap consumer-grade SSDs, but perhaps with encryption capabilities actually turned on. I'd be surprised if you were getting something like the Samsung 850 PRO without specifically ordering premium SSDs.
we've got various models through the years, yet still a notch higher - the 850 PRO has TBW at 300x-500x capacity where is the ones we've been getting got TBW around 1000x, and i think the earlier hardware was even close to 2000-3000x.
I think you should go shopping, because the time where SSDs cost 10x as much as an HDD is over.
When a WD Blue 1TB SATA 6 Gb/s 7200 RPM 64MB is $46 on Amazon and a Crucial MX500 1TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 Inch is $134.
Unless you're comparing the cheapest 1TB HDD you can find to a Samsung 970 pro 1TB or something... which really isn't a reasonable comparison imo.
those are cherrypicked numbers because 1TB is at the very low end for HDD sizes. compare with a more typical HDD size (3TB or 4TB) and you'll see the differences become more obvious.
In that market, people are comparing a pile of disks in an array to a pile of solid state storage needed to replace its capacity. The bulk price of storage inverts when it is cheaper to store hundreds of TB on huge SSDs rather than on huge HDDs. That would be the death of HDD, since nobody really wants spinning disks in their datacenter.
It doesn't even need to be a pile of disks. Even for a PC the differences are big.
My computer has a 1 TB SSD which is a decent size for an SSD. It's still a bit tight for me, so I complement with a spinny rust NAS. If I had an HDD instead it would have been like 8 TB and I wouldn't necessarily need the NAS. I think that's what GP is hinting at when he says "me SSD needs". I think he's also complementing with HDD somewhere for bulk storage (be it external drive, NAS or even cloud storage)
Sorry, you're right! I had quickly searched for a few multi-terabyte drives. But at around 100 GB the two kinds are close.
Companies are overbidding at the fabrication lines to get their latest phones built. Data centers want SSD offerings for customers with insatiable demand for SSD servers at a premium.
The whole thing is just demand demand demand and the chips cant come out fast enough.
Will last for a while at the current rate.
Eventually, an SSD with cost parity with a low end HDD will be big enough, after which there's no reason for the low end consumer market not to switch over. The high end will have already as well (I certainly will never buy another laptop containing a HDD).
At that point, HDDs will essentially only be found in external drives and data centers. The writing will be on the wall, and R&D will slow down, starting a cycle that will lead to collapse.
SSD controllers are cheaper than the fixed costs of hard drive motors, actuators and clean-room assembly. Adding an extra platter gets you more incremental GB per dollar, but getting that first platter working is much more expensive than the minimum viable SSD.
Cost is still up there but only about 2.5x as expensive as 2.5" HDDs... a 2 TB HDD is about $80 while a 1 TB SSD is ~$100-120. And there are (kinda shitty) 2 TB SSDs that are hitting $250 these days (eg Micron 1100).
You can get them for sure[0] and they're not really that expensive at all. That particular one gave me about 95MB/s write speed on large files.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-Elements-Portable-Hard-Drive/dp/...
Sorting by price on Newegg, if you're looking for a cheap laptop drive you can choose right now between a 320gb HDD for $28.55, a 60gb SSD for $19.99, or a 240gb SSD for $31.99.
For a 1TB drive, you're looking at $38.50 HDD vs $109.99 SSD.
Large SSDs remain fairly expensive for now, but the low end is being eaten.
Reliability and mean time between failures figure in to the equation as well -- at both the low end and the high end.
Data centers don't want to be swapping out bad drives all the time, and low-end consumers can't afford to buy new drives all the time. Both want to stretch the drives they have as long as they can, and at least in the past SSDs were less reliable and failed a lot sooner than mechanical drives did.
I personally do like to buy laptops with mechanical drives in them, because I can get a lot of storage without paying insane prices, and because I want the drive to last as long as possible. And just in general, I don't trust SSDs. They have yet to prove themselves to me.
> And just in general, I don't trust SSDs. They have yet to prove themselves to me.
I'm pretty sure you're cherry-picking the data you're willing to look at. It's definitely not true that any datacenter ever avoids SSDs due to worries about drive failure rates. These days, high-end consumer or enterprise SSDs are warrantied to survive more writes than it is physically possible to send to a hard drive during the same 5-year span. Flash memory write endurance stopped being a serious concern by the time consumer SSDs reached capacities that made them sufficient for use as the sole storage device in a mainstream laptop.
Controller/firmware bugs are the only source of SSD failure that you have a non-negligible chance of encountering in the wild, but the rate of such failures is very small, especially if you stick to the major reputable SSD brands. And that's in the consumer market where the vendors aren't specifically validating each SSD model with your specific servers before you put anything into production.
But in a laptop, a device that you lug around, move around while working, and sometimes even drop, a precise mechanical device has a much larger chance to misbehave, to my mind. Its I/O load is way lower than in the datacenter, too.
Power failure behavior of most consumer oriented SSDs is also data corrupting.
70,686mm^2/std 300mm wafer.
Roughly 2 dies/wafer, with exceptional packing, and don't account for defect rates.
Average $0.74/in^2
109.56in^2/std 300mm wafer
81$/std 300mm wafer
roughly 40$ in materials BEFORE you even start talking about the processes to build up 64 layers, and everything else.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/30/dram_vendors_sued_a...
As a web developer, do you charge based on how much it costs for your to eat and pay rent for the day?
Solid state drives still cost about 10 times more per gigabyte. I'm just a web developer, but a spinning-disk drive looks 100 times more complicated to me to manufacture. I know at the beginning that hard drives would be cheaper, simply because SSDs were newer, and there was R & D to amortize. But by now I would have thought that SSDs might have matched hard drives or even undercut them. Not only has it been over a decade, but hard drives themselves are using new R & D too. For example this article mentions that this new hard drive uses a new technique, called HAMR. Can the old factory machinery from 2005 be used to manufacture these new HAMR disks?