SSD prices cratered in 2023, then shot way back up, and have barely dropped since then.

Baseline name brand SSDs got down to about $75 for 2TB, and I'm not going to be impressed by anything until I see similar numbers again.

I got an Intel 660P 2TB for $55 haha. Should have stocked up on bigger SSDs ugh.

Also the capacities for SSDs have barely budged. Many years ago I went all-out and equipped my PC with a 4TB SSD. Just last week I went SSD shopping for the first time in ages.. and 4TB was the largest drive anyone had. It's a few generations later and the new NVME/PCIe standards mean faster, lower-latency drives. But where are the 8TB, 12TB, or 24TB drives?

They exist but definitely more painful to use at a home setup since their formats are more server oriented, like U.2/U.3 or E1S and few others. And for course the prices - you can get 30,60 TB (and even more), but it’s gonna be >$4k.

And versus the normal M2 drives, the larger server grade are more annoying. For example, I got recently a 15.36TB Kioxia Cd6-R in U.3 format, for $1.3k, which is not bad for ssd prices. After getting the right adapters and fitting it inside a minisforum ms-01. It’s working fine, but it immediately reached its “critical” temperature (while doing nothing) so I had to attach a big fan and cool it. All the larger SSDs which are meant for server rooms will expect lots of cooling.

https://www.serversupply.com/SSD/PCI-E4.0/15.36TB/KIOXIA/KCD...

You can also look up the rated idle power in the datasheets to know beforehand. Anything over ~5w needs cooling and usually they are 10+w (at least the ten or so I have here at home). Some of my disks have a low power more (still 7w) which you can enable with vendor tooling or the correct sas command but ymmv. Check the datasheet, it almost always states max 45c ambient and continuous airflow required.

Why not get 4x 4TB drives and stripe?

MS-01 doesn't have enough space

I agree this would work, and yes backups are important, but you're now at 1/4 reliability plus raid issues reliability.

The upthread may be able to hug that, but I like a quiet night in, not an unreliable wildcat.

RAID 0, ok (but that's a bit dangerous). As soon as you add some redundancy, you pay either a massive price in term of capacity or in term of performance, pretty much any implementation you look at (ZFS, MD, Windows storage space, etc). Larger SSDs means less components which can fail, less power consumption per TB.

I fail to see how 16TB of chips spread across 4 PCBs is significantly different in risk than the exact same number of chips being collocated on one PCB.

I think the argument would be all the extra support electronics, in particular capacitors.

And the controllers

I had found Samsung 9100 NVMe to be a massive improvement, especially so at 4 TB as that more than doubled up the effective iops for random writes (vis-a-vis its massive 4 GB cache) I bought two for roughly 400 euro apiece. 9100 also supposedly comes in 8 TB, but I'm yet to see it in the wild.

There's a couple 8TB options, but with the twin constraints of M.2 size and price nobody is really bothering to go bigger for consumer parts.

And the technologies for fast connections to 2.5" drives keep failing to get a foothold in consumer products.

> And the technologies for fast connections to 2.5" drives keep failing to get a foothold in consumer products.

Not surprising, considering the vast majority of consumers don't need more storage than you can easily fit in an M.2 form factor. Why mess around with expensive enterprise U.2 drives when it gives you zero benefit and gains you the hassle of dealing with extra wires and finding space for an ugly bulky rectangle?

Once you get to storage sizes where 2.5" becomes a need, you are well beyond the consumer price range. Very few people are willing to spend more on a single SSD than on the rest of their gaming computer combined.

With individual games being hundreds of gigabytes and growing, I'm not convinced that you're right.

The "vast majority of consumers" are not PC gamers who keep a dozen AAA games installed at a time. They have work PCs and laptops.

I never said that the vast majority of people need large SSDs.

I said that the set of people who need large SSDs is big enough such that its complement does not necessarily constitute the "vast majority".

Obviously what you mean by "vast majority" is somewhat subjective, and there is absolutely room to disagree with my statement. But argue against the right thing.

4TB is what currently fits easily into the M.2 form factor, and 8TB has been possible for years without much extra expense in custom packaging. I'm quite confident that it is fair to say the "vast majority" of consumers do not need 8TB or more of storage in their laptops.

If local storage becomes too cheap, how can companies push their cloud storage subscriptions? Imho it’s sad that ssds haven’t gotten much bigger. A spinning disk can now house dozens of tb. If 8tb can fit on an m.2, it could feasibly fit even more into an SSD form factor. Not as fast as nvme, but still faster and somewhat more resilient than hdds. I have a strong desire for ssds like this… but my only option is super expensive u.2, and I don’t need it to be that crazy fast. Just faster and smaller than hdd would suffice

It pains me so much. I would love a laptop with a 4TB or 8TB SSD. But the 3.5 extra TB to go from a 0.5TB SSD to a 4TB SSD costs 1758 USD if I want an Apple laptop (which I do, for all sorts of other reasons). It's absolutely wild.

If you're worried about price and pricing Apple, you're doing it wrong. You could put the SSD in a Thunderbolt enclosure and it'll be just about as fast, if a little awkward to carry around and plug in often.

There are plenty of non-Apple but good manufacturers with flexibility. Hell, I don't like Dell for their price points, but all of the laptops I've seen from them have upgradeable RAM and storage. If you want even more customization there are things like Framework.

Well, I am worried about doubling the price of the laptop for 3.5TB. External SSDs are a significant extra and (technologically) completely unnecessary complexity and inconvenience.

> There are plenty of non-Apple but good manufacturers with flexibility.

I disagree. The laptop market is tragic.

I mean, isn't it obvious? There is no demand for massive SSDs. The current "average consumer" capacity has stabilized at 1-2TB for a system drive. It's also what you buy for your PS5s etc. There's just not that many (popular) use cases for larger SSD. Even with gaming, which is probably the most widespread use case for "fast and big" drives, people found out that there's only so many AAA 150GB behemoths that they can play at the same time...

photo and video use case?

As an average consumer/data hoarder, why not store those on cheap spinning HDD's? They can stream the data fast enough, and modern NAS hardware gives you easy RAID too. You don't really need super-quick random access to multiple TB's of data, so HDD storage is probably good enough.

HDD is really not fast enough if you're going to be doing a RAID rebuild with a 18TB HDD

It's plenty fast enough for my N+2 ZFS Raid, but I'll admit that that time is still measured in days.

I’m running several that large or larger in a Synology.

Adding a drive takes a week. Replacing a drive a slightly quicker, but rebuild times are no joke.

I think you're confusing cause and effect - 1-2 TB is the most common for PS5s because it's still where the price-per-GB sweet spot is. I bought a 2 TB because it was the cheapest per GB at the time, figuring I'd come out ahead financially even if I replaced it with a 4 TB in 2-3 years.

Alas, prices have not come down like I expected. And sure, there's only so many I can play at a time, but I also don't want to have to wait through a reinstall each time I change it up.

If consumers were offered the same space for half the cost or same cost for double the space, I find it likely at least 30% would pick each of those bins.

It's not that people don't want larger drives, it really is that this is what the market is willing to bear and there is NOT sufficient competition to keep prices low.

> There is no demand for massive SSDs.

Then why can I buy 22TB spinner by disks so easily?

I’d love to go solid state, but the cost should be phenomenal.

Judging by comments here, the server options also require a lot of cooling, and keeping the noise down is the point for me (along with keeping heat + power down, and speed).

The 22TB HDDs are good for archival and long-term storage.

The capacities for SSDs have barely budged in the consumer space, but they're going upwards a lot for enterprise and 2nd hand enterprise drives.

ie: https://www.ebay.com/itm/186355513308

There are heaps on Ebay, but you'll be paying $$ for the larger sized drives.

There are 8TB drives, and (ignoring QLC ones) 18 months ago you’d have paid over $1200 for either of the two models available (Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus or Inland Performance Plus). Then WD released a 8TB version of their SN850X at an initial price of $850. These days I regularly see it for $650 or below (Amazon actually has it for $600 right this moment), which is a positive but tolerable premium over buying 2×4TB of the same (admittedly high-end) model. The other two options have also come down in price, though the Sabrent still hovers just below a thousand.

Be extremely careful of buying WD (NVMe) SSDs if you're intending on using them with Linux: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/14793

Many _serious_ reports of problems there, across many models and firmware revisions. It's an ongoing problem, and WD is ignoring it entirely.

Thanks! I see that the people reporting problems with the (DRAMless) SN770 there also report no problems with the SN850X, but that might not be indicative either way—AFAIU the 8TB SN850X has somewhat different internals compared to its lower-capacity brethren. (It does put Framework’s decision to ship SN770—now SN7100—SSDs in their laptops as standard in an unfavourable light.)

It's just a brand. The SN770 shares nothing technical with, for example, the SN8100.

Well, "the brand" is ignoring the problems across several SSD models.

The reports in that thread you linked to are clustered around several models that do have substantial shared technology: a DRAMless design using an in-house SanDisk controller, and difficulties arise with the NVMe Host Memory Buffer feature that is only applicable to DRAMless drives. But the high-end SanDisk drives aren't DRAMless, and the SN8100 in particular doesn't even use an in-house SanDisk controller.

> But where are the 8TB, 12TB, or 24TB drives?

Kioxia has them for servers [1]. You'll pay for that privilege though, 12.8 TB will set you back a healthy 1.600 € [2] and 30 TB 4.100 € [2].

[1] https://europe.kioxia.com/de-de/business/ssd/enterprise-ssd....

[2] https://www.primeline-solutions.com/de/kioxia-12-8-tb-cd8-v-...

[3] https://www.primeline-solutions.com/de/kioxia-30-72-tb-cm7-r...

Why do you think the price of SSDs should be close to cost?

As there are many consumer level producers (who all buy from a smaller set of actual producers), it may seem like the market is close to perfect competition (which would justify price=cost).

But actually there are many low quality producers that frequently burn those stupid enough to buy from them. And a few high quality producers who generally sell what they advertise. So if you are trying to buy a high quality SSD, you are buying from an oligopoly that have built their brands over the years. So they can charge significantly higher than cost due to this reason.

And I imagine that others can't drop their prices much lower than this price because then people get suspicious and don't buy it at all.

> Why do you think the price of SSDs should be close to cost?

Not close, but closeER and at least some evidence of tracking. That's what I'd expect if they were ubiquitous.

Some goods track commodity prices closely. Shrinkflation happens when you can't easily alter the unit price, chocolate bars are a good example. Not that we pay anything like as little as the producers get: there's enough competition that putting valhrona to one side, chocolate prices reflect commodity prices. Same with fuel. Same with ROHC compliant resistors. SMD components. PCBs. Batteries, led light bulbs. DDR memory.

Not SSD. There is no reason it must, this isn't the laws of physics. I just observe it doesn't. If there was more visible competition in supply of inputs, they MIGHT. But it looks like at best a duopoly or tri-opoly of inputs, and prices reflect demand a lot more. Supply isn't even close to demand, there's no surplus.

Those other things are somewhat peripheral. Not saying they don't have a role, but I don't think it's fundamental. I bought 6 "patriot" P210 and they get average to poor reviews for speed and reliability.

Eh, probably RAM’esque price fixing. Not that anyone is going to look too closely with all the geopolitical fuckery right now.

There have been reports that Micron has been doing unusual ammounts of lobbying around the time that the US government introduced trade sanctions against YMTC and Apple dropped their plans to start using them. (Though that time period also coincides with the CHIPS Act frenzy, so take with a grain of salt.)

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.

We'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"

Not 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.

Mate, 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"

An SSD with 2TB flash typically contains 2GB RAM for lookup tables.

We are talking about Samsung and Micron here?

Price/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.

Do 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.

Maybe spending time making more GPU memory instead?

DRAM and NAND require entirely different fabs.

The 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 ...

The 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.

Interesting - 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?

The 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-contr...

There is no consumer market for 4TB+ SSDs. There never was, and there probably won't be for the foreseeable future. Most non-technical people have been conditioned to store their data on their phones and/or in the cloud these days. When they need more storage, their first thought is to upgrade their cloud plan, not to open up their device and void the warranty.

Professionals like us know of course that the SSD is an easily upgradable component. But we also tend to know how to set up a NAS with 4x 18TB HDDs in a zfs pool that can saturate the bandwidth of any reasonable home network when transferring large files. So the market for professionals and enthusiasts don't always translate into a market for large SSDs.

I would like to be able to get rid of my hard drive NAS at some point, in favour of something smaller and quieter. The price really doesn’t make sense right now, though.

> and there probably won't be for the foreseeable future.

There might be if we get to vert large models that rely more on storage than compute, but that's a lot of "ifs" in there. Maybe when people start capturing their birthdays in 16K HDR at 120 fps.

Opening up one's device does not void the warranty in the US. We have the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act which forbids this, despite manufactures trying to groom us otherwise with those void if removed or broken stickers.

Most recently, FTC started to raise awareness and crack down on some abuse: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/....

Will take a long time to de-program and by that time nothing will be replaceable to matter due to industries march towards preventing repair altogether.

> There is no consumer market for 4TB+ SSDs. There never was, and there probably won't be for the foreseeable future.

Gamers certainly are a market. Borderlands 3 for example, a 2019 game, clocks in at 75GB on Steam, GTA 5 at 105 GB, MSFS 150 GB. And that's all OLD games. CoD Black Ops wants 175 GB, GTA 6 is rumored to want anything from 100 to 300 GB. You don't want that on spinning rust.

Are you going to have all those installed at the same time? I mean, most players will focus on one, two games at the time, and also Steam or GoG will just backup your saved games to the cloud, so you can uninstall them, and come back to your old games later.

And if uninstalling is too far, inactive games can go to an extra cheap hard drive and it'll only take 10-15 minutes to move 100GB back to your SSD.

I was hoping SSDs would get price competitive with hard drives but the progress sure has been bad lately...

(It's possible to even set up a system that lets you play a game while it's being moved over to SSD, but sadly there aren't any easy ways to do that right now.)

> have been conditioned to store their data on their phones

This is 100% true. I have a family member that literally has a decade of family photos stored in WhatsApp conversations. 10 gigs app storage used on some old iPhone, no backup.

HDD isn't any different. Peice per TB has been flat for many years. You get higher capacity for Hyperscaler, but those are not intended for consumers and you need to pre book in advance to get them.

SSD price may have fluctuating for the last few years but their cost model are now similar to HDD. And so is DRAM.

Mainly cost to produce GB of DRAM / NAND / HDD are roughly the same for many years. You may get better performance or lower energy usage. But cost hast changed. And all fluctuations in market are supple and demand dynamics, which is why many saw 4TB for $150 in 2023 and thought things will drop soon. But that has not been the case.

We need breakthroughs to further reduce the cost per GB. Although one could argue we have half the cost already if we accounted for inflation for the past 20 years.

What's a fair price for a TB of HDD? SSD? Which high-capacity SSDs are worth buying?

I'm not sure if there are any sites tracking this. Anyway, I need to buy 30TB of storage this year so I can upgrade my NAS and make it last few years. Thanks for any replies from anyone who has an opinion!

HDD: $10/TB

SSD: $50-100/TB

Most new drives are sold into consumer/end user retail around $20/TB and only seem to dip a little during sales (with most sellers also quantity limiting any sales, also). Getting to $10/TB is possible but typically involves buying manufacturer recertified, and may involve going smaller (14-16TB drives) than you might prefer.

I managed to find 64x Seagate Exos 20TB for $13/TB new about 2 years ago, on NewEgg of all places, but I’ve never seen that deal repeat. :(

All the new 30TB+ HDDs using HAMR technology from Seagate and WD still feel like expensive unobtainium.

Thank you.

The SSDs come from, very generally speaking, the same semiconductor segment that has been busted multiple times for price fixing in DRAM.

Not that hyperconsolidation in HDDs isn't vulnerable to the same things, but the management playbook of these guys is to fix and inflate as much as possible.

> Prices for HDD do drop when the TB available rises but there seems to be a "floor" price.

For SSD, there definitely appears to be a floor price.

The floor price for new hard drives is somewhere around $50-$80. When a drive at a certain capacity is only sellable for $50, most of the options disappear. Looking at newegg, you can get a 1TB drive for $60, 2TB for $65, and 4TB for $75 ... The price floor is around there. But if you want the best $/TB, you've got to get larger drives.

For SSDs, the floor is a lot lower. You can get a 128gb ssd for $22, 256Gb for $25, 512GB for $33, 1TB for $50, and then after that $/TB stays pretty consistent, there's not a lot of reduction in cost due to density like with hard drives.

Imo the problem of SSDs is that even super-cheap products easily hit or exceed the sweet spot (which for me is at least 1TB of capacity and 1-2GB/s of read write speed, and lack of judder/slowdown when near capacity).

A ton of affordable SSDs can do this, and after that (well, I'd pay for 2TB but not more), any upgrade is not noticeable for the end user.

There is collusion between manufacturers to control prices. Just like other industries, they learned the hard way with overproduction and capacity. Samsung was able to convince everyone to cut back. In Dec of 23, I purchased a Crucial P5 Plus Gen 4 2 TB SSD for $86 off Amazon and it was soon afterwards Samsung cut back drastically, with competitors following.

Your last point is exactly what capitalism has wrought, can see it in everything now. It relies on the apathy of the general public, which is immense.

Every now & then there's an article on shrinkflation, and it's incredibly noticeable to all of us that what we're buying in the supermarkets we're getting less for more. Do we do anything about it? Nah.

A lot of it is down to endless growth, investors hopping on the last few carriages of the train and demanding that more carriages be added after them, and everyone else already on-board obviously support that as well.

There are very few companies that are run as "at capacity" ie fully satisfying their market size, competing with competitors, organically staying the same size due to external factors.

Now it's all internal factors (which I include investors in) trying to balloon every company as large as they can.