back to article Disk will eat itself: Flash price crash just around the over-supplied block

A flash price crash is coming and should increase disk cannibalization rates as SSDs become more affordable. Objective Analysis' Jim Handy, speaking at last week’s Flash Memory Summit, confirmed we are in a flash over-supply situation, and there will be a downward pricing correction, if not collapse, close to the production …

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  1. pip25
    Meh

    "They would then only be 4X more expensive per GB than disk drives"

    In other words, still way too expensive for me to buy. I'm sure this is a huge drop from previous prices, but only when it gets to the 2X range will I start considering SSDs as a alternative that could completely replace my current drives.

    1. Old Used Programmer

      Re: "They would then only be 4X more expensive per GB than disk drives"

      It really depends on how you configure a system. At a 4x price ratio, one could put a 512GB SSD boot drive, and a 2TB bulk storage HDD in a PC and each drive would cost the same and still have plenty of room on the SSD and speed as well.

    2. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: "They would then only be 4X more expensive per GB than disk drives"

      "In other words, still way too expensive for me to buy."

      Are you kidding? At 4x the cost of HDDs most of the market will be biting SSD sellers' arms off.

      You'll save 1/3 of that difference in power consumption costs in the first 12 months alone, and with SSDs on average lasting at least 6-8 years in service the major savings come when you don't have to buy another hard drive. The faster seek times and throughput are just icing on the cake at that price.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "[...] but only when it gets to the 2X range will I start considering SSDs as a alternative that could completely replace my current drives."

    Also - what are the relative life expectancies of individual SSD v HDD units?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Pricing

    Hard to say if there's a liner correlation between NAND price changes and SSD changes. I assume the SSD vendors need to mark up their material cost, so a drop in NAND pricing could be leveraged into a more extreme drop in SSDs (or higher profits for the manufacturer)

    Meanwhile, if drops in SSD prices cause lower demand for HDDs, we should anticipate dropping prices on HDDs as well (until the pricing drops enough that shrinking margins cause manufacturers to drop out of the HDD market entirely).

    Economics is such a funky non-linear world....

  4. IGnatius T Foobar !

    Cheap-as-chips SSD? Bring it on.

    Cheap-as-chips SSD? Bring it on. Looking forward to expanding my rig.

  5. petef
    Coat

    Of course HDD is a cyclical industry.

    1. Korev Silver badge
      Coat

      Which sector in particular, how are you partitioning the market?

      1. OrneryRedGuy

        Don't bother, it's a total cluster.

        1. sbivol

          I agree, his track record is not very good.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        more...

        I'm seeking more information on this ... will prices drop randomly or sequentially? I'm on track for this ... It's getting so crazy my head is going to crash just thinking about it ... :-)

        1. shade82000

          Sounds like we might end up with a fragmented market but there's still debait about whether the SSD industry is affected by this.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            price pressures will RAID the SSD margins?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Seagate circling the drain

    I can't wait. They never gave a toss about any of their drives that have failed me over the years. At one time they guaranteed their products for several years, now it's down to months.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Finally reliability will meet affordability. Clumsy people such as I will be more than glad to never have to deal with those fatal head crashes.

  8. Tristan

    Enterprise ssd - why not just use a raid of cheap consumer ones? It's not like you can realistically wear them out, and even if you do then you could buy 5 for the cost of one enterprise one.

    With the old spinning rust disks, the enterprise ones have tler - time limited error recovery meant that the raid array would not wait for repeated read attempts from a bad block - up to 2 minutes as a consumer level drive. It would wait for a maximum of 7 seconds before failing, and the raid controller would simply read that block from the mirror instead.

    But enterprise ssds? Seems to mostly be higher write cycles tolerance, and even on consumer level ssds the endurance is "lots"

    1. Alan Brown Silver badge

      "Enterprise ssd - why not just use a raid of cheap consumer ones?"

      RAID-Z3 of them, actually (Or ZRaid1) - You don't need the L2ARC, but they still benefit from the ZIL SLOG drive to smooth out the random writes (with a long enough delay period a lot of random writes end up evaporating entirely instead of turning into sequential ones and the ZIL is only ever used in anger when recovering from an unexpected power cut)

      ZFS - the filesystem based on the premise that "Disks are crap, just deal with it" - instead of trying to take the usual enterprise approach of gold plating everything to get extra reliability it never assumes that what you put in is what you get out.

      "But enterprise ssds? Seems to mostly be higher write cycles tolerance, and even on consumer level ssds the endurance is "lots" "

      This in spades. People are sniffing at 0.5DWPD on 4TB SSDs - forgetting that in the case of sata drives that's getting close to "all writes, all the time" - given that mechanical drives max out at around 120MB/s sequential that's effectively filling them 5-6 times faster than you can do with a mechanical drive, nonstop, over 3-5 years (depending on the warranty period) - this simply isn't a real-world use cases for drives of this scale and means you're unlikely to ever run out of spare blocks _even if_ you decide to use the drives for surveillance systems and don't allocate more spare space just in case.

    2. Roj Blake Silver badge

      We've got several thousand consumer SSDs deployed in servers and for the most part, you're right.

      Some do get hammered and wear out after less than a year though.

      As well as the extra endurance, enterprise SSDs tend to come in higher capacities. Micron do an 11TB Enterprise job, but their consumer drives (that you will know as Crucial) only go up to 2TB.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Objective Analysis expects a 45 per cent per annum growth in NAND flash capacity shipped"

    I can imagine there being a massive demand increase if price drops by a factor of 4 - but is there sufficient capacity to supply that demand? And if not, isn't that going to result in upward price pressure?

    Supplying product at cost (as the article says) is not sustainable in the long term anyway - certainly not to finance growth in capacity.

  10. Gustavo Fring
    Windows

    THE ONLY PROBLEM IS WHEN TO JUMP IN

    SO WHEN DO I BUY MY 2TB SSD ? AND SHOULD IT BE QLC OR GOOD OLD TLC ? ON A GUMSTICK? NVME ... THIS XMAS , NEXT YEAR, NEXT SUMMER SOUNDS GOOD ? WHEN ..

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