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dwa3592

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.

hikarudo

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.

wtallis

> There are many computer components competing for the same resources (fabs, wafers).

That's a bit off the mark. Processors, RAM, and flash memory each require their own specialized fabs. TSMC makes processors but not DRAM or NAND flash. Kioxia makes flash only. Samsung has all three types of fabs. Micron does DRAM and NAND, in different fabs.

The increase in SSD prices is not because there are many components competing for the same constrained resources, it's that they are complementary goods being subject to the same dynamics in parallel because the servers that are causing this demand spike need all of those components. Where we do see competition for the same fab capacity is in the mix of DRAM types, where GPUs want HBM, server CPUs want DDR5, laptops and phones (and the occasional server CPU) want LPDDR. And competition among different types of processors for TSMC's fab capacity.

lgg

I mostly agree, but if you go further back in the supply chain there are a number of common inputs/tools. For example, as 2025 the new LPDDR lines are using EUV systems, which means for new fab production both DRAM and logic producers are competing for machines from ASML.

It doesn't change your point that these lines are different and the immediate price spike is not about them competing for capacity in the same facilities, but the fact that manufacturers are committing to large enough future purchases to drive new fab construction means that future pricing outlook (which does impact the current prices to extent) does involve some amount of competition between different types of semiconductor products.

hikarudo

Thanks for the correction. You're absolutely right.

state_less

An industry doesn't need to increase supply when demand increases, they can absorb the demand as profits. More so in an industry that is hard to enter into. Consumers hate this and call it all sorts of things like market failure, gouging, etc... In this case, the suppliers are slow walking increases in production and enjoying a run up in profits. They raise concerns about oversupply, as if this deep learning thing were some passing fad and the market will have no use for the new supply if it passes. It's a dubious notion though, the demand is here to stay and new supply needs to come online to meet demand. We simply need more silicon in the market. High prices should eventually bring new supply online, but I'm a little disappointed by the rate of the ramp up.

aftbit

>It's a dubious notion though, the demand is here to stay and new supply needs to come online to meet demand.

This is a big bet. Look at what happened in 2001 with the dot-com boom. We're still trading on their dark fiber over-build today. Meanwhile any overcapacity built in fabs will quickly be made obsolete by newer and better fab technology (or at least, that's been the pattern for the past 30 years).

I think you're missing the fact that building new supply takes time and sustained commitment, and there's simply nobody in a good position to make that commitment without losing big if your thesis turns out to be wrong.

If the demand for new AI builds is eventually satisfied, or worse, craters overnight, then who will be left holding the bag? It sure won't be Google or Apple, or even NVIDIA - it will be TSMC and Samsung.

But as you mention, this is all temporary. Either you're right, and demand will remain sustained long enough for some of the providers to decide to take that risk, or demand will crater and prices will fall.

The fact that the S&P 500 is near record highs at the same time as consumer confidence is at a 70 year low is not encouraging for continued all steam ahead in my mind... but then it's easy to predict a general future recession, and much harder to predict it to the day.

jandrewrogers

> the suppliers are slow walking increases in production and enjoying a run up in profits

The major companies have been trying to build >$100B of new production capacity in the US for years now. All of these manufacturing facilities have been significantly delayed by NIMBYs using the same "environmental and community concerns" advocacy slop that hinders almost all productive industry in the US.

Blaming the suppliers is a lazy take. They aren't responsible for degrowth activists being able to dictate what we are allowed to build.

cm2187

Also my understanding is that a lot of the suppliers remain skeptical / prudent about the long term demand from AI. Not their first boom/bust cycle.

throwaway67743

Or their continued collective inability to predict or manage supply and demand, it happens repeatedly and previous events were very minor in comparison... The other obvious reason is profiteering but pretty much impossible to prove.

vondur

We saw this during the pandemic when everyone wanted to purchase bicycles. Shimano (they make bike transmission parts and brakes) saw a huge increase in demand. Shimano didn't want to invest into new factories as they assumed the demand was a temporary spike. I'm pretty sure this is what is happening currently with RAM, SSD's and processors. New fabs are coming on line, and Apple is looking at both Intel and Samsung to bring additional capacity online. If the AI boom dramatically slows, it's going to be interesting to see how the industry responds.

wredcoll

I don't get this, is there a world where we need fewer cpu/ram/ssds in the future?

Like, there's so many things that could benefit from a cheap processor involved in their operation, the growth seems effectively unlimited.

mrtksn

It is a market failure as the markets fail to cater for the demand due to structural factors. It’s basically designing database structure that causes huge latency due to use pattern changes and you are not able to alter the structure because that will demand even more painful downtime and latency and the pattern may eventually change and make the alterations redundant.

throw0101c

> It is a market failure as the markets fail to cater for the demand due to structural factors.

The Market™ is perhaps going after higher margins. If you can charge $200 instead of $100 for a widget, why wouldn't you?

Ideally at some point someone will see the margins and be motivated to go after some of it and offer things for $190, but the ROI on upfront fab costs given market risks may not be high enough for the business uncertainly that needs to be taken (boom-bust cycles).

No participant in The Market is obligated to "cater" to demand if they do not think the juice is worth the squeeze.

tw04

It’s market consolidation unchecked. How many nand suppliers are there in the US? How many globally? Now add the sanctions on China, and tell us how that’s a competitive market.

The reality is all the things we learned from the Great Depression have been forgotten, and half the voting public seems to champion monopolies while simultaneously acting dumbfounded that the end result will always be an increase in costs.

einpoklum

Supply, to a great extent, is a policy decision. Demand, to a great extent, a policy decision. This is not the silly metaphor of individual consumers and producers acting independently of each other.

cptskippy

I think I'm agreeing with you but its also not something easily dismissed. The DRAM Cartel has been found to be distorting the market on numerous occasions by various regulatory bodies. There is a boom-bust cycle that occurs with DRAM and Flash memory. The Cartel claims they always lose despite the fact that demand seems to always steadily rise.

The pandemic caused once such boom-bust that resulted in a rather large downturn in demand in 2022-2023 referred to as the pandemic hangover. During that time demand dropped following overspend during the pandemic and members of the cartel drastically cut production at times to keep prices above cost. Even after the demand recovery began in 2023, the cartel members were slow to increase production and made little to no investment in production capacity in 2024-2025. Creating a shortage.

The AI hype cycle has exacerbated the shortage by creating speculative purchases and then panic buying. Remember the shoe company that pivoted to AI?

So Cartel market manipulation is partially to blame for the over 100% increase in prices and the shortages.

mxfh

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

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).

Aurornis

> 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

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?

Aurornis

> If you don't see people talking about the "end of personal vehicles", it could just be that you haven't looked very hard.

Or it could be that I mostly talk to people in the real world, and less so follow the echo chambers online that think "you'll own nothing" is a foregone conclusion about the future and fit their worldview to match.

lazide

If this was really an economically viable plan, we’d all just take taxis everywhere.

And some do. Most don’t, for the same reasons self driving doesn’t matter.

sandworm101

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.

BizarroLand

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"

kjs3

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

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

Indeed. Now...where did I put that pile of PC3 memory...

didgetmaster

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!

ericd

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

> 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

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.

nirav72

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

naveen99

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

therealmarv

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.

mxfh

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

wao0uuno

>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.

Koshkin

> buying a single large capacity drive

Now that's a terrible idea. You shouldn't trust any single device with terabytes of your data, regardless of whether it is low-cost or Chinese.

MrDrMcCoy

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.

devttyeu

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

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

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)

markhahn

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

I'm still pining for Optane to make a comeback.

Melatonic

Didn't help that they used "Optane" for two very different products. I agree on the good one though !

close04

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

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

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.

bigbuppo

Your Aunt Debbie recorded 37TB of video last year on her iphone and had to delete most of those precious memories to save space for bacon jesus memes.

NoMoreNicksLeft

>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

But they don't local store that much data, which is what would be relevant for a discussion above local storage costs.

close04

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?

throwaway2037

I checked the specs here: https://www.micron.com/content/dam/micron/global/public/prod...

The interface looks equiv to 4x PCIe 5.0.

    > Sequential read (MB/s): 13,700
    > Sequential write (MB/s): 2,700
That is pretty awful write performance. Does anyone know more about this? I assume all of these hyperdense SSDs suffer from the same drawback. Also, I heard that the E3.L interface can support up to 16x lanes, but there are no practical commerical products at this point.

Aurornis

Consumer and data center drives play by different rules. The super high write speeds you see for consumer SSDs are usually achieved through tricks like using sections of the drive as a high-speed buffer and then using a background process to rewrite the data into the drive's high-density NAND storage during downtime. They can also use caching techniques that aren't resilient to power loss. They might allow burst performance that heats the drive up until it throttles.

This is all fine and even desirable for a consumer who will only be writing for at most a minute or two, but with a 245TB server drive you need to assume the performance will be needed constantly. They target sustainable and predictable performance.

sheepscreek

A more convenient (and dare I say, faster) tape drive replacement for backups? They do make a good point, it would take 10*24TB drives working in the worst raid configuration to even come close to these speeds.

voxelghost

65 hours to restore a full backup

xattt

Yes, but with all that data, how much heavier does it get?

didgetmaster

It depends on the data. I heard that ones are heavier than zeros.

jurgemaister

2.231705*10^-13 gram

justsomehnguy

Extremely dense QLC chips. Still it's 2700-3000MByte, ie ~3GByte/second.

What should worry way more is DWPD which is abysmal... on the first glance. But if you punch it in the calc it still would take ages to wear it out.

                    SSD #1    SSD #2     SSD #3
    Capacity (GB)   245000    245000     245000
    Warranty (yr.)  3         3          3
    DWPD            0.3       1          0.075
    TBW (TB)        80482     268275     20121
    TBW (PB)        80.483    268.275    20.121
    PBW             80.483    268.275    20.121
    GB/day          73500     245000     18375
                
    Time period Average host-side write data rate (MB/s) needed for reaching DWPD value within specified time period
    8 hr.           2552.08   8506.94    638.02
    12 hr.          1701.39   5671.30    425.35
    24 hr.           850.69   2835.65    212.67

https://wintelguy.com/dwpd-tbw-gbday-calc.pl

_zoltan_

DWPD was the boogey man 10 years ago. everybody worried about it.

now, nobody cares. I have over 500 NVMe drives in our deployment and the drive deaths are not due to wear.

markhahn

then either your drives are overprovisioned or read-mostly.

it's not that hard to hit 300 cycles on flash.

speedgoose

I look forward to have my favourite hyperscaler grant me 1000 "premium" IOPS per VM on this monster.

cm2187

IOPS? This thing has slower IOPS than an old SATA SSD (~40k / QLC). I think it is meant for sequential operations only.

perching_aix

Note how that is still well in excess of what e.g. AWS EBS GP3 volumes offer (or at least used to, though even now their "80K IOPS" is measured with 64 KiB random transfers, whereas Micron measured that 42K IOPS with 4 KiB random transfers), which is what the person above is gesturing towards.

The same EBS GP3 used to be specified with 16K max IOPS at 16 KiB random transfers until pretty recently.

stingraycharles

What’s the intended block size of these things? I thought 4KB was normal, but that doesn’t make sense at 40K IOPS, and doesn’t align with the benchmarks I’ve seen.

Also: price is expected to be $80k. I suppose density is the selling point here, not speed.

nine_k

The u.2 form factor is slightly larger than a 2.5" drive. I can imagine the entire space in it taken by Flash chips. I can't imagine what cooling scheme do they employ for the chips in the middle.

adrian_b

The U.2 form factor is a 2.5" drive, not larger than it.

"U.2" does not change anything in the mechanical characteristics of a 2.5" drive, it just replaces the SATA or SAS electrical interface with a NVMe electrical interface.

You can mount a U.2 drive in any location intended for 2.5" drives, as long as its height can fit there.

However, 2.5" drives come in various heights. Many laptops and mini-PCs that accept 2.5" drives accept only some of the smaller heights and they do not accept the greater heights, like 15 mm, which are typical for enterprise SSDs and HDDs, regardless whether they have a NVMe, i.e. U.2, or a SAS interface or a SATA interface.

This new high-capacity U.2 SSD has the standard 15 mm height of the 2.5" form factor.

MadnessASAP

Apparently TDP is 30 watts¹, according to the product brief. I would imagine it's a single PCB with flash chips on both sides then thermally bonded to the aluminum chassis. That should keep all chips at approximately the same temperature. On its own it could be easily air cooled, but with 24 in a 2U chassis you'll be having some decently hefty forced air over the drives.

1. For comparison, an HDD usually comes in around ~10 watts

trvz

It's not just a single PCB, but a sandwich of several.

b112

The 4th Earl of Sandwich disagrees.

cyberax

Given the cost of 24 of them, you can probably buy solid silver heatsinks watercooled with tears of sysadmins.

rbanffy

I was going to say blood of virgins, but tears are probably better heat conductors.

roygbiv2

The tears of sysadmins are fairly cheap though.

i_think_so

Hey! You leave me out of your twisted fantasy!

I just want....I just want hard drive prices to come back down. *sniffle*

rbanffy

The transfer rates limit how much each chip can be active at any given time, so a heat-aware writing allocator can pick the least active blocks for the next writes and distribute the heat accordingly. Even if it’s not heat-aware, the tendency will be that the writes will be distributed over as many chips as there are, and so will be the heat generated.

Now, I would LOVE to see this much SLC flash on a direct to bus attachment setting.

crote

Over the past few years the main improvement in SSD capacity has been due to them stacking an ever-increasing number of NAND layers in a single chip, with state-of-the-art SSDs already having over 300 layers.

No need to worry about cooling when each layer in the sandwich is only a fraction of a micrometer thick!

walrus01

the u.2 form factor indeed evolved from chassis designs that were originally 2.5" drives. It's now kind of becoming obsolete with new designs using things like E1S, E1L (exactly the correct height to be slotted into a 1U server, it's like a slightly wider M.2, but meant to be insertable and removable), and E3S and E3L.

Note that the 245TB is an E3L, the half size version of it come in smaller size.

https://americas.kioxia.com/en-ca/business/ssd/solution/edsf...

https://www.exxactcorp.com/blog/storage/edsff-e1s-e1l-e3s-e3...

https://www.simms.co.uk/tech-talk/e1s-e1l-the-new-server-for...

esperent

Access Denied

You don't have permission to access

"http://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-detai..." on this server.

High security on this press release.

antonvs

Your IP address might be on a blocklist.

asimovDev

even my AWS IP is let in without trouble

tjwebbnorfolk

works for me. akamai doesn't like you

el_snark

No problems here ...

Spooky23

The press release is missing the key specification — how many Libraries of Congress fit on this thing?

mtmail

Usual estimate is 10TB of compressed text-only. So 24x LoC would fit on the drive.

cammikebrown

How much is it?

el_snark

They haven't released details but I was able to find a Solidigm D5-P5336 122.88TB drive for around 40,000 USD, as a guideline. So ... more than that.

dlenski

Okay, so that 122TB drive costs about $330/TB.

I haven't bought a hard drive or an SSD in at least a decade (I get stuff for free, basically) but…that seems a bit high, right?

Seems like well-rated consumer-level SSDs cost around $250 for 1TB right now.

What accounts for the premium price/TB of these extremely high capacity enterprise-targeted drives?

rbanffy

> What accounts for the premium price/TB of these extremely high capacity enterprise-targeted drives?

Spare capacity, mostly. That’s why they have higher endurance. If you want to double the endurance of a given drive, tell the controller to allocate twice as many spare blocks and report less capacity than you would otherwise.

In this case, you are also paying a premium for the PCIe attachment instead of SAS, and a lot for price elasticity. You see, with drives like these you slash space and energy consumption in relation to HDDs by a large number, and that allows you to pay a premium for the device, because, at the end of its lifetime, it’ll have more than covered the cost difference in saved space and energy.

userbinator

What accounts for the premium price/TB of these extremely high capacity enterprise-targeted drives?

The word "enterprise".

kjs3

What accounts for the premium price/TB of these extremely high capacity enterprise-targeted drives?

The extremely high capacity and the enterprise targeting.

bogometer

I fondly remember when i could buy a well-rated consumer-level SSD for a lot less per TB...

undefined

[deleted]

jasomill

Density, power efficiency, write endurance, sustained write speeds under continuous load, power-loss protection.

mikestorrent

I was quoted $18K for a 3.7 TB Dell NVMe disk the other day. I'm gonna guess these drives are literally a quarter million each

r_lee

> I was quoted $18K for a 3.7 TB Dell NVMe disk

surely you don't actually think that's realistic pricing?

bluedino

Various Dell prices from the US website:

  3.84TB SSD SAS ISE, Read Intensive, up to 24Gbps 512e 2.5in with 3.5in HYB CARR, AG Drive 
  Dell Price $8,825.13 /ea.

  3.84TB SSD SATA Read Intensive 6Gbps 512e 2.5in Hot-plug AG Drive,3.5in HYB CARR, 1 DWPD 
  Dell Price $7,893.91 /ea.

  3.2TB Enterprise NVMe Mixed Use AG Drive U.2 with carrier 
  Dell Price $6,596.39 /ea.
I don't see a 'write intensive' option (I only looked around for a few minutes), but I can imagine them being 2-4x those prices.

UltraSane

$200/TB is reasonable. $300 if it is VERY fast. That is just robbery.

cyberax

You're getting ripped off. NVMe SSDs are expensive, but not THAT expensive. A 4Tb drive should be around $1k even with some "enterprise" markup.

ricardobeat

Apparently $80k, not that terrible in comparison

xbmcuser

4-5x times what it would have been if not for the demand from AI. According to my rough calculation 4-8tb ssd drives were going to reach parity with hdd this year

ukuina

If you have to ask...

0-_-0

I don't think he wants to buy one

baq

‘Contact us’

burnt-resistor

Likely $90k USD MSRP with a wholesale price around half that.

Dell is getting first dibs.

Aboutplants

“For AI workloads: The 245TB Micron 6600 ION provided up to 84 times better energy efficiency”

How big of a deal is this part in relation to the initial upfront costs? I’m not privy to the cost of power for SSD

mgerdts

A big consideration for efficiency and TCO calculations is the number of servers required to house the drives. NVMe drives tend not to be in external JBOF enclosures.

Fewer servers means fewer cpus, less RAM, fewer fans, and maybe fewer switches.

justsomehnguy

With a modern CPUs hitting 400W it's already a problem to fill a rack top down with servers like you could do before: too many heat to dissipate and transfer, too much power to provide in the first place.

Just imagine something like 2S 9565 in at least 2U machines: with 10 server x 2U x 2 CPU you would have 8kW in the processors alone and you didn't even fill half of the 42U rack.

https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/9005-...

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XorNot

It means you don't have as much to cool.

Getting rid of 30 watts of heat is trivial compared to say, 300 (I don't quite know how to read that ratio since a 2.5kW SSD seems a little high to me).

feisty0630

Given that 2.91TB SSDs are a common enterprise size, perhaps they're saying the 1x245TB SSD uses 1/84 the power of 84 2.91TB SSDs ;p

zekrioca

What is this thing that all pictures of new devices need to come with this black background?

layer8

Dark mode.

stego-tech

(Im)patiently waiting for this AI-generated memory crisis to pass (or the bubble to pop) so SSD prices can crash back down again. Been dreaming of replacing my RAID6 HDD setup with a RAID1 of SSDs and a hot spare.

danborn26

A 245TB SSD completely changes the density math for database nodes. The reduction in rack space alone makes this a huge win.

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