Grab a 4TB SSD for 5 cents per gigabyte during Prime Day – 8TB models start as low as 7 cents per GB

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If 4TB costs 5 cents per GB the 8TB should cost 4c not 7c and 16, 32, 64 etc TB even less than 4c due to volume discounting

Memory mafia robbing the voiceless public in the light of the day
 
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Not a single thing on "sale" here is even close to a sale price! Three friggin years ago we were looking at 49.99 per TB on a 990 pro! Paying 1.5 times more today for this outdated hardware IS NOT A GOOD DEAL, let alone a sale price!
 
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Seems too many salespeople here. They do not like to hear about unreasonable and sometimes absurd pricing in tech industry. I think the vast majority of salespeople on Anandtech had lead it to its belly up, discussing pricing and cost was literally a taboo there.
 
Stomx said:
If 4TB costs 5 cents per GB the 8TB should cost 4c not 7c and 16, 32, 64 etc TB even less than 4c due to volume discounting

Memory mafia robbing the voiceless public in the light of the day
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It's not that simple because of the idiotic M.2 format. If client used U.2 and kept the 2.5" format like enterprise we wouldn't be looking at quite the pricing we are and drives could scale better without having to use the latest NAND.

Example: SN850X uses the same NAND for 1/2/4TB drives, but a newer generation for the 8TB.

Used enterprise 15.36TB drives are going for $900-1200 now which puts them right in line with client drive pricing. This very rarely used to happen, but due to how much of a problem M.2 is for capacity here we are.
 
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t3t4 said:
It's exactly simple:
Each demand a modern price!

Pay more today for the same hardware as yesterday? That's ludicrous! But as long as you all are willing to pay, then you all control the market! You all are the source of your own problem.
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What are you even talking about?

Clearly it's nothing I was addressing at all. Newer, more advanced, NAND costs more than older and is required for increased drive capacity. That's why 8TB drives cost more per GB than 4TB drives and why even 4TB models aren't ubiquitous. That's all I was talking about.

If you're talking about the bargain basement SSD pricing from a couple of years or so ago that was due to a very unhealthy market. NAND makers weren't selling what they were making and everything ended up getting discounted so they could move it. They all cut manufacturing during this time to equalize supply and demand. I bought four or five drives during that time because all of this was public knowledge and it was obvious the prices were going to go up once excess supply dried up.
 
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thestryker said:
It's not that simple because of the idiotic M.2 format. If client used U.2 and kept the 2.5" format like enterprise we wouldn't be looking at quite the pricing we are and drives could scale better without having to use the latest NAND.
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I don't mind to use 110 mm M.2 length instead of 80. And 2x wider. I have space in my PC case probably for like 10,000 of them :)
 
Stomx said:
I don't mind to use 110 mm M.2 length instead of 80. And 2x wider. I have space in my PC case probably for like 10,000 of them :)
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Yeah that would probably get 2 more stacks at best which is still significantly worse than 2.5". We would probably have 16TB drives for close to what 8TB drives cost now if they had the extra PCB space from 2.5" due to what NAND they could use.

There are pictures of each side of the PCB on Solidigm's 61.44TB 2.5" drive here as an example of what a modern 2.5" drive looks like: https://www.storagereview.com/review/solidigm-p5336-61-44tb-ssd-review
 
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SomeoneElse23 said:
Inflation is real.
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That isn't how tech works. Prices for a set speed or capacity plumet over time. 25 years ago 16 megabytes of RAM could cost over $100. Now you can get 2000x as much for less. Same for storage. However the prices of the older tech and capacity aren't dropping and newer and larger versions are getting higher and higher prices. You can spend almost a grand on a HDD now. Spinning rust for almost four figures. Insane. Prices for HDD steadily dropped until about three years ago. In fact they are climbing now. 1.2-1.4 cents per GB was normal pricing. Now only a handful of low warranty models are even below 2 cents per GB. This is how reduced competition from mergers work.
 
thestryker said:
Yeah that would probably get 2 more stacks at best which is still significantly worse than 2.5". We would probably have 16TB drives for close to what 8TB drives cost now if they had the extra PCB space from 2.5" due to what NAND they could use.

There are pictures of each side of the PCB on Solidigm's 61.44TB 2.5" drive here as an example of what a modern 2.5" drive looks like: https://www.storagereview.com/review/solidigm-p5336-61-44tb-ssd-review
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No doubt the 2.5" is a beast size compared to all NVMe M.2 drives and I agree with you here.

But even increasing size just by 30mm to 110mm which is one more standard size of NVME M.2 drives is well enough to more than double the memory size of any 80 mm M.2 drives right today and reach 16TB. This is because all current 80mm M.2 drives have a lot of space not devoted to the NAND chips (the smaller 2260 and 2242 M.2 drives clearly save this space) while the opposite side of the board does not have to waste the space on controller, DRAM and circuitry and is completely devoted to V-NAND chips.
 
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Stomx said:
But even increasing size just by 30mm to 110mm which is one more standard size of NVME M.2 drives is well enough to more than double the memory size of any 80 mm M.2 drives right today and reach 16TB.
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Yeah I think they could probably rework the boards to fit another 4 stacks (current 8TB are 4 stacks). 2 would be easy and 4 would require compressing a bit, but I think doable. In that hypothetical we'd see some 8TB drives with budget pricing, but the 16TB would still carry a premium.
 
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thestryker said:
Most NAND packages used in SSDs are larger than an entire MicroSD card. You do not want to use the same NAND as MicroSD cards for a multitude of reasons the first two that leap to mind are performance and endurance.
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I just bought a 2TB Gen4 NVME. It only had chips on one side. They could have used the same chips and doubled the capacity to 4TB without using more expensive chips.

However I don't think using denser chips adds much cost. A m.2 2230 format 2TB has about a 30% premium at retail and that is a single chip. So a 16TB m.2 can probably be sold at 7 cents per GB and be very profitable.
 
lmcnabney said:
I just bought a 2TB Gen4 NVME. It only had chips on one side. They could have used the same chips and doubled the capacity to 4TB without using more expensive chips.
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... and that's why 4TB drives don't tend to carry the same premium as 8TB.
lmcnabney said:
However I don't think using denser chips adds much cost. A m.2 2230 format 2TB has about a 30% premium at retail and that is a single chip. So a 16TB m.2 can probably be sold at 7 cents per GB and be very profitable.
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2280 SSDs have room for 4 NAND stacks on them so how exactly are you getting to 16TB? That's one of the things we were discussing above with the 22110 discussion where you could probably do it with one of those.
 
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Formally the back side of 2280 has space for 4 chips. So with two on top the total will be 6 and with current 2TB chips the overall size 12TB. But the problem is that you do not want to place the chips under hot controller and DRAM because the flash memory is exponentially sensitive to the temperature decreasing charge retention time with it. But if you use decent heatsink with forced cooling and keep the temperature below 42-45C this will be not a problem (may be more with more modern chips, I remember some research 5-7 years ago).
 
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lmcnabney said:
However I don't think using denser chips adds much cost.
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Yea, would be interesting to know how much cost adds stacking process with more and more layers.

Also interesting how expensive is making flash memory. Each chip has approximately 2-3 square centimeters surface area and with say 200 layers this is ~500 cm^2 total area. This is a half of the size of 30x30 cm^2 wafer. Just one 2TB chip which is sold for $100, so to be profitable this whole wafer has to be also around $100! For comparison, the development of the most advanced wafers at 3nm at TSMC for example now costs $30,000. Definitely this is much older process node which is used for the flash but still it is shocking that technology became that cheap
 
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Stomx said:
Yea, would be interesting to know how much cost adds stacking process with more and more layers.

Also interesting how expensive is making flash memory. Each chip has approximately 2-3 square centimeters surface area and with say 200 layers this is ~500 cm^2 total area. This is a half of the size of 30x30 cm^2 wafer. Just one 2TB chip which is sold for $100, so to be profitable this whole wafer has to be also around $100! For comparison, the development of the most advanced wafers at 3nm at TSMC for example now costs $30,000. Definitely this is much older process node which is used for the flash but still it is shocking that technology became that cheap
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You are confused. 3D NAND isn't stacking in the way that you are thinking. They are deposition layers and they are only on one piece of silicon. This brief article explains the two methods.
 
thestryker said:
2280 SSDs have room for 4 NAND stacks on them so how exactly are you getting to 16TB? That's one of the things we were discussing above with the 22110 discussion where you could probably do it with one of those.
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Two sides. Might have some thermal issues with Gen 5, but Gens 3 and 4 can do it.
 
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