News Memory Prices Rebound Due to Reduced Production, Increasing Demand

[Admin]

Production cuts worked well for DRAM and NAND makers as memory prices rebounded.

Memory Prices Rebound Due to Reduced Production, Increasing Demand : Read more

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

If the big DRAM makers want to make sure that DRAM never gets too low in price, make sure all devices have as much DRAM as possible.

That means ALL nVME SSD's have DRAM, no exceptions.
ALL HDD's have the largest DRAM Chip capacity possible.
etc.

Get iGPU's to use GDDR on top of normal DRAM.

 

[Li Ken-un]

If the big DRAM makers want to make sure that DRAM never gets too low in price, make sure all devices have as much DRAM as possible.

DRAM for all the things! You get a chip. And you get a chip! And you get a chip!

Maybe some company should build a U.2 NVRAM drive—that mere mortals can buy unlike Radian’s RMS-375—made of all these DRAM chips, backed by an equal helping of SLC NAND.

 

[thisisaname]

Low priced memory did not last very long 🙁

 

[AgentBirdnest]

About a dozen SSDs that I have my eye on, at all capacities, from budget SATA to high-end PCIe 4.0 - have jumped between 10-20% in price over the last couple of weeks.
That puts them back at like... maybe May or June prices? So, not really the worst thing in the world. Still, it's quite a jump from one month to the next. Now is the time to buy SSDs if you need/want 'em. (Well, a month ago was the best time, but now is probably the second-best time.)

 

[watzupken]

The question is whether this is a sustainable rebound. Companies may from time to time restock, and hence, create the impression of a "comeback". This may happen especially when the likes of Micron, Samsung, and other big time players, are cutting supply, which may cause companies or individuals to try and stock up. The overall economic condition isn't in a good shape, and I have doubts demand will stay strong for long.

 

[Hotrod2go]

Just as well I ordered another M.2 drive this morning.

 

[umeng2002_2]

Just as well I ordered another M.2 drive this morning.

Now you know the point of these articles and reports. Just like how there are always reports of turkey or cranberries right around Thanksgiving.

 

[Hotrod2go]

Now you know the point of these articles and reports. Just like how there are always reports of turkey or cranberries right around Thanksgiving.

Maybe, but the prices for storage devices in my part of the world have been consistent for several months already anyway.

 

[umeng2002_2]

That's my point, these reports are designed to create FOMO buying or manipulate stock prices.

 

[InvalidError]

If the big DRAM makers want to make sure that DRAM never gets too low in price, make sure all devices have as much DRAM as possible.

Raise prices too much by cramming more stuff than what most people need into stuff and sales will slow down due to prices being too high for the people's liking no matter how much extra stuff you try to throw at them. You can only derive so much of your income from whales who will buy almost anything regardless of price. The rest of the market wants fair products at fair prices which usually necessitates some feature and performance balancing effort to produce something desirable for a decent chunk of the market at a given price point.

 

[Giroro]

If there's one thing I know for sure about Computers, it's that the prices will always go up and performance always stays the same.
It's called Jensen's law of computing.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Raise prices too much by cramming more stuff than what most people need into stuff and sales will slow down due to prices being too high for the people's liking no matter how much extra stuff you try to throw at them. You can only derive so much of your income from whales who will buy almost anything regardless of price. The rest of the market wants fair products at fair prices which usually necessitates some feature and performance balancing effort to produce something desirable for a decent chunk of the market at a given price point.

I understand the desire for "Fair Products @ Fair Prices".
I'm the same way.

But right now, the pricing is too low for them, so low that they had to cut back on Fab production.
Which is something you don't want to see out of Fabs. You want to see Fabs running 24/7/365 and cranking out product.

Having a little more demand by having RAM in more components like HDD's & SSD's will raise the average price.

Imagine using current 3 GiB DRAM Packages for HDD's & SSD's DRAM cache & what it will do for it's performance now.

4 GiB DRAM Packages are already being prepped for production.

With (1 / 2 / 3 / 4) GiB DRAM Packages in production, HDD & SSD makers can tier which product storage capacities gets which size of DRAM Package and offer more/less DRAM to differentiate their product stacks.

 

[InvalidError]

Imagine using current 3 GiB DRAM Packages for HDD's & SSD's DRAM cache & what it will do for it's performance now.

Having more RAM on a HDD/SSD than required for internal operations is useless since writes are limited by media speed and the need for file system journalling to know exactly what data has been committed to storage if you want it to gracefully recover from unsafe shutdown while reads will be limited to whichever is slowest between the media and interface. For everything else, your OS already has a file system cache to decouple application IO from hardware IO.

I'd rather have 64GB of system RAM where I can use it for anything I want including read/write caching for any combination of drives connected to my system than 64GB of RAM on my SSD where it does nothing besides drive the SSD's cost up $70, make it consume 3-4W more power and increase the likelihood of having a difficult to catch flaky DRAM cell ruining the drive by ~64X.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

I'd rather have 64GB of system RAM where I can use it for anything I want including read/write caching for any combination of drives connected to my system than 64GB of RAM on my SSD where it does nothing besides drive the SSD's cost up $70, make it consume 3-4W more power and increase the likelihood of having a difficult to catch flaky DRAM cell ruining the drive by ~64X.

I'm not asking for 64 GiB of RAM on your SSD.

Just replace that lone DRAM package on your SSD/HDD with a new (1/2/3/4) GiB DRAM package.

Then you'd have more burst capability and resorting space for the SSD/HDD controller before it commits to NAND Flash.

 

[InvalidError]

Then you'd have more burst capability and resorting space for the SSD/HDD controller before it commits to NAND Flash.

When writing to an HDD/SSD, you don't want on-drive DRAM write buffers to be any larger than absolutely necessary to minimize the risk of discrepancies between what the OS' journaling system believes was written to storage and what actually has been. HDDs and SSDs use the smallest DRAM readily available that they can source for cheap and get away with because going any larger is a straight up waste of money.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

When writing to an HDD/SSD, you don't want on-drive DRAM write buffers to be any larger than absolutely necessary to minimize the risk of discrepancies between what the OS' journaling system believes was written to storage and what actually has been. HDDs and SSDs use the smallest DRAM readily available that they can source for cheap and get away with because going any larger is a straight up waste of money.

Is that why Samsung's 990 Pro has 2 GiB of LPDDR4 for 2 TiB of SSD Capacity?
1 GiB of LPDDR4 for 1 TiB of SSD Capacity?

Top end Capacity HDD's top out at 512 MiB & 256 MiB respectively depending on model?

 

[InvalidError]

Is that why Samsung's 990 Pro has 2 GiB of LPDDR4 for 2 TiB of SSD Capacity?
1 GiB of LPDDR4 for 1 TiB of SSD Capacity?

Top end Capacity HDD's top out at 512 MiB & 256 MiB respectively depending on model?

The main reason fast SSDs have DRAM is to keep tabs on write-levelling, occupancy and address mapping tables without traversing relatively slow NAND or going to host memory like DRAM-less NVMe does. You need 300-400MB per 1TB of storage for that, Samsung may have decided it was a little too tight for its liking on a 'Pro' drive and may also be tracking extra/finer-grained details that require additional working DRAM per TB.

HDDs have 256-512MB of DRAM simply because those are the smallest DRAM manufacturers can still source for a few pennies cheaper than 1GB DRAM chips. Once DRAM manufacturers wind down production of those low-density chips and prices go up on whatever manufacturing capacity remains, HDD manufacturers will migrate to now cheaper 1GB chips. I bet HDD manufacturers would still be using 32-64MB DRAM chips today if such chips were still economically viable.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

The main reason fast SSDs have DRAM is to keep tabs on write-levelling, occupancy and address mapping tables without traversing relatively slow NAND or going to host memory like DRAM-less NVMe does. You need 300-400MB per 1TB of storage for that, Samsung may have decided it was a little too tight for its liking on a 'Pro' drive and may also be tracking extra/finer-grained details that require additional working DRAM per TB.

That excess capacity might also be nice as a "Read/Write" buffer that helps sort the data packets before it gets written to NAND or sent out onto the data connection in correct logical order.

HDDs have 256-512MB of DRAM simply because those are the smallest DRAM manufacturers can still source for a few pennies cheaper than 1GB DRAM chips. Once DRAM manufacturers wind down production of those low-density chips and prices go up on whatever manufacturing capacity remains, HDD manufacturers will migrate to now cheaper 1GB chips. I bet HDD manufacturers would still be using 32-64MB DRAM chips today if such chips were still economically viable.

So HDD Manufacturers will be dragged kicking & screaming into higher capacities once they stop making 256 & 512 MB of DRAM capacities and standardize on 1 GiB being the minimum

 

[InvalidError]

That excess capacity might also be nice as a "Read/Write" buffer that helps sort the data packets before it gets written to NAND or sent out onto the data connection in correct logical order.

You don't need 1TB of RAM for that. NAND is organized in 128KB blocks and those are further subdivided in 2KB pages. The most data that may be worth delaying writes for aggregating purposes is maybe two blocks worth for each NAND channel, anything beyond that just gets bottlenecked by the NAND controller.

So HDD Manufacturers will be dragged kicking & screaming into higher capacities once they stop making 256 & 512 MB of DRAM capacities and standardize on 1 GiB being the minimum

Just because they slap bigger chips on the drives due to those being the smallest economically obtainable doesn't mean they put any effort in using it in any meaningful way. You can use a 1GB chip but leave your firmware coded to only use 80MB of it.

There isn't much point in having larger on-drive write caches when all they do is make the OS wait that much longer for flush commands to complete.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

You don't need 1TB of RAM for that. NAND is organized in 128KB blocks and those are further subdivided in 2KB pages. The most data that may be worth delaying writes for aggregating purposes is maybe two blocks worth for each NAND channel, anything beyond that just gets bottlenecked by the NAND controller.

I never stated 1 TB of RAM, I stated:

With (1 / 2 / 3 / 4) GiB DRAM Packages in production

That means only 1 package of DRAM on the HDD or SSD for the Drive controller, and use the largest single package available.

Just because they slap bigger chips on the drives due to those being the smallest economically obtainable doesn't mean they put any effort in using it in any meaningful way. You can use a 1GB chip but leave your firmware coded to only use 80MB of it.

There isn't much point in having larger on-drive write caches when all they do is make the OS wait that much longer for flush commands to complete.

Well, if that's the attitude, than that royally sucks for those who want a larger cache.

The point is to act as a buffer for large File Writes that might happen in the modern day.

Files larger than 1 GiB are somewhat common in this day and age, especially multiple files in aggregate.

Having that extra DRAM space to act as a cache is very nice, especially for smaller files that are smaller than the maximum DRAM size. You can make Writes to that drive function at DRAM speed until it hits the buffer limit before it has to slow down while the drive writes down the data in the DRAM cache.

Kind of like modern SLC cache that allows high performance, but use RAM to function as a micro RAM Drive Cache that gets flushed as fast as possible while data is coming in or read out.

 

[InvalidError]

Well, if that's the attitude, than that royally sucks for those who want a larger cache.

The point is to act as a buffer for large File Writes that might happen in the modern day.

You already have a "large file writes" cache: all of your unused system RAM gets used as a file system cache by Windows by default. You can have a 128GB disk cache if you want to. Out of my 32GB of system memory, 19GB is currently used as file system cache. When I do periodic dumps to my external HDD, a bunch of it gets buffered by the OS and I need to wait 10-20 seconds for all of it to get flushed to the HDD before disconnecting. A large on-drive cache would only mean a much higher risk of losing data due to disconnecting the drive before all data has been truly written.

Disk write caches are downright EVIL. You don't want more of it than absolutely necessary.

 

[Hotrod2go]

That's my point, these reports are designed to create FOMO buying or manipulate stock prices.

No, you didn't have all the information. I ordered those BEFORE hearing anything about this news.