This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
And Apple will finally sell the iPhone starting with 256GB
Technically the Pro Max already starts at 256 GB (starting with the 15 series iirc). But they simply removed the 128 GB option from the price stack.
The prices will stay the same. Manufacturers will just make more profit.
Is that what has happened to the storage market historically?
Not at all. The price of storage has plummeted so much that most video games comfortably use ~100GB for large games and don’t care because even SSD storage is extremely cheap.
If you don’t believe me, here’s a post on Reddit that shows it off pretty well.
There's two ways to take that statement. The price of a hard drive will remain the same, or the price per memory unit will remain the same. Price per hard drive remains largely the same. Price per unit of memory drops.
The only exception here is SSDs are slowly dropping in price to meet magnetic disk drives.
I'm not exactly sure what that chart is using for data sources. Historically every couple of years I've bought whatever goes on sale for around $200 and added it to my unraid.
I was able to pick up exos 14s a couple of years ago. And they're still not back down to $200.
I'm optimistic. I'm making numbers out of my butt because I literally can't remember.
But I think My 20GB SSD from 2010 was about $100. I used to dualboot.
Today, I can get a 512GB SSD for $50.
Yet apple will still charge $200 for 128gb
It's almost as if oligopolies can manipulate prices regardless of availability
32 level "PLC" cells, OMG. How about staying at levels with some durability.
Amazing news! Unfortunately, if this comes to Brazil and 8tb SSD would be the price of a car
More density means less longevity, less write cycles before the blocks wear out, also decreases the time before Nand leakage can end up corrupting the data. Doesn't seem like a good thing to me.
Oh yeah, also more storage space causes complacency with developers who will terribly optimize their games because they don't have to worry about games not fitting on people's disks. Think 100GB games is bad it'll get much worse when they got more free space at their disposal, and worse, the perception that their customers have tons of free space as well.
I don't disagree with you, but on the other hand, this will be a huge boon for people who do things like sail the high seas and wish to keep what they acquire long term. You're not constantly rewriting in those cases. You're just slowly (or perhaps not so slowly) filling up the drive. Eventually, it's essentially read only.
Considering how much I spent on 6 TB of regular hard drive storage for this reason a few years ago, I'd be all for affordable 8 TB SSDs.
sail the high seas
You don't need solid state storage for Linux ISOs
Thinking about it, it would be nice if when formatting a partition on mlc based drives, you could specify the number of bits per cell used. So an 8tb QLC drive could be formatted as a 2tb SLC for those who want the resilience, without having to commit to it permanently.
I'm sure there are technical reasons that would be difficult, but everything started out difficult until we figured it out.
For the first part, as long as it isn't too bad and it gets detected, and has methods for mitigating damage from losses, that's fine. If you get a lot more capacity but lose some over time, you still have more capacity.
For the latter, yeah it does but do they even care now? Personally, I don't play any games that large really anyway, so it doesn't effect me. Let them lose you as a customer too if that's an issue and they surpass how much you'll put up with.
Good news but it'll be a while before I can replace the 20TB drives in my NAS with these.
It's looking like 2029 will be the turning point. Right now, we are on the verge of having 16tb m.2s on the market, and by 2029 SSDs will be around $10-15/TB like HDDs are now.
In 2029, if semiconductor trends continue, it is likely that we will have 16TB SSDs for ~$200 and 32TB SSDs for ~$500; Cheaper than the $320 we're paying for 20TB HDDs right now.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/16tb-m2-ssds-will-soon-grace-the-market
The HDD industry doesn't seem like it will improve at the same rate. It is likely that the SSD market will have better $/TB than the HDD market in 2029, unless hard drives make some massive breakthrough before then. The survival of the HDD industry past the next 5 years is basically riding on Seagate's ability to successfully release HAMR technology.
While I fully agree with the SSD side, you seem to ignore that HDDs are also getting cheaper per TB (always have, and usually quite noticeably). Also the reliability of large to huge SSDs remains to be seen as well. Obviously a breakthrough in HDD technology would have an influence as well, as you mentioned.
I'm not saying SSDs aren't here to take over, they surely will eventually (preferably sooner), but I think it'll be a few more years until we got actual price parity per TB. Even when ignoring other aspects like reliability.
Excellent, I needed more space for cookies, malware and games that suddenly require 500GB of free space. I'll have that thing full in no time.
Soon the new COD will weigh 5TB
COD will ship as a 5TB HDD cartridge :D
We will go back to the cartridge bay days.
I'm all for it, and it's just the usual "moores law" trend, I just wonder if we won't hit a wall where (most!) users just won't need it?
most users already dont use what theyve got. its more about reducing physical size for the masses... these new techs will allow for even smaller storage for thinner, more efficient devices.
i think only some power users (im a data horader) and commercial interests care about bulk storage
I'm slightly surprised that loss of faith in corporations being good stewards of our cultural content - wantonly deleting cherished shows, namely - has not driven a larger move towards personal ownership of media. In a world where anything that fails to be profitable faces destruction, owning your stuff has never been a better idea.
People, in general, don’t care. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, more that they just don’t notice until she show they searched for isn’t available and then they shrug it off and move on to another one they can watch. Most people I know don’t want to keep large catalogs around if things they like because they only watch a single movie a few times in their lives. They watch it and then they’re good for years or more. There’s so much content out there that there’s no way they’re going to rewatch things and there’s no way they’re going to miss it because they’re having enough trouble keeping up with all the new stuff. On top of that, the convenience of just turning on the tube and hitting play vs trying to find the disc, and store and organize it is huge. And ripping it and then keeping a large amount of storage locally, online and healthy for the purpose is out of their technical wheel house. (And budget at times)
Honestly, I’m a big proponent for buying physical media… but I’ve greatly reduced what I rip/buy/keep, just knowing there’s only so much time left on my personal hourglass and I’ve got better things to do than worrying about all that up keep. When I kick the bucket, no one is going to care about it all. Maybe they’ll keep a few interesting ones but they’ll likely just sit on someone else’s shelf. In the mean time, how many times am I really going to watch some of these things?
Thermal is a wall to contend with as well. At the moment SSDs get the density from 3D stacking the planes of substrate that make up the memory cells. Each layer contributes some heat and at some point the layer in the middle gets too hot from the layers below and not being close enough to the top to dissipate the heat upwards fast enough.
One way to address this was the multi-level cell (MLC) where instead of on/off, the voltage within the cell could represent multiple bits. So 0-1.5v = 00, 1.6-3v = 01, 3.1-4.5v = 10, 4.6-5v = 11. But that requires sense amplifiers that can handle that, which aren't difficult outright to etch, they just add complexity to ensure that the amplifier read the correct value. We've since moved to eight-level cells, where each cell holds an entire byte, and the error correction circuits are wild for the sense amplifiers. But all NAND FGMOS leak, so if you pack eight levels into a single cell, even small leaks can be the difference between sensing one level from another level. So at some point packing more levels into the cell will just lead to a cell that leaks too quickly for the word "storage" to be applied to the device. It's not really storage any longer if powering the device off for half a year puts all the data at risk.
So once going upwards and packing hits a wall, the next direction is moving out. But the more you move outward, the further one is placing the physical memory cells from the controller. It's a non-zero amount of distance and the speed of light is only so fast. One light-nanosecond is about 300 millimetres, so a device operating at 1GHz frequency clock has that distance to cover in a single tick of the clock in an ideal situation, which heat, quantum effects, and so on all conspire to make it less than ideal. So you can only go so far out before you begin to require cache in the in-between steps and scheduling of block access that make the entire thing more complex and potentially slow it down.
And there are ways to get around that as well, but all of them begin to really increase the cost, like having multi-port chips that are accessed on multi-channel buses, basically creating a small network inside your SSD of chips. Sort of how like a lot of CPUs are starting to swap over to chiplet designs. We can absolutely keep going, but there's going to be cost associated with that "keep going" that's going to be hard to bring down. So there will be a point where that "cost to utility" equation for end-users will start playing a much larger role long before we hit some physical wall.
That said, the 200 domain of layers was thought to be the wall for stacking due to heat, there was some creative work done and the number of layers got past 300, but the chips do indeed generate a lot more heat these days. And maybe heat sinks and fans for your SSD aren't too far off in the future, I know passive cooling with a heat sink is already becoming vogue with SSDs. The article indicated that Samsung and SK hynix predict being able to hit 1000+ layers, which that's crazy to think about, because even with the tricks being employed today to help get heat out of the middle layers faster, I don't see how we use those same tricks to hit past 500+ layers without a major change in production of the cells, which usually there's a lot of R&D that goes behind such a thing. So maybe they've been working on something nobody else knows about, or maybe they're going to have active cooling for SSDs? Who knows, but 1000+ layers is wild to think about, but I'm pretty sure that such chips are not going to come down in prices as quickly as some consumers might hope. As it gets more complex, that length of time before prices start to go down starts to increase. And that slows overall demand for more density as only the ones who see the higher cost being worth their specific need gets more limited to very niche applications.
We hit that point in spinning disk drives a while ago for me
The issue is, every time we make a great leap in storage medium, we tend to use that new storage for BIGGER files. Higher quality media and all that. Back in the day, the average movie file was measured in the MB. Now it's GB. Think about an old floppy with 1.4 MB of data and how many text files you stored on it. You couldn't ever imagine needing more space. Then came pictures and music files. Video files. Then higher resolution picture and video files. Suddenly even your text documents aren't just raw .txt files, but Word documents and interactive PDFs.
As storage improves, what we expect to be able to carry around with us or have in our home computer changes. I'm currently running a home server with 18TB of storage. An amount that I would have never dreamed of possessing 20 years ago, and yet here I am debating when I grab that 24TB drive because I can already see me running out of space in a few months.
This is all to say that I really don't think there will ever be a maximum amount a user could need. Give them that maximum and in a week they'll have figured out a way to use it to capacity. I think video games and cartridge/disk size limitations and then the transition to digital games and balloning game size shows my point.
Its already been 6 years since the first 100TB SSD released and I still don't think anyone has bothered to dethrone it last I checked. Density and number of layers possible have both increased since then. I imagine part of it is just a performance issue though; 10 10TB SSDs are gonna be faster than 1 100TB SSD.
At the consumer level, the usage of smaller form factors will probably mean more density will still be useful. Things like the steamdeck drives will benefit for a while.
I'll believe it when I see it. 4TB SSDs are still not affordable.
"Could"
I'm already avoiding buying newer SSDs because the durability is dropping off a cliff.
I'm really scared of them cramming more and more bits in the same cell. Every time they double that number it's got to be cutting the write longevity in half. Unless they've got some other thing they can do to increase that.
I'm sure we will get some "random" fire at some factory to drive prices up again.
That's likely the point where spinning platters die in the marketplace.
Right now, spinning platters are around $12/tb. SSDs are around $75. Exact numbers fluctuate with features and market changes, but those are the ballpark. Cut in half, SSDs will be $38/tb, and then $19 in the next halving. Spinning platters aren't likely to see the same level of reduction in that time period; they're a mature technology.
I think once they reach double the price per tb, we'll see a major collapse of the hard drive market. My thinking is that there's a lot of four drive RAID 10 systems out there. With SSDs, those can be two drive RAID 1, and will still be faster. With half the drives, they can be twice the price and work out the same.
Spinning platters are already dead in many ways because even though they've increased in capacity, they haven't meanigfully changed read/write speeds in decades, which makes moving the ever increasing data a huge pain.
