Comment by therealmarv
3 hours ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.