Comment by close04
3 hours ago
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.
But they don't local store that much data, which is what would be relevant for a discussion above local storage costs.
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?