Comment by mrngld
9 days ago
> I love this baseless optimism. Reminds me of the economic theory (forgot who put it forward): Everything will be fine in the long run.
Seems accurate though, I've already noticed no-name Chinese manufacturers stepping it up, throwing caution and capital to the wind and leaning in as hard they can. Following the typical Chinese model of how they get involved in markets, we're just a couple years away from memory being a market with skyrocketing prices and limited availability to a market where various nations are considering bailouts and tariffs to protect their local manufacturers from dirt-cheap Chinese exports to keep their memory producers from going through what domestic solar panel producers went through (a near extinction level event).
I specifically didn't say disk mfg as well only because I haven't yet noticed a new big spinning HDD Chinese brand. But they're definitely active in the lower end of the DDR5 market.
In that scenario, maybe SSD prices drop enough that spinning disk loses relevance.
I don't see that possibility from a data retention duration perspective. SSDs are glorified and addressable capacitors at the end of the day, and they leak.
For a backup drive that's plugged in at least every 2-3 months, an SSD is great if the price is right.
For proper long term cold storage, you want tape.
There's a niche in between where hard drives are good on their technical merits, but it's not a huge niche.