This sucks. For awhile prices were so great for consumers. Finally thought prices would settle low. I’m already seeing a 50% increase in some products. Some cheap team group 128gb SSD could be had for like $12 last year. I tried to look at prices a few days back and it was about $20 and rising.
From article looks like they don’t want to settle at prices before plummet, but at recent peak prices. Shit companies raising cutting output to inflate prices. Car companies are going to be next to follow. They’ve had to cut prices to sell recently. Once that settles …
Well, I did pay $500 for a 128gb SSD when they first came out. Later that year Amazon was accidentally shipping 512gb instead and I was psyched to get one in the mix.
They all cut way back on manufacturing last year due to the price drops from significantly reduced demand. So it’s 100% expected that prices will go up because they’ve created a reduced supply.
There’s an unofficial open for everything these days, food, medicine, computer components, etc… there’s a handful of companies that corner the market for everything now and they all are perfectly happy matching supply and pricing.
They’re reducing supply because they can’t make any money with this supply/demand mismatch, Micron for example didn’t have a single profitable quarter and lost something like $6B total over the course of 2023
The only reason SSD prices have been this low is because we’ve been paying less than the cost to produce them as they try to recoup some of their losses and shed inventory
Fake problems in order to get in on all this fake inflation bullshit. All these capitalist pigs raking people over the coals for record profits under the entirely fabricated “inflation” crisis. SSD manufacturers want to get theirs too.
This is the prep/hype phase where they spread fake news to get the consumers prepped for surgery. None of it is real.
Nice, I bought 10 TB of SSD (6 for workstation, 4 for server) this year. And I have 3.5TB of USB SSD available. Workstation already had 2tb, but I expanded because I crossed the 1tb threshhomd.And 16tb HDD, and another 8tb HDD via USB available.
Since this community has already established that piracy* is justified, and we need our SSDs to store all our morally rationalized but illicitly obtained copies of content we enjoy but don’t want to spend money on, how do we now proceed? Obviously we won’t spend money, it’s the entire reason we’re pirating in the first place. This leaves us with only one option: we’ll have to be modern-day Robin Hoods and shoplift these SSDs, because fuck corporate greed.
Article says SSD manufacturers currently sell at a loss & intend to raise prices because they want to be profitable, 40% is break even, 50% is profitable
If that is real, this is baffling, why was it done in the first place? Was there some new company that could manufacture a significant amount of SSDs who started selling at loss so everyone else had to follow to not lose all marketshare? Also it’s not like SSDs are some eggs that expire, there is no need to dump all inventory. Pretty hard to believe.
Actually a common practice to gain a leg up in the market and kill the competition. This can drag on for long, but the endgame is always buyers getting screwed.
These companies need to get smacked upside the head. Hard drives would be pretty much completely obsoleted if SSDs hit the prices that they should if we had proper competition instead of the “competition” to keep prices up that this memory cartel loves to keep up. My only hope is for another player to come in and dump cheap product onto the market like Japan did in the 80s.
Maybe it's a cartel but I don't have my hopes up. Storage technology is only getting more complicated and the number of players is only decreasing.
In my view (and maybe I'm wrong) there's just not that much money to be made in it, contrary to what consumers think. Why fight each other over pennies when you can both earn dollars? Maybe if China figures things out, but you can be my ass I'm not gonna trust a CCP backed storage company lol
A 3D printing revolution is what we need. Something that can print a very basic storage device. It doesn’t have to be good, just needs to be free shitty alternative to these price gougers.
An admirably optimistic goal! What you’re talking about here is a post-scarcity society like Star Trek, though. And even with machines to turn energy and goo into anything, they couldn’t replicate complex machinery like a tricorder - only the individual parts, sometimes.
Good enough for me! I’m not looking for a perfect solution, I can work with incomplete products with weak parts, as long as those parts are readily replaceable
Unfortunately it’s not possible to 3D print memory and the memory densities required makes it impossible for anyone other than those on expensive cutting edge hardware to achieve cheaply.
I can 3D print all the parts of an Abacus, giving me tens of bits of memory and a calculating device!
But yeah, on the serious side, nobody is going to be 3D printing any time soon, if ever, the kind of stuff small enough (and hence with sufficient memory densities for modern applications) to require advanced lythographic techniques and clean rooms to make, even if somebody went to the trouble of figuring out printeable materials for each of the kinds of layer (undoped semiconductor, various variants of doped semiconductors, conductive layer, isolating layer and others) currently present in ICs.
You can print “kiddy electronics” (really big transitors, resistors, capcitors and so on) on flexible substrates, but that’s way too big for any halfway decent memory densities (the Abacus joke is only half joking).
The magnetic read write head is going to be difficult to manufacture. The gearing will need to be 100% on point. You will either need a PCB custom made for your project or you will need to program an Arduino or pi to perform the tape backup. Your OS will need software to manage the data transfer.
You can store 30tb on tape for well under $100. It’s the magnetic tape itself that costs.
You could buy a used tape drive and cassette for less than the cost of a HDD of the same capacity.
Tape storage is slow and finicky. Retrieving is even slower due to seek time.
You wanna store a few hundred bytes? Print some mechanical knobs and call it a day. You wanna make some real storage devices?
Hire top PhD:
Physicists for quantum effects used (and parasitics mitigated)
Chemical engineers for CVD and other very hard and expensive clean room processes.
Electrical engineers to design analog circuitry for charge pumps and multi-level cell readout technology, as well as digital VLSI/HDL design for digital logic including storage controllers
Mechanical engineers for packaging design and automation for your expensive and dangerous production line
Civil engineers for your fab plant, which is so large that significant infrastructure needs to be built to support your fab (e.g. TSMC in Taiwan funded/built a municipal scale desalination plant of which a significant fraction is used for semiconductor processes)
Until we have replicators as the other commentor pointed out, I'm afraid we aren't even close yet. Fingers crossed we hit type II civ sometime but I won't be holding my breath for it.
Hdd wont be obsolete for awhile. They’re the best media to store large libraries cost effectively. Until there are 10+TB SSDS with reasonable prices, many people with home storage systems won’t upgrade. Not shelling out $10k for SSDS, sorry.
Lower end 4TB SSDs were around $130 a while back (summer or fall of last year). I bought an 8TB hard drive for about $100 around that time since I just wanted archival storage. Since then, prices for both SSDs and HDDs have gone up. Still, I think for most people 4TB should be more than enough and I have a feeling that prices could’ve gone even lower back then but they want to keep prices high and they also want to keep segmentation between HDDs and SSDs instead of erasing most of the market for HDDs.
Honestly I was getting scared we’d start seeing a really bad market crash with companies consolidating and going bankrupt left and right with how hard SSD prices crashed. Since that didn’t happen there’s at least still (an illusion of) competition
I think it’s only collusion if they all talk about doing it. Reading that your competitor raised prices and then raising your own isn’t the same as using back channels with your competitor in order to agree to both raise prices
We cynics predict the other players will follow suit, acting as a cartel. The prices will remain inflated, and media covering the price rise will blithely repeat industry talking points as fact. A few keyboard warriors will be convinced enough to point to these articles in online arguments. Someone somewhere types “supply and demand” unironically.
Maybe a few years down the line there will be an investigation when a whistleblower forces some government in europe to appear as if they’re doing something. The trial will last longer than the media coverage of it.
After that, we predict a settlement that costs less than the profits they made colluding to inflate prices. Someone somewhere types “cost of doing business”
Yeah but they probably have all the same suppliers and even if one keeps their prices low for now eventually someone there is going to wonder why they are doing the same work as everyone else but getting paid less for it.
This is why you need a healthy market. You need lots of competitions selling a lot of different products. Not 4 companies all seeing the same crap.
The only higher Return On Investment than creating yourself or finding and securinb a monopoly position and squeezing costumers is, maybe, buying politicians and having laws written to favour you, so naturally people guided only by the personal upside maximization idology will engage in both if they think they can get away withnit (or the penalties if caught are less than the profits).
It is absolutelly natural in Capitalism for companies to seek and even create monopoly positions and then squeeze customers, and to corrupt those who make the laws and regulations as well as those who enforce them, and often these things are combined: notice for example how the artifical monopoly which is Copyright has been repeatedly extended in duration to well beyond the point were there is an upside for Society, and now none of us will ever see the works created during our lifetime become Public Works.
Yes, capitalism will always choose the most efficient path to acquiring capital, which is evidently acquisition + mergers until they can artificially limit supply, then exploit and extort society wholesale; regardless of the consequences.
Yep… Doesn’t matter if the answer is war, famine, mass incarceration, crippling debt, homelessness, mental illness, pollution, climate change, ecocide, or genocide — capitalists will always find the most efficient path to the acquisition of capital.
We act like it's a bad thing but imo this is good. Samsung and other storage manufacturers need to produce enough to match demand, not waste resources producing extra storage that won't be sold. They make products besides SSDs...
Say what you will about problems about capitalism but imo this is simply supply and demand leading to greater market efficiency...
From today’s prices, an increase of 40% will reportedly get these companies back to breaking even, and a rise of 50% will mean profits instead of the losses that threatened bankruptcies earlier this year.
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