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Comment by jaawn | Hacker News Reader

Every piece of storage news I've seen for the past year or two reinforces my opinion that there is a great deal of price-fixing happening in the consumer storage market. The price trend of 2TB HDDs, for example, just does not make sense.

When I see that a company can now create SSDs with ~16x more capacity than the best consumer option, I feel like something fishy is going on that is artificially slowing the pace of larger capacity drives making it into the hands of consumers at a reasonable price.

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In the HDD market there are actually just two companies: WD and Seagate. There are other brands (Toshiba, HGST) but these are not completely independent (HGST is owned by WD, Toshiba still exists mostly because WD feeds it with technology whenever they are threatened by anti-monopoly rulings, so they can say competition still exists).

In the SSD market there are lots of brands, but only a few flash chip makers - so it's the same lack of competition but better hidden to the consumer.

For SSDs, there are four independent flash manufacturers, three of which are pretty big. They all have an in-house controller product line, and there are at least three major independent controller providers. It's a lot more competition than hard drives.

And the main reason the number of hard drive manufacturers is so low is that SSD is the competition and is winning for many use cases.

Cloud storage providers must be sucking up a huge amount of HDD supply... I wonder if that is putting a floor under consumer HDD prices.

That could be true, since the most cloud Providers don't use "enterprise" hdd's, they just buy stuff they tested.

Nah, it was only really WS and Seagate even before SSDs came around at all.

> Toshiba still exists mostly because WD feeds it with technology whenever they are threatened by anti-monopoly rulings

From what I have read, Toshiba's 2.5" consumer/enterprise and 3.5" enterprise HDD business was acquired from Fujitsu [1] and has nothing to do with WD/HGST. WD had to transfer some/all (reports diverge) HGST 3.5" consumer HDD assets to Toshiba on the insistence of the EU Commission.

The Toshiba/HGST thing is a little opaque to me: HGST still sells a few DeskStar HDDs, notably DeskStar NAS, and newer Toshiba 3.5" consumer HDDs (MD-series 4TB+) look more like the enterprise HDDs that Toshiba has been selling for a while [2], not like the DT01ACA... models that were relabeled HGST DeskStar 7K3000 [3], although there are also pictures of the very same MD models that do look HGST-style [4]. Makes me unsure what to buy 3.5"-wise when I want the Hitachi reliability that I am used to (buying IBM/HGST for over a decade and never had a failure).

Then again, maybe I'm just naive and Toshiba is more dependent on WD than I think.

[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/toshiba-buys-fujitsu-hard-disk-driv... [2] https://www.alternate.de/p/o/a/Toshiba_PX3009E_1HP0_4_TB__Fe... [3] http://cdn1.goughlui.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/IMG_4989... [4] http://www.toshiba.eu/hard-drives/internal-hard-drives/sata-...

Interestingly, Seagate also owns Samsung's HDD manufacturing business. Samsung is focusing on chips as the future of storage, and obviously, they're right...

Keep in mind that this 16TB SSD costs $20,000 or more; it's not comparable to a $200 consumer hard disk.

Do we know it will cost this much? A 4TB one is $2200 or less.

Price often goes asymptotic at the cutting edge.

nitpick, but you almost certainly mean to add "asymptotically vertical"; asymptotic alone doesn't tell you anything a bout which direction the price curve is heading, only that it is approaching some limit.

Context makes it quite clear that it's going up. "Asymptotic" is a perfectly good description of an acceleration.

You can always add more words to take something that is perfectly clear and try to make it more clear. Add enough and you make it harder to understand.

So I prefer it written the way it is.

y = (-3x^2 + 2)/(x-1) is asymptotic both as x->1 and x->\infty.

Precise language matters, one should not rely on the crutch of context if one wants to be clear.

you're reducing precision of the expression by adding extraneous data. The orientation of the asymptote is fully expressed by the context of price and the notion of high-end computing.

It's obvious from the context. Adding "vertical" is unnecessary. This is conversational writing, not legal nor instructional writing.

But this is not Reddit either.

Isn't that a tautology?

He wrote "often", not "always".

I meant the "asymptotic at the cutting edge" part, ignore price. An asymptote is the cutting edge

Where in the article did it say that? The only mention of price is:

"We don't have a price for Samsung's 16TB PM1633a, but we can't imagine that it'll be cheaper than £5,000."

Based on that, you could reasonably say it will cost $7800 or more per current GBP->USD exchange rate.

Also, you might need to subtract VAT.

One thing about HDDs is that the marginal cost to the manufacturer is basically constant regardless of size. It costs them just over $100 per drive to make a drive. The cost of making 6 or 10TB drives is all in the R&D. Large cloud providers buy drives in such large volumes that they get access to pricing that normal people don't which is why they can provide things like Youtube, S3 and Glacier without going broke.

The pricing isn't much better than what consumers get. They can charge 200% of cost for the product, though.

I think you're neglecting fabrication yield.

What's the marginal price on a part you can only make successfully one time out of ten?

I couldn't find info on SSD yields, do you know where to find it? I found that HDD factories generally target 97+% yield. So, if SSD yields are much lower, you bring up a good point.

SSDs probably have very very good yield because unlike a CPU if any parts are damaged they can just work around them.

They can even sell them as lower capacity drives. I'd be surprised is the yield was not 100%.

I was referring more to the NAND fabrication yield, eg:

http://semimd.com/blog/2014/01/29/3d-nand-to-10-nm-and-beyon...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/09/3d_nand_gigantically...

I'm making the assumption that NAND flash is binned and derated based on defects. ie, to make this drive, Samsung needs to fab 256Gbit dies. As this is on the leading-edge of their production capabilities, I'm guessing that the defect rate is not negligible, and that they accidentally make lower-capacity chips a significant portion of the time.

If it costs $100 to make an HDD, how are they selling 1TB drives for ~$50, and 3TB drives for ~$85? I sincerely doubt drive manufacturers are working with such terrible (i.e. negative) margins in the consumer space...

Have you seen the price of 10Gbit Ethernet ports? A technology that's over 10 years old, and hardly more advanced than things like thunderbolt....

Not just storage. If you go backwards through the supply chains, you inevitably end up with a limited number of companies supplying core parts.

I feel that as well. We are told it will be a while until we see anything beyond single digit TB and suddenly Samsung drops a massive bomb with 16TB? I doubt that an average consumer would use 16TB but who knows. Also I have some qualms about storing on SSD knowing the data won't last forever

Ignoring that it's a wholly new flash/storage chip just being introduced to the market, scaling up flash storage is not a great mystery or difficulty -- add more chips. The reason consumer drives are at the sizes they are is a matter of consumer tolerance for pricing levels, and we saw all of the noise when 1TB flash drives were announced, people annoyed that it isn't for less than $100.

I don't see much justification for the "consumer tolerance" argument. It seems like most people are holding off on SSD purchases, or choosing lower capacities because they think the drives are too expensive.

Your conspiratorial argument is that they're holding off higher capacity consumer drives (note that in the Enterprise market you have been able to get multi-TB solutions for years) for some reason, but that the existing options are too expensive. This is a very entitled argument where your core complaint is that you can't have difficult, expensive technology for cheap.

>your core complaint is that you can't have difficult, expensive technology for cheap.

That's a circular way of putting it, where you incorporate "expensive" (the thing that is under question) into your argument.

His core argument is that it shouldn't be that expensive, and maybe they are using their monopoly / cartel power to fix the prices, so they can milk the < 2TB consumer market first AND charge way higher in the enterprise for "premium" drives that aren't.

That might or might not be the case (they could still be as expensive to manufacture as they claim), but price fixing is something that disk and memory companies have been found guilty of doing in the past (in courts et al).

His core "argument" is that it's fishy that a device can appear that has 16x the storage space. That is precisely what they said, so this really isn't open to debate. But that device will be unfathomably expensive. We all know it will be. It's meant for extraordinarily rich tech companies that need hyper-density, and has positively nothing to do with the consumer market.

What it has to do with the consumer market is that they have the ability to manufacture a drive in the same form factor as the consumer space, at a large enough scale to offer it for sale. That has a lot of implications for the capabilities of their manufacturing processes.

In the past (and I think still currently), the true "bleeding edge" of the SSD market is made up of drives that take up full rack units. So, if this 16TB SSD was in a funky form factor, or even just 3.5", it would make way more sense to me and be less fishy.

So now we're on to completely different argument #3, which is that you don't like the form factor they use.

Again, aside from the fact that it's a new manufacturing process of flash cells, which is rather an important point, the people willing to pay the big dollars -- enterprises -- didn't want flash in hard drive/SSD form. When you're paying 10s of thousands for an extremely high performance system, you don't drop it behind an abstraction of SAS/ATA, but stick it in a PCI-E slot to get extraordinary performance and direct access. The choice of form factor was targeting the market, just as the choice of how much flash to put in a SSD drive is targeting a market.

And the truth is that Samsung didn't even announce a price for this, and it's unlikely this iteration ever becomes a real product. They put it in an SSD case to get press because it's neat, not because it makes sense.

>So now we're on to completely different argument #3, which is that you don't like the form factor they use.

Please stop putting words in his mouth (first you dismissed his accusation of price fixing as "your core complaint is that you can't have difficult, expensive technology for cheap", which was far for his "core complaint").

And, no, we're not "on to completely different argument".

This isn't a rhetorical competition and he didn't put forward false argument to trick anyone.

He just explained further the reason behind his original objection.

I've put no words in anyones mouth. I have no idea why you keep responding while adding literally nothing of substance, but their first argument was that there's a conspiracy because how could densities jump so significantly, clearly showing that they were holding back. The next, in the face of the reality that the consumer market has no stomach for the price of devices with magnitudes less storage, is that the conspiracy is that prices are too high, making larger devices untenable, completely contrary to the first argument. The third is that the conspiracy is that enterprise flash devices come in non-consumer form factors (see points #1 and #2).

This is profoundly ignorant. Save trying to amble up to the high ground when you simply add more noise. It is the sort of tiring entitled nonsense you see on every Facebook post by Anandtech, everyone stomping their feet that they can't have a 2TB SSD for less than $100.

Actually, being the originator of the words in question, I do agree that you are "putting them in my mouth." At the very least, you seem to be inferring a lot of things which I did not imply or intend to imply.

The previous commenter is correct. I view all of these statements as clarification of a single argument and its originations. That argument involves no conspiracy theories, simply a suspicion of price fixing (that's not an outlandish suspicion, in my opinion. I mean...drive manufacturers have been found guilty of it before...)

I don't think it is a conspiracy that some enterprise drives come in odd form factors, you completely misread that part of what I said. My point was that, normally the most advanced enterprise drives come in strange (i.e. much larger) form factors. This is because they have not yet worked the size and power requirements down to fit the smaller form factor, which makes complete sense. However, this drive uses a standard form factor, which tells me it is not "bleeding edge." There are probably rack mount SSDs with much higher capacities than 16TB.

So, the reason it seems weird is that they have obviously passed that hurdle with the 16TB offering. They can now fit 16TBs of SSD storage in a standard form factor. It is odd because if they can fit 16TBs, and we assume that at scale, the variable costs are almost exclusively due to the capacity of the chips, why is there not a consumer drive even a factor of 4 smaller (i.e. 4TB) available? I understand there not being a 16TB drive...or a 12TB, 8TB, etc... available. But a factor of 16 seems oddly large.

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