Hacker News Reader

You generally can't just stick separate chunks of flash memory together to make one big one, because the controller is the limiting factor. Having a chip being able to manage large amounts of flash memory (having to have its own memory for the allocation tables, wear leveling, and so forth) is where it gets tricky.

View on HN

But we've had 1+ TB flash controllers in SSDs for several years, too.

Yes, and they're disproportionately more expensive (ie more than twice the price of 2 500GB's) because of the aforementioned issues. It's also the bottleneck in having say 5TB SSD's that are just 20 smaller ones stuck together, because you could cram them into a 3.5 inch enclosure.

3.5 inch SSDs are expensive because they are primarily used in very expensive servers, and they aim for maximum performance.

If your main concern is capacity, you can easily use multiple controllers. In the laziest case just put a cheap raid controller in front.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com