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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

I'm kind of hoping that SSD capacities go up or prices go down. Especially for laptops, in 2017 it feels like the baseline for the storage capacity should be 1TB. Yet here we are, struggling with 256GB, like desktops from 2007.

And don't get me started on RAM, where 8gb should be the norm even for cheap laptops...

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They've dropped enough that it's cheaper for us to purchase all 1TB SSDs to replace our 650GB 15K SAS disks in our SANs, after two years our drive failure rate has dropped by nearly 900% with a 5-40x performance gain depending on what you're measuring and the drives are about half the price of what the 15k SAS drives cost, to top it off our SANs used to run so hot you could barely touch the rear or the servers and now they're dead cold 24x7.

How does something drop 900%? Did you mean it's not at 1/9 of what it used to be?

I think the poster meant -90%, so 1/10

I'm sorry and thank you, yes I did!

Yeah, but you're comparing SAS disks with server SSDs. I'm talking more about consumer grade SSDs. I feel like the price curve still starts at a quite high price point and cheap or medium laptops can't reach that point, except for very low storage capacities.

By the way, I'm talking about $800 laptops, not $1500+ :)

No I'm not, we use 'consumer grade' (which is kind of a bs marketing term if you do your homework to ensure you get a quality brand and model) ssds in our SANs, we run 960GB Sandisk Extreme Pros in our first Gen and Micron M600 or Crucial MX series in our second gen SANs, they perform great and we've had almost no failures over the past two years of hammering them. We do keep the firmware up to date which I think a lot of people are slack on. We tried some Samsung Pro SSDs in a POC and had major issues with their performance over time and several DOAs so we're lumping those in with other Samsung hardware quality and not going near them.

I wouldn't count on it. There's an industry-wide SSD shortage happening and prices are actually on the rise. This is a temporary situation while SSD manufacturers retool and ramp up 3D NAND but neglected to ramp up existing 2D NAND to meet demand in the mean time.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ssd-hdd-shortage-nand-marke...

I've heard that HDD prices might rise as well, but I can't find a source for it right now.

Thanks, I was in the market for an SSD for my desktop and was wondering why I haven't seen decent prices anywhere.

Scarcity not shortage

Scarcity is based on the premise that there really are a limited number of goods or services. On the contrary, a shortage is backed by the seller's decision to withhold the sale of certain products at their current price tag. Shortages can be solved by raising prices.

I've never heard of that distinction before.

What about the phrase 'there were food shortages during the war'?

In World War II, the government combined rationing with price controls — limits on what people could charge for various goods — in hopes of keeping the cost of living reasonable. This poster urged people not to undermine price controls by paying premiums for black-market goods outside the rationing system.

src: http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/ww2-rationing/5922

> 8gb should be the norm even for cheap laptops...

Why? For example, why now, why not two years ago, or in two years time?

I haven't paid much attention to specs recently, but looking at the Thinkpad T series which I'm typing this on (a 2010 one with a decent keyboard)

The standard for a 2017 T460s is 8G, maxed out at 20G The standard for a 2010 T410s was 2G, maxed out at 8G The standard for a 2005 T43 was 512M, maxed out at 2G The standard for a 2000 T21 was 128MB, maxed out at 512M.

So a 4 fold increase in 5 years seems a historic trend for laptop memory sizes, but that would mean 8G as standard in 2015. The maxout level has tailed off recently too - I'd expect a max out at 32G now, not 20G.

Presumably the demand appears to be dropping, that said my uptime is only 5 hours, and memory use isn't great Mem: 7779 5269 277 713 2232 1437

Browsers use tons of memory, at some point I'll have to buy the bullet and downgrade the keyboard, looks like 20G is the way to go.

The non-s versions of the T-series can do 32 GB, the 20GB limit on some Lenovos is due to them only having one memory slot and 4 GB soldered in.

On the other hand, even some 2010 laptops support 32GB max, the most on current ones is as far as I know 64GB, so yes, the max curves certainly have flattened, but I think reasonably so.

You can put a 16GB chip in that 460 to max it out for $150. In the days of DDR2 it cost $800 to max out a laptop with 8GB

I'm not sure what the price threshold is for me to actually buy all the SSD storage I need, but Dells pricing error a few weeks back was definitely below it ($20 per 256GB drive). Unfortunately my order got canceled, so I'm still rocking a 120GB ssd and a bunch of shitty slow spinny disks.

You can get a 4TB SSD. They are a little pricy, but they do exist.

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