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Comment by gizmodo59 | Hacker News Reader

The cost of RAM is already very very high. This has been surging for quite sometime and now we might see the same for SSDs too. Not to call this news as false, but its sad to see the price increasing :(

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/73el5s/are_ram_pr...

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We've already been in it for SSDs for a while. We're just getting back to $40/120GB SSD Sata drives. And that's mostly via on-sale prices.

(diclaimer - this is mostly via newegg/amazon pricing - hard drive prices are something I follow in the background, this isn't a scientific/well researched observation by any means, but other folks I've talked to have similar observations)

I recall paying around $1/gb in ~2006, and that was for a 5400rpm drive (and I’m sure the older members here will say something in the mb range). So while i agree, the rate we have come to expect value to increase isn’t continuing on that exponential curve we experienced the last 20 years, the prices are not expensive by any means.

If you’re talking mechanical drive prices, the best deal I’ve seen around are the wd easystores sold at Best Buy. When they go on sale for under 150 for the 8tb version, hard to beat that value. I filled my entire storinator up with them.

Can’t wait until ssds can compete with price/capacity.

2006 isn’t relevant to today’s market though. We can’t go back in time. Today’s businesses are built on data set sizes, compute loads and software footprints that in many couldn’t run on 2006 scale hardware at all. Unavailability of modern scale systems wouldn’t set back many businesses, it would kill them.

The biggest risk of supply shocks like this, even modest ones, is that businesses will decide to buy up supply early to avoid any problems getting it later. That further restricts supply for everyone else, driving prices even higher, and soon you have a ‘bank run’ on that resource choking off supply and making it unaffordable. This happened in the early 90s to RAM. A fire at a plastics factory for material used in RAM chip production created a run on RAM, even though in reality it wasn’t a threat to supply. The fear of a shortage created a shortage.

As a non-observer, what timescales are we talking about here? These statements don't mean much without context. The last storage price spike I recall was the great 2011 Thailand flood. Have there been fluctuations the common man should know about since then?

Roughly: a flash memory shortage started in late 2016 when everybody but Samsung was having trouble transitioning to 3D NAND flash memory, and Samsung was having trouble with their third generation of 3D NAND. All of the flash memory manufacturers are now producing 64-layer or higher 3D NAND and prices have been coming down for a few months, but they're still higher than 2015 prices.

I think stabilize is a better word, I hardly call a few percentage changes "coming down"

Consumer SSD prices are absolutely trending down. Everyday Amazon and Newegg prices are slightly better than the Black Friday/holiday sales of four months ago.

Strange the NAND price didn't drop that much. Weak demands of SSD?

*NAND price and SSD price never quite trend together or match up.

i paid $75 for a decent 240gb SSD back in 2014.

The price for a similarly decent 240gb SSD is still around $75 today.

Back then I thought 512gb/480gb would be available for $75 in 2017.

Capacity is the same, but how about durability of performance of those drives?

Worse nowadays. Every new process shrinks nand cells, on top of that we are on TLC everything now, while 5 years ago huge SLC chips were norm.

Good 2012 drive was Samsung 830 surviving 10 Petabytes, nowadays consumer drives are expected to survive ~100TB.

It wasn't that long ago that ram cost closer to $100 a gigabyte.

Yes and about half way between then and now it was about $100 for 16GB.

I remember paying $450 wholesale price for 8mb of ram. That was 25 years ago, which doesn’t seem that long ago, but in tech that’s centuries ago, so I’m not sure what point you were trying to make.

That $10 per gigabyte isn't "very very high".

Even if it does represent a doubling from the bottom.

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