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Comment by lawrenceyan | Hacker News Reader

In comparison to general processing, I haven't been keeping up with advancement in SSD/flash memory technology very much. Is the market still the cut-throat low margin hell hole I remember it being, or has technological improvement slowed to a point where performance gain is now much more difficult to achieve?

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It's both, depending on the segment. The vast majority of SSD controllers can easily saturate the SATA bus, so there's not really much room for differentiation in 2.5"/M.2 SATA drives. But when you've got a PCIe-3 x4 bus to work with, as is the case for the NVMe drives being compared in this article, it's a whole different ball game. There the bottleneck is the controller (and to a much lesser extent, the flash itself). For a while Samsung was really the only game in town, as far as high-end performance goes, but it seems like WD has finally got a worthy competitor. Now it just remains to be seen how well the drives hold up (bad controller firmware can put up high performance numbers at the expense of the longevity of the flash (aka your data)).

The NAND industry went into a severe shortage (as NAND goes) along with DRAM. However, NAND shortage happened due to 2D to 3D. While 3D allows for high cell density, it also made Capex go from about 8B to around 25B as an industry. One of the reason Lam stock price has been on a tear. NAND spot pricing went up somewhere between 200-300% for like on like technology. Margins exploded, and the industry grew larger than any forecasts. There is a big debate on if the margins will stay high. While DRAM is still edging up, we may have seen some lowering of NAND pricing. So cost reduction is coming from mixing to MLC and TLC with better architectures in the same package.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle

It has stabilized into a modest margin business for the few big companies that dominate it. Very similar to how the HDD market did. Based on the margins Western Digital has been seeing lately, I'd say it's even more lucrative.

Western Digital almost has 20% operating income margins at this point, that's a notch below where Intel is typically at (25%-30%) and comparable to Cisco. Their latest two quarters saw them generate $1.85 billion in operating income on $10.5 billion in sales. Not bad.

Is this monopolistic/cartel-like in nature, or is purely due to the costs of capital expenditures for research and development? Also, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle.

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