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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

This boom/bust is really obvious with regards to computer prices.

I'm seeing 2TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs with 7000+ MBps under $100 these days. Almost everything in the computer-world is on a significant sale.

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We have to counter with even more resource hungry and inefficient software of course

I'm doing my part!

I have my Windows installer raring to go

Real talk: ever since I put Windows and Linux on separate SSDs, rather than simply separate partitions, they haven't killed each others' bootloaders once. Best $100 I ever spent.

My second tip for solving incompetent software with redundant hardware: TOSLink -> 1Mii Bluetooth Transmitter to avoid the catastrophic linux bluetooth stack. It's brilliant. TOSLink = no buzzing from inadequate shielding next to digital lines (or "AI audio" noise floor massacre or popping or...) and no software bluetooth = OS can't screw up pairing and that OS switching can't screw up the pairing. I did this in a moment of rage after the Nth time dumping hours into yet another linux bluetooth issue only to find that someone had submitted a patch years ago but project management hadn't reviewed the patch for a year and then banned the person who submitted the patch for complaining that nobody was reviewing his patches >.<

Any specifics about the second paragraph anecdote? It seems like a serious scandal.

Hmm doesn't look like I wrote it in my journal but yeah, it was pretty gross. The reason given for the ban was some swearing in the message, but to my intuition the profanity was pretty tame, well-deserved, and ultimately just an excuse.

I do remember the bug: Bose headphones have a low quality mode and a high quality mode (low quality frees bandwidth for microphone and maybe latency), and the linux bluetooth stack defaulted to the low bandwidth mode so aggressively that even if you changed the script to set high bandwidth mode it would immediately set back.

I have no idea if the bug is fixed because this happened in 2020 and I haven't thought about desktop bluetooth since 2020 because TOSLink->1Mii Bluetooth Transmitter solved all my problems with it.

The sorry state of Bluetooth on Linux is well known at that point. Android had to roll their own stack because the standard BlueZ on Linux is a fucking pain.

I have windows on a separate SSD, and grub still stops working whenever I update my motherboard firmware...

Condolences. I wish I had a second trick for you but I don't.

At least I can fix it from Windows, because it's just some uefi parameter that gets borked. I have the command in a text file on my desktop.

I don't really know how to trash the SSD in my software.

Flash wear says hello.

Run something like Chia.

(Obviously not an endorsement.)

I don’t really know what software you write, but trashing flash from software is a thing.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/flash-memory-wear-killing-...

Cache videos on disk aggressively

It sounds like we need to port more software to Electron

Meanwhile, Apple charges hundreds of dollars at purchase time for 256GB more storage. And it's non-upgradable on top of that.

Sometimes I feel they are just testing our limits. Same with iPhone price increases. I guess they are going to continue until the net profits decrease.

Well, if they continue on that path the EU will mandate upgradeable storage next.

I get why they do it though, my 2022 MB Air is serious competition against my work 2019 16" MBP. Far superior battery life, similar display quality (WTF that notch though), feels just as snappy with IntelliJ, 200+ Chrome tabs and Docker, and all of that despite just 16 GB RAM. No way to do that unless you got fast storage directly adjacent to the CPU so users don't notice swapping.

The SSD isn't all that fast with the Air, though.

Have you used any of these sub $100 devices? I just took a look, and all of the names are vendors I have no experience with what so ever. All of the vendors I am familiar are above that price point. So, my immediate concern would be these cheap ones are made from chips rejected by the name brands, and their performance would be rejected by me after wasting the time/money on them.

I was looking at NewEgg and not Alibaba/ebay/amazon

Lots of <100 2TB ssds on Samsung / Intel / Micron / etc. products.

https://slickdeals.net/newsearch.php?q=2tb&searcharea=deals&...

> Intel

Note: Intel is literally obsolete in terms of Flash. Intel sold all of their SSDs to SK Hynix, who is now selling those SSD-designs under the name of "Solidigm"

So if you want a "modern Intel" SSD, look for Solidigm. Intel got out of this race in December 2021, so no "new" SSD (2022 or 2023 era) is from "Intel" branding, only "Solidigm".

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I'm more of a Crucial / Micron fan myself, but Samsung, Crucial, and WD (aka: Sandisk was bought out by WD) are all 2TB for under $100.

But yes, I'm talking about the big-names, with high-performance (7000MBps+ suitable for PS5). The good stuff. GPUs, CPUs, HDDs, and Motherboards have also come down in price. Its entirely across the board though the SSD market is where its most obvious.

I have an ADATA 2TB in a PS5 and my work machine. These aren't fly by nights.

They can be had for sub $100. Even the much lauded Samsung 980 Pro is dipping close enough to the same.

Assembling a new home PC, picked up a 2tb Samsung 980 Pro with a heatsink recently for $129 (I think it was $113 without the heatsink at that moment).

DDR5 ram is finally starting to get price reasonable as well.

I got a 2TB 980 pro with heat sink from Bestbuy last week for $99. I was astounded. No brainer upgrade for the PS5

be sure to upgrade the firmware, 980 pros are known to die after a while.

dunno why people keep paying this premium for them, there's other better options for less money, like HP FX900 or Team Cardea these days. And those companies have a track record of reliability and not... whatever Samsung is doing for the last 10 years.

Like honestly these days Samsung rates below stuff like Sabrent Rocket for me. You're better off picking a random other product from a big-name brand with equivalent specs as long as it's not a Samsung... the "SSD monty hall problem" if you will. Simply by switching, you improve your odds.

I picked up a 2TB 980Pro and installed it into an external USB-C chassis from SSK. I now have extremely fast external storage to edit from on the go without filling my internal system drive with crap media footage. At ~$100, that enough to have one per project and avoids the "which drive" question. It's now, get the ProjectX drive, or get the ProjectY drive. It's the happiest I've been as a mobile editor.

A 2TB Western Digital SN850x, a near top of the line SSD, is $99 at Best Buy.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-black-sn850x-2tb-internal-ss...

That's entirely consistently with Moore's Law in NAND chips. I honestly think they were gouging us by not dropping prices earlier.

I'm holding out for $100-200 8TB versions before I fill out the empty slot in my laptop and max out the RAM. Having all my in-use video, samples, and Kontakt libraries on-board would make life a lot easier.

Recently found a 4TB Samsung for ~200 USD

8TB is new enough that it's still at premium pricing, but I expect it to fall like 4TB did. I'd hate to get a 4TB today when what I really needed was 8, only to have it drop within a few months. They're already down quite a bit.

You made me check and I notice the same in my area, great deals indeed, thanks!

I noticed that too. What does it mean? That demand is sinking or that costs are going down?

Computer parts are always high-margin. They're made out of purified sand after all, the raw materials of chips is excessively cheap.

The ultimate price that consumers pay is very much related to demand and less about costs. The economics of chips is very interesting: its very expensive to design and develop a chip. But making additional copies of chips (or mass producing any design, really) is extremely cheap.

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So yes, computer parts will go up in price mostly in reaction to demand. And they'll go down in price mostly in reaction to demand.

The long-term investment into computers is not guaranteed however. It takes $Billions to design a modern chip, which is the hard part in practice. To run a computer company means to sell enough chips to fund the next generation. But for any given week or day of the year, the price of those chips can be whatever anyone feels like... really.

> Computer parts are always high-margin. They're made out of purified sand after all, the raw materials of chips is excessively cheap.

The purification and especially the lithography (aka making actual chips out of a silicon disk) is what is expensive. The machines are pricey as fuck - a single line from ASML alone costs 200 million dollars, and that's just the machines for the lithography, not including the machinery that makes the ultra pure monocrystals, that slices them, or that cuts and packages them, or the cleanrooms and the remaining support infrastructure. Or the extremely specialized staff you need to actually operate them.

And it's a ton of money involved with very long lead times - say you're TSMC, you get an order for a batch of chips, and even if you had capacity starting tomorrow, the 700 steps to the final product take three months [1]. That's a massive amount of capital to be stuck for months, and errors can waste all of that.

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/three-month...

They are ( NAND maker ) selling at a lost.

except for H100s from NVIDIA. Waiting for them to go down in price

They are in a separate bubble right now.

Makes me wonder why I bother with anything in the cloud at all!

Got a link/model number? I’m always down for a new drive.

There's lots and lots of 2TB drives under $100 available. Just picking one that I know of:

https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-b...

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