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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

I was looking for some 8TB m2 drives recently and they are still surprisingly expensive, considering you can get 2TB ones on sale for less than $100. But there are barely any options too, still a niche market https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#A=600...

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Aside from lack of demand, there are some significant technical reasons that contribute to 8TB M.2 drives being expensive niche products, both stemming from the fact that 8TB of flash is still a lot of chips: PC OEMs prefer M.2 SSDs that are single-sided because many thin laptop designs require that, and many low-end SSD controllers literally don't have the pin count necessary to interface with that many flash chips.

The lack of demand vanishes once prices come down to something reasonable.

I think this might be an appropriate time to make the economist's distinction between the quantity demanded at current prices vs the overall shape and location of the demand curve. Lower prices would shift the market equilibrium to a different point along the demand curve, but there would still be far less demand for 8TB drives than for 1TB drives. Shifting the demand curve itself upward would require something like a big change in usage patterns causing more consumers to need 8TB of local storage. Without such a shift, consumers will mostly be happy to save money on 1-2TB drives rather than move up to higher capacities they don't need.

Those $100 2TB drives are probably because of this: https://www.theverge.com/22291828/sandisk-extreme-pro-portab...

I see Samsung 2TB drives on sale for around $100 periodically, are they subject to the same problem?

Samsung drives have been fairly bulletproof, even among their budget offerings.

I've recently had an unexpected run of failing WD Blue SSDs and just had a new Sandisk drive (not one from gparent) fail, right after I backed another drive up to it.

Not sure. Samsung, WD, SK hynix 2TB drives are regularly on sale around ~$100

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/search?sort=new&restr...

I also had a problem with Sandisk 2TB portable SSD. But it dies for a few days and comes back. It's wired. I will not keep anything important in that drive after this incident.

Have you checked if there are available firmware updates for your model?

Btw, since the thread is about both Samsung and SanDisk now, I can tell a personal experience with both regarding the same kind of issue.

I had the exact same problem with SanDisk as explained in The Verge article. I had it in January, before it became a known major issue, so I guess they were not prepared for that. However, the process was smooth enough, and I just filled a ticket with details, received a couple of questions, send it to their service center and received a new one later. It works fine now.

But I had a similar situation with Samsung SSD too, it died after a couple of months. But they made it impossible to replace it. The process is so bad that I was never able to get into any support for that case, and never received any meaningful response. So I just gave up eventually, so I guess I just donated few hundred dollars to Samsung.

Sounds like someone is salty over not following 3-2-1 backups.

I had that Sandisk 3 years ago. Same thing happened to me. Lost a lot of data. Now, I banned anything by Sandisk and even evangelized anything but Sandisk - probably a couple 10mils of Sandisk revenue averted. I'm surprised, 3 years after, Sandisk SSD extreme STILL has same problem. Now probably easier to say "I told you so".

I think with the rise of streaming and cloud storage, the need for large storage devices on a personal level is really declining for most people.

Why the downvotes? This is observably true “for most people”

This is bizarre to me. Cloud storage kills the need for small drives. So for the individual with modest storage needs, the cloud is relatively inexpensive and thought free. But the moment you get over 2TB the cloud gets extremely expensive. So if you're a person who needs to store a lot, large drives make a lot of sense.

This to me, it's the opposite of observably true. You would think large drives would be most in demand for personal use.

Naive question: Does the decline of smaller local storage undermine economies of scale that benefited larger local storage?

> Cloud storage kills the need for small drives.

I'm not sure that cloud storage kills anything. There's reasonable mistrust in it and much of the world lives with unreliable infrastructure..

Most people aren't able to self-host and maintain a more reliable infra for various reasons: lack of knowledge, lack of free time, they don't necessarily have 2 different houses, lazyness, etc.

are you only asking/observing yourself and your tech-savvy friends?

cloud storage doesn’t make local storage irrelevant. just less relevant. drives still fail, new machines are built, etc, etc. and when that happens to the average consumer, they don’t seek out the biggest drive available. just whatever is down the street.

and just down the street doesn’t want to stock dozens of massive drives, lest the average consumers balk at the prices.

The cloud isn't supplying storage, the cloud is providing reasons not to need storage in the first place (piracy vs streaming).

Cloud services are providing both things.

Most of the people in my life rely on cloud storage for their digital lives - mostly Google Drive or iCloud. It’s the primary destination for photos and videos for many people, and services like Google docs both store files and remove the need for traditional local storage.

Most people never stored their TV on their personal devices in the first place. People shifted from rental to streaming / DVD & Blu-Ray to streaming.

Every year I have more pictures and more documents and more stuff in general to store. That or I have to fuss with pruning things, which is a PITA and I'm reluctant to do.

I think with the pricing of cloud storage and photo, video and assets taking more and more space, the opposite is true.

For example apple requires larger storage to even use prores:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212832

Or Baldur's gate 3 takes 123GB of storage for the install.

People swallow the cost because it is easier than migrating. My partner has made a lot of albums, tagging in google photos extensively. When her account reaches the free limit, I offered her to use google takeout and host her pictures in a local nextcloud instance but told her I didn't had immediate time to dig out if getting back tags and albums from google tameout's metadata was possible and she just grabbed her card details and subscribed to the drive expansion.

Gamers are an exception, but gaming is a niche market. Most people using computers are using laptops with integrated intel gpu and never install any game.

> For example apple requires larger storage to even use prores:

I don't think this is about capacity, but rather it's about performance: small SSDs are slower because they have fewer flash chips to write to in parallel. But that effect goes away as you move up to higher capacities and hit other bottlenecks; even high-end PCIe gen5 SSDs that are too power-hungry for anything other than desktops and servers reach full speed by 2TB.

Well, you wouldn't normally try to put a 123GB game on Google drive.

Alternatively, with the ever increasing exploiting of online providers, and the ongoing government led attacks on secure encryption, then maybe personal/local storage will turn out to be the smarter option after all. ;)

Dont get lulled into a false sense of privacy, the governments can and will hack anything connected to the Internet, sometimes illegally for trivial or whimsical reasons.

I only use cloud storage as a convenience / easy backup, not as "permanent" storage. My need for large storage devices hasn't really declined, it's pretty much crept up year by year.

Also - it starts getting very spendy for cloud storage after a few TB.

True and probably why Apple sells laptops with such ridiculously low storage of 256MB or charges insane amounts for reasonable amounts - because they want to force you into reliance on their services. But this penny pinching policy does cause major problems eg my daughters system files have taken up 90% of her SSD - so now she can no longer upgrade or install new software.

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