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Comment by wavephorm | Hacker News Reader

I seriously need a 1TB SSD (which either don't exist or are still way too expensive) for my laptop because I am constantly moving files off my local system and onto my file server which could also seriously use some 4TB drives, which also don't exist. I am running out of space on each of my systems faster than I ever remember.

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If the stuff you're moving around is going over a network, then you obviously don't need SSD performance for it, since your laptop doesn't have a NIC capable of more than 1Gbps. If you can't fit two drives in your laptop, then you are exactly the kind of user that hybrid drives are targeted at.

I'm moving stuff to network drives all the time because the SDD drive capacity of my laptop is too small. Even after 3 years there still isn't anything on the market that is an acceptably priced replacement. Like I said, where is my $300 1TB SDD that should have been on the market by now?

3 years is a really long time for an entire industry to be totally stagnant. It's somewhat similar to how Intel has been sitting on their asses for the past few years ignoring the entire mobile computing revolution.

I suspect it's coming. You can get a 512g for $399 now. I'd wager a small amount that we'll see 1TB SSD in the next year - it may still be $800+ when they first arrive, but will come down more after that.

Or a Samsung 256GB for $189. Anyway, it's a great time to pick up some SSDs.

The SSD market has been anything but stagnant for the past three years. That's a ridiculous assertion for you to be making - three years ago, the SSD market was still immature and not at all ready to be mainstream. The first halfway-decent SSD (Intel X25-M) is only about four years old, and it's nowhere near competitive with current SSDs for price, capacity, or performance.

You seem to be under the false impression that the NAND is the most important part of an SSD. It's not. From an engineering perspective, it's the least important component - it just happens to be the primary reason for cost scaling with capacity. The controller and it's firmware are far more complicated, and make all the difference for performance. Those components have made a lot of progress in the past three years. And even the NAND has advanced, just not exponentially, because while density is inversely related to unit cost, it is also inversely related to durability, and the drives 3 years ago weren't designed with excessive longevity requirements.

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