Hacker News Reader

Comment by pstack | Hacker News Reader

You wouldn't know it by the prices.

The prices are pretty much where they were from before the flood. Harddrive capacity has just gone up a ton. I bought a 1 terabyte before the flood for $60 and that is pretty much where it is at now if not cheaper in some cases.

Yes, but the problem is, hard drive $/GB has not recovered to the pre-flood trendline, even if prices have (4 years later) finally hit parity. The trendline has been badly hurt by the floods, it's pretty amazing. (I did a little tracking and was impressed how my predictions of the consequences were still insufficiently pessimistic: http://www.gwern.net/Slowing%20Moore%27s%20Law#kryders-law )

Economies of scale haven't recovered to pre-flood levels, because of the crisis in developed countries and because SSD is quickly growing its share of the market.

These are completely different technologies and their R&D spending and amortisation is separate.

> because of the crisis in developed countries

You mean that crisis which started in 2007?

> because SSD is quickly growing its share of the market.

Aren't SSDs still like 5x more expensive on a per-GB basis?

Yep to both.

Still, the crisis makes recovery harder for every market. And SSDs being 5x more expensive just became acceptable as download speeds have kind of stalled worldwide, and video resolution is not as demanding (compression also improved). Past 100GB or so, the utility curve enters into diminishing returns pretty strongly.

It used to be the case that media demanded exponentially more storage. Not anymore. You look at the average size of movie torrents for instance, and they have slowed down their growth drastically. The benefit of bigger files in practical terms is not as apparent anymore.

The cloud has also taken over for ratpacking download-and-forget data.

SSDs are already the better option for a lot of people (and still on the rise) in the throughput-latency-cost-space equilibrium. It's quite obvious just by looking at the stuff OEMs are shipping.

This is all vague reasoning compared to a huge flood crisis screwing up the supply chain for years. Why should I believe your claims about 'the cloud' and 'diminishing returns' rather than an amply documented crystal-clear cause?

These are not claims you need to believe, it's overwhelmingly evident that there have been changes in the consumer landscape towards less demand for storage space above what they already have. People are not filling up their drives as they used to.

The proof is the % share of SSD drives selling in retail. Regardless of the massive difference in cost/GiB. Mor people prefer a faster 250GB drive over a slower 4TB. Because 250GB is still plenty for the average consumer and speedy computing wins the bargain.

It's evident - but it's a trend which has always been happening, returns are always diminishing. Why are we attributing to this gradual effect the the sudden huge abrupt break in an exponential lasting years which we have observed, rather than say, an abrupt unprecedented flooding crisis affecting experience curves?

I don't think the effect of the floods is lasting so much. It just so happened that the disruption of SSD started to be noticeable around the same time of the aftermath of the floods.

And by floods, I mean the speculative movements they caused rather than the real effect on supply.

It doesn't help that the price per GB for SSD's didn't really go down in the same period.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com