
The cost of a 1TB SSD drive just dropped below $98 - PatrolX
https://arador.com/the-cost-of-a-1tb-ssd-drive-just-dropped-below-98/
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bluedino
This is some kind of advertisement. This is a low-performing DRAM-less drive.

"Good" drives like the Crucial MX500 were regularly found for $100 during the
second half of last year Prices jumped and are slowly coming back down.

[https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B077SF8KMG](https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B077SF8KMG)

~~~
wtallis
At the end of 2019, everyone was expecting the NAND flash memory market to be
on its way toward a shortage in 2H2020, and the major oversupply that pushed
prices so low was over. When the coronavirus hit, it was initially unclear
whether it would do more to depress supply or demand, so price trends weren't
very consistent (especially with lots of stuff going temporarily out of
stock). Now the picture seems to be that NAND production hasn't been slowed
much but demand is way down, especially for client/consumer drives (as opposed
to server SSDs).

~~~
bluedino
I would have thought demand would have went out since laptops all sold out at
the start of the stay at home orders

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neixidbeksoxyd
This seems like a straight up ad with affiliate links. The price of SSDs has
been going down for months, and if anything they went up since the pandemic
began. You can check the price history of popular ones on camelcamelcamel to
confirm.

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loeg
Cheap QLC (not the DRAM-less crap) was sub-$100 per TB last year (closer to
$90/TB). This is not the first time flash has crossed this particular
arbitrary price threshold.

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morsch
Meanwhile, high-end 1 TB drives -- e.g. Samsung 970 EVO, ADATA XPG
SX8100/SX8200 -- are if anything more expensive now than they were 6 months
ago, ~175 EUR. At least where I live.

~~~
bogdanu
And 970 plus around 219 eur on amazon.de. Still better than 5 years ago when
I've paid the same price for a 250G 850 pro.

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p1mrx
I'm thinking about putting an NVMe SSD in my Haswell-based desktop from 2013.
The BIOS can't boot from NVMe directly, but I should be able to install Clover
EFI on a flash drive, and mount it to an internal USB header.

However, the idea is mildly ridiculous because I only have PCIe 2.0 x1 slots
available (and one 3.0 x16 slot for the GPU), which is limited to 500 MB/sec,
compared to SATA-III at 600 MB/sec.

Most NVMe drives support PCIe 3.0 x4, which is 3940MB/s. It'd be nice if I
could bond two of the x1 slots into an x2, but that would require exotic
hardware and chipset support. A basic x1 -> M.2 adapter is $5 on AliExpress,
so I'm going to run at 500 MB/sec for the heck of it.

~~~
papermachete
You are not realistically going to be bottlenecked at 500MB/s unless you load
few large files.

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monkpit
Check out diskprices.com for a great resource that’s not just ads. I found out
about it via HN originally and use it often when making purchases or
suggesting purchases to others.

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ggm
I expect to see a rise in SSD form factor home NAS boards & enclosures. The
pain-point right now is the PSU. If its built in it usually incurs the fan.

~~~
PatrolX
Enclosure prices are ridiculous, someone needs to enter that market and
slaughter it.

~~~
bsamuels
I definitely felt the same way when I was shopping for my first NAS. A two-bay
Synology ran about $300 for new on Amazon and I just couldn't figure out why
it was so expensive.

A few months later I picked one up used on Ebay for $120, and after using it
for a few weeks, I can now report why these cost so much.

The amount of software that comes on this thing is absolutely mind blowing. I
was able to set up a bidirectional sync to my cloud drive, differential
backups, compressed folders for archival, and a backup to Glacier for off-site
backup without writing a single line of code.

With a bit of additional digging into their package center, I found out I
could install Docker & run GitLab on the NAS, along with a bunch of other
self-hostable software.

I realize I could have probably built my own NAS and used FreeNAS for a
fraction of the price of buying new, however the amount of time that would
have spent configuring/debugging/setting up FreeNAS makes the vendor-purchased
NAS a much better investment.

~~~
dingaling
But those features weren't in your original specification ( 'I need a NAS
enclosure' ) so why pay for them?

The manufacturers know that plain mechanical enclosures have very low margins
so they implement features that are perceived-needs ( 'oh that sounds cool!' )
and crank the margins by hundreds of per cent.

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bmmayer1
Amazing. I remember the original Zip drives (and Jaz drives after that) and
the price point was somewhere around $200 for 100MB. Would be nice to see this
sort of progress in quality and price in, say, healthcare.

------
Kequc
That's great, Apple can stop charging thousands of dollars for them.

~~~
ashtonkem
Apple charged multiples of the market price when they were installing user
upgrade able consumer grade 2.5” HDDs into their laptops, this won’t stop
them.

~~~
vegetablepotpie
Apple products are not just worth the sum of their components, they are an
“experience” unto themselves.

I type that both sarcastically and with complete sincerity. Apple is
vertically integrated, which puts their products in a different class than
Intel/Windows, ARM/Android. If you’re an Apple user you’re not worried
necessarily about the CPU or memory, your concern is whether you can run the
Mac OS or iOS and the ecosystem that goes with it. So Apple doesn’t have to
compete on price for its hardware, but rather on other intangibles.

~~~
ashtonkem
Agreed. I’m just pointing out that the price that Apple charged and the
underlying price of the components is poorly correlated. Apple will charge
what you’ll pay, not what it costs to produce.

~~~
Splognosticus
That's true of everybody who's passed econ-101, of course.

