> delivery times for enterprise-grade HDDs delayed by two years.
I sleep
> so hyperscalers are now switching to QLC NAND-based SSDs to avoid these backorders … This could lead to SSD prices rising worldwide
Real shit
replies(1):
I sleep
> so hyperscalers are now switching to QLC NAND-based SSDs to avoid these backorders … This could lead to SSD prices rising worldwide
Real shit
It sucks right now and will probably suck through 2027.
By 2028 or so we'll have a 50% drop in price-per-storage for these components.
Apple will almost certainly introduce the same approach for the budget MacBook as well.
Do you mean relative to six months ago, or now? Because a lot of the prices have already more than doubled.
(I’m upset because the computer I’ve been planning to build, which three months ago would have come to around ₹90,000, is now up to ₹1,20,000 and climbing week by week, half due to price increases on the same part, half due to forced substitutions on RAM since the cheaper 32GB 6400MT/s DDR5 sticks are completely unavailable. And looking into laptops, for the first time ever I’m seeing manufacturet SODIMM or SSD upgrades being cheaper than aftermarket.)
I think it's the higher density that makes it better for cold storage, which generally has infrequent access, and more reads than writes.
Hence the QLC's endurance being "sufficient for cold storage".
Per the op:
> and the ongoing DRAM shortage is proof of this, with memory kits costing more than double what they did just a few months ago.
> While enterprise-grade QLC SSDs would entirely power this pivot, Sandisk has already raised NAND prices by 50%, according to another DigiTimes report, after initially warning of a 10% increase two months ago.
So you're basically saying prices may return to normal in two years, and that's somehow a good thing compared to them not being inflated in the first place?
Temporarily thanks to old stock.
https://x.com/jukanlosreve/status/1988505115339436423
Samsung Electronics has lowered its target for NAND wafer output this year to around 4.72 million sheets, about 7% down from the previous year's 5.07 million. Kioxia also adjusted its output from 4.80 million last year to 4.69 million this year.. SK hynix and Micron are likewise keeping output conservatively constrained in a bid to benefit from higher prices. SK hynix's NAND output fell about 10%, from 2.01 million sheets last year to around 1.80 million this year. Micron's situation is similar: it is maintaining production at Fab 7 in Singapore—its largest NAND production base—in the low 300,000-sheet range, keeping a conservative supply posture.
DRAM price fixing scandal: 1998-2002, 2016-2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
Apple doesn't make their own NAND, just like they don't make their own screens. They did write their own NAND controller and stuck it into their CPUs, but the flash memory that actually stores data doesn't come directly from their factories.
I wonder if history isn’t repeating itself. AOL CDs had pretty much jumped the shark by 2000.
There is also encryption at rest.
No, this wasn't the case. While there were never comprehensive studies various tech media purchased these cards to run testing and found that, other than scammers, they all performed to expectation.
Indeed it has, but many of those it replaced did not necessarily get moved to better positions if they were moved at all. The industrial revolution was great if you were young and had little to no responsibilities. Your average middle aged farmer with a large family to feed faced poverty or near poverty and those who were able to move to the cities faced worse labour conditions. People on here love talking about the winners while conveniently ignoring the loser side.
And that's not even mentioning the skilling up issue to which older workers are more vulnerable. Who will fund the nation wide skill up costs for them?
Enterprise SSDs are not expensive only because they have better flash chips, but they have much more of them.
A top of the line write oriented SSD comes with 4-7x more capacity than what it says on the tin, but that extra capacity is used for cell replacement rather than capacity itself.
Mixed use comes with 2-4x overprovisioning, and read oriented is around 2x IIRC.
On the dram side, because that's what I saw recently, sk hynix is down to TWO WEEKS of inventory: https://wccftech.com/sk-hynix-ddr5-inventory-down-to-just-2-...
I'd be curious what evidence there is to support its purely an end-product manufacturing shortage?
Further - and most concerning - is the pollution of the supply chain with refurbished/recertified stock being sold and marketed as "new".
One example:
https://kozubik.com/items/MaestroTechnology/
I strongly advise buyers to stick with trusted suppliers, avoid Amazon/ebay channels, and carefully vet your incoming stock with SMART tools to ensure you receive what you think you are ... especially for SSD parts.
You have to actually examine the real bits on the drive. Resellers don't want to take the time to actually zero a drive, they usually just nuke the partition table.
You also need to physically examine the drive. Corroded fingerprints on the PCB, wear on the port contacts, scratches from mounting rails, etc.
That's how it found out that the last "new" drive I bought on Amazon was actually a used Backblaze drive. It contained terabytes of customer data, and a shit ton of cleartext files. SMART, of course, reported it was a brand new drive with zero hours. Cleartext logs on the drive showed many thousands of hours of runtime.
Physical examination is the only reliable method.
Downstream of that, AI is effectively also responsible for the current generation of game consoles never declining in price.
Because game consoles are fixed platforms that continue to be manufactured over 5+ years, normally the most expensive parts in the system (the CPU and GPU) would gradually get cheaper to manufacture [and in turn, cheaper to buy] over the course of the console's lifetime—which was often passed onto the consumer in the form of the console's MSRP gradually decreasing. Either the process node for the console's silicon design would stay fixed, and demand for this process node would gradually decrease as larger fab customers move on to newer nodes, decreasing the (effectively auction-based) pricing for fab time on the older node; or the console manufacturer['s silicon vendor] would put their silicon design through a process-shrink, and so, while still paying top dollar for use of the fab's newest node, would be getting more chips per wafer out of that, and again could charge less.
But instead, what we've seen since the start of the AI boom is that there's no longer any price-reduced timeslots to be sold to manufacture the low-BOM parts for these price-sensitive console-maker customers. Instead, both Nvidia and AMD are now getting such high value out of even the older nodes, that 1. the fabs know they can squeeze them, charging full price for those slots as well; and 2. both Nvidia and AMD, in their roles as silicon vendors to the console makers, haven't been able to justify using (very much of) the time they're paying so much for to fab low-BOM-cost parts to fulfill their pre-existing outstanding purchase orders, when they could instead be fulfilling much-higher-margin new POs from the hyperscalers.
Thus every console of the ninth generation (PS5, Xbox Series, Switch) still selling for their launch price (with no help from process shrinks); thus none of these consoles having been able to be produced in excess of demand to the point that supply-and-demand ever drove retail prices below MSRP; and thus the only tenth-gen console so far, the Switch 2, taking ~4 years longer than anticipated to release†.
---
† Nintendo were very likely waiting for Nvidia to run off enough of the Tegra T239 with a sufficiently low passed-on fab cost, for Nintendo to both 1. be able to build a backstock and non-run-dry pipeline of Switch 2s, and 2. be able to be positive-margin on charging the same price as the Switch 1 for them. They waited four years, and neither thing ever happened; so they eventually just gave up and priced the Switch 2 higher, and also built out an entirely novel D2C + online-marketplace-partner distribution pipeline so they could ration the tiny initial supply of units they had been able to build with the chips Nvidia had supplied them so far.
Though, that being said, Nintendo actually got a double whammy here. They were also waiting for fast NAND to come down in price, so that they could have physical game cards manufactured for a trivial BOM price while still enabling the "direct GPU disk-streamed assets" pipeline that games of the last generation had begun relying on. Obviously, as today's article points out, that hasn't been happening either! Thus game key cards; thus SD Express cards only beginning to trickle out, with no sizes above 128GiB available at the Switch 2's launch time; and thus those SD Express cards being ridiculously priced for their capacity compared to equivalent transfer-speed + die-size NAND (as seen in e.g. low-profile/flush-mount flash drives.)
This sounds like it could be a big problem for Backblaze customers, and consequently for Backblaze.
Can you alert the Backblaze CEO about their insufficiently-decommissioned drives leaking out like this?
Backblaze customers also need to know, but I would give Backblaze the first shot at figuring out how to notify, whom, of what.
Assuming this is true, I find it weird/surprising that Backblaze doesn't at least zero their drives before disposing of them? I have to do that at my work, and at least by policy I could lose my job if I skipped doing it.
Can still take hours per drive though, which is why a lot of people skip it.
A lot of abuse came to light during the launch and initial mining of the (ridiculous) Chiacoin[1] during which Chia miners would burn through SSDs to within a hair of their usable life, reset their SMART stats, and sell them as new on Amazon or ebay.
As can be seen in my above comment, larger distributors like "Maestro Technologies" have their stock polluted with parts like this and I find it very unlikely that they are not aware of the status of these parts they are selling as new.
Soon we'll see many "AI" product that analyses network storage to identify files that could be deleted because they're the nth copy of some random report that was never published.
What worries me about AI is how it's not obvious which new jobs it may create. Younger farm workers and children of farmers could just move and work in factories, where the employers mostly took care of their training. I can't see such opportunities here. I believe whole world needs either UBI, or governments paying for jobs that previously weren't seen worth paying for. Otherwise the economy will collapse due to mass unemployment and resulting lack of demand.
Maybe in 3-5 years there will be a fantastic time to upgrade again, after AI bubble has burst and slightly used stuff gets dumped from data centers to online marketplaces.
Sometimes, I think government supply control isn't that much of a bad thing. That way, the government could force the availability of goods for the common market as well and not just for the really big dogs flush with ample VC money to burn who can pay any price.
[1] For the uninitiated: a cryptocurrency where the limiting factor wasn't CPU, RAM or GPU compute resource, but storage - in 2021, there was so much craze around it that HDD and SSD prices exploded, and after the bubble collapsed a lot of heavily abused drives flooded the markets.
Every tech startup circa 2023 doesn't do anything without smearing AI all over their front page.
GPUs? No way. The datacenter cards don't even have video output ports, and I think the chips destined for AI / ML training also have everything video/render related removed from the silicon, makes for more yield.
And the other way around, using (cheap) consumer GPUs in servers, I think at least NVDA tries to prevent that with driver-based DRM, so there won't be any flooding coming from there either.