My outlook for 2019 is based less on new technology arriving for flash storage but rather changes around the form factor. Consumer space is still dominated by SATA with M.2 also being mainstream and offered on premium devices. It would be nice to see more U.2 drives, especially for higher capacity units. Unfortunately, U.2 still appears to be aimed at the server market despite appearing on various consumer level boards. With NAND likely to filter with the 10 cent per GB mark throughout 2019, a large 8 TB or 16 TB drive on the consumer side would be feasible (the first 4 TB consumer drives were nearly $2,000).
Speaking of the server side of things, 2019 will be interesting on the SSD front. Mentioned in the article is coming Samsung NF1 vs. Ruler format war. I strongly suspect Intel will win in the long run but if Samsung doesn't make any drives for it, there will be a vacuum to fill for Ruler providers. Intel obviously has their own Optane solution for the Ruler format and Micron to cover more traditional NAND offerings. There is room for a third party to rise up in this market.
I'm also hopeful we will see some PCIe bridge chips that include hardware NVMe RAID5/6 support. This would permit six PCIe 4x NVMe drives to share a single PCIe 16x uplink to the host without sacrificing bandwidth as the NVMe RAID controller handles the parity calculations for the redundant drives. For the above mentioned server form factors, this will be critical to maximizing the number of drivers per 1U chassis (currently targeting 36). HighPoint and MicroSemi have such chips on their roadmaps but they are not shipping them yet to my knowledge.
NVMe controllers will start to move over to PCIe 4.0 this year adoption spreads of this higher speed spec. One the server side we may even see some OpenCAPI compliant drives for even more bandwidth, even lower latency connectivity and reduced CPU overhead. This maybe more of a 2020 thing as this takes time to develop and so far only IBM is behind OpenCAPI (though AMD is rumored to support this in their next Epyc chips).
Too bad. Realistically, M.2 is good enough for consumers, even the relatively small number of them that use desktops instead of laptops. We currently have 2TB on M.2 2280 cards, which is more than most consumers need or can afford. Almost all desktop motherboards have an M.2 slot that's well away from the GPU, so the drives only have to contend with their own heat production, which isn't enough to trigger throttling during real-world use.
U.2's advantages are irrelevant to the vast majority of consumers, and it comes with the downsides of extra cost and complexity for cables and connectors. Demand for consumer U.2 is way too small to be worth any SSD vendor going to the trouble of developing such a product. The enthusiast niche is more easily served by the PCIe add-in card form factor.
You're asking for a consumer SSD that would be more expensive than the average sale price of an entire consumer PC. The market really isn't broad enough to make that happen.
I can totally agree with half of this. SATA is absolutely abysmal for SSDs. And I'm amazed they keep releasing SATA SSDs. SATA needs to become a relic of the past just like the spinning rust for which it was designed. Has no business being anywhere near solid-state memory.
I still have an X58 motherboard. Only SATA 2 support, and no plan to upgrade the mother until a new processor absolutely kills my I7 920 in single thread, or something like a 20 cores processor gets cheap enough to justify an entire new sistem.
Not happening in the near future, so I will keep upgrading to SATA SSDs.
Many PC manufacturers decided not to upgrade the BIOS to support M.2 and NvME SSDs. They say that it takes too much time but hacklers can do it in 20 minutes.
Curious what the average home pc user gains. NVME drives aren't that much faster for home use than the old SS drive's. That, and the added heat have kept one out of my ITX for now.
No thanks? Does every system you use only have a single boot drive or a pair of them at most? Not everyone pushes off their storage to a NAS/DAS, I intend to keep using SATA for mass storage on SSD and HDD for the foreseeable future on my desktop... I've actually moved on mostly to SSD (2x 1TB + a 2TB) and I'm only using HDD for backups.
And fancy users aren't limited to one m.2 device. The high-end NUC has two m.2 slots, and if you're building a full-size desktop there are riser cards. I mean, I dealt with spinning rust for years (in DBs, where seek time kills you), so even the most basic SSD is kinda magic, but there are plenty of neat options out there.
I guess 'it's good enough' works if you're someones grandmother who just wants to check their email every once in a while. Beyond that, I don't know who these people are though. I basically just have a few games and a bit of software and it's totally consumed my 256GB SSD. Where if given a chance I'd have at least 1TB of just games. And I know others who have multiple TBs of games. If you have any media at all, do ANYTHING at all with audio/video, movies, recorded shows (and I don't know anyone who doesn't) M.2 is a joke. If you are any kind of avid gamer, M.2 is a joke. And with all of its limitations it's STILL too expensive. It absolutely boggles my mind that anybody has any interest in this form factor outside of those who NEED it for some sort of embedded application or ultra small form factor setup. Rubs my rhubarb every time I encounter someone online who tells me I'm only supposed to care about M.2 as if I don't actually know any better. Had a conversation with a friend recently who was wanting M.2. Told them about its shortcomings and guess what they did? They did an about-face. There IS something M.2 is good for though... For the manufacturers it's an easy sell to the 14 year olds who are all WOWIE ZOWIE A HARD DRIVE ON A STICK because they just don't know any better.
I'm aware that M.2 is roughly in line with the price of SATA SSDs but my point is that ALL SSDs are still too expensive. If M.2 drives were vastly cheaper than other form factor SSDs then at least they would make SOME sense. As is the prices are just one more downside.
Well, prices got sort of frozen over the last 2-3 years and only started dropping over the latter half of 2018... We're seeing encouraging signs now tho. $100/TB is not too shabby...
U.2 is only niche because motherboard manufacturers decided not to support it. Without going into the reasons of varying validity as to why they made that decision, I can safely say that it wasn't a technical or cost decision. U.2 Connectors were comparable to M.2 connectors in cost when they were first being added to boards. Additionally, it is much easier to design in an edge connector than to allocate the required space for M.2 mounts.
Nonetheless, the current market heavily favors M.2 making U.2 a niche product. That said, it may not be as niche as you imply or perhaps I'm just an extremely odd example. I have four boards in my possession from four different generations that have a U.2 connector. Two are not currently in play, but they will be brought back up soon and likely sold off. U.2 was not a even a consideration for the first two boards as I wasn't yet in the market for an nvme drive. For the last two, U.2 was dismissed as a differentiator due to lack of support from SSD manufacturers.
Exactly! It's niche because manufacturers decided to MAKE it niche. As if it would have been difficult to get consumers to replace their spinning rust with SSDs that look the same, use similar connections, fit in all the standardized cases... Would have been the easiest thing in the world for consumers to segue into using U.2 coming from traditional HDDs. My guess is the predetermined outcome we've been handed was designed to allow manufacturers to strengthen market segmentation and protect their enterprise revenue. Would be more challenging I think to charge dollars per GB for the tech if everyone understood that it was just as cheap to make as SATA and everybody and their grandmother had access to it. And/or they wanted to protect prior investments in SATA commercialization. Both are insults to my intelligence.
Yeah as I said...niche. Not gonna happen. Plenty other abandoned connectivity methods out there to keep it company....looks at his SATA Express port...
Outside of NUC-like compact systems, desktops are a shrinking niche in the overall PC market. No one is going to move an expensive interface over from the enterprise segment to reap a small number of potential sales. Hardware companies will just graft laptop storage interfaces onto second-string motherboards.
I've got 7 M.2 drives (5 nvme) in play (not including laptops) across 6 systems. In two of those systems, the M.2 drive is a plus. In one system it has pluses and minuses, so I call it neutral. In two of those systems, it is a minor inconvenience. In one of the systems, it is a major inconvenience. Three of those systems, if I had a U.2 connector, I would use it to add additional nvme storage despite already having an M.2 drive. I can see where M.2 is useful, but also where U.2 would be nicer if only it were supported.
Well you're an odd one. I buy memory for storage space and performance when accessing and maintaining what I store. It would never occur to me to buy into a new, exorbitantly overpriced form factor with all the limitations of M.2 just so that I could avoid having to plug a cable into it. When I build a system I typically connect the cables once and I'm done until the system is replaced. I guess there are other people who... are doing something different. But like I said, if all you ever need your computer for is checking your email or Facebook or whatever just ditch the whole 'computer' thing and get a beefy smartphone or laptop. M.2 might actually be really useful for a small laptop. But either way, I for one have no interest in paying more money for less.
Sorry, that can't happen. The modern market requires all interfaces to be different between business computers and personal computers. If they let the peasants use U2, it starts the entire business model tumbling down. Next thing you know, business users are buying home computer parts for a tenth the price of the modern inflated business pricing and hardware manufacturers can't get away with price-gouging anymore because there isn't even the slightest hint of an illusion that business hardware is worth the extra cash.
That "QLC = More Density Per NAND Cell" is extremely misleading; is that from a press release?
The diagram doubles the number of cylinders each column to the right, i.e. SLC => MLC => TLC => QLC each involve a doubling. And in terms of possible states for each NAND cell that's true, but the way it's presented kind of suggests each cylinder is a "thing", which is particularly misleading because although you can store twice as many "things" in MLC flash as in SLC flash, that's obviously not true for QLC vs. TLC - you only yet 1.33x as many "things" (and slightly less than 4/3 really due to increased need for spare area and ECC).
So the diagram makes it look like that doubling is a good thing; when in fact it's twice as hard to tell the voltage levels apart, but only on the order of 30% more storage.
That diagram is a slide from Micron. I don't think it's misleading if you bother to read any of the labels, which make it clear that the slices of the cylinders are representing the voltage states and not the number of bits directly. The diminishing returns are spelled out in the labels below the cylinders.
Wait, QLC provides 1 more bit of information, which, by definition, doubles the amount of information you can store, so I'm not sure where you got the 1.33x number from.
It really is double the amount of information you can store per cell, as that's how binary numbers work. 2 bits can store twice as much info as 1 bit. 3 bits can store twice as much info as 2 bits. 1000 bits can store twice as much info as 999 bits.
Though your point about increased need for spare area is correct.
Hmm. I think what might be confusing then, is that for 1.33x as many voltage states that can be read from TLC to QLC, you get double the amount of capacity per cylinder, as that 1.33x increase in voltage states implies 1 extra bit.
Never mind, I was under the impression that 5.0 was supposed to finish in 2019 but naturally that doesn't mean that it'll be seen on consumer products the same year.
Can’t wait for the day I can finally replace all my HDDs with SSDs. Just bought 2x 12TB for my NAS and they are loud as hell, hating it. But allas, that day is still a while away it seems, even if 2018 really did help finally grow SSD sizes (2 TB are beginning to get affordable).
2TB MX500 were as low as $210 during Black Friday, I missed it but still grabbed a SanDisk Extreme for like $250 and the WD equivalent was $230 as recently as last week... I imagine there's been some further drops closer to $110 for 1TB drives.
Prior to the last 2-3 years and the demand/shenanigans therein, these kinda drops were the norm every 1-2 years thru the first gen SSD and the 430, 830, 840 series. I went from 80GB to 128GB to 500GB to 1TB within a couple years each and had paid $200-300 each without fail.
Then around 2015 my 1TB 850 got stuck at $300+ until early 2018... -_-
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RamarC - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link
Very good overview. ThanksKevin G - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link
My outlook for 2019 is based less on new technology arriving for flash storage but rather changes around the form factor. Consumer space is still dominated by SATA with M.2 also being mainstream and offered on premium devices. It would be nice to see more U.2 drives, especially for higher capacity units. Unfortunately, U.2 still appears to be aimed at the server market despite appearing on various consumer level boards. With NAND likely to filter with the 10 cent per GB mark throughout 2019, a large 8 TB or 16 TB drive on the consumer side would be feasible (the first 4 TB consumer drives were nearly $2,000).Speaking of the server side of things, 2019 will be interesting on the SSD front. Mentioned in the article is coming Samsung NF1 vs. Ruler format war. I strongly suspect Intel will win in the long run but if Samsung doesn't make any drives for it, there will be a vacuum to fill for Ruler providers. Intel obviously has their own Optane solution for the Ruler format and Micron to cover more traditional NAND offerings. There is room for a third party to rise up in this market.
I'm also hopeful we will see some PCIe bridge chips that include hardware NVMe RAID5/6 support. This would permit six PCIe 4x NVMe drives to share a single PCIe 16x uplink to the host without sacrificing bandwidth as the NVMe RAID controller handles the parity calculations for the redundant drives. For the above mentioned server form factors, this will be critical to maximizing the number of drivers per 1U chassis (currently targeting 36). HighPoint and MicroSemi have such chips on their roadmaps but they are not shipping them yet to my knowledge.
NVMe controllers will start to move over to PCIe 4.0 this year adoption spreads of this higher speed spec. One the server side we may even see some OpenCAPI compliant drives for even more bandwidth, even lower latency connectivity and reduced CPU overhead. This maybe more of a 2020 thing as this takes time to develop and so far only IBM is behind OpenCAPI (though AMD is rumored to support this in their next Epyc chips).
Drazick - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link
It is time to see U.2 form drives in the customer market.M.2 isn't optimized for Desktop computers.
For Desktop computers I want U.2.
Billy Tallis - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link
Too bad. Realistically, M.2 is good enough for consumers, even the relatively small number of them that use desktops instead of laptops. We currently have 2TB on M.2 2280 cards, which is more than most consumers need or can afford. Almost all desktop motherboards have an M.2 slot that's well away from the GPU, so the drives only have to contend with their own heat production, which isn't enough to trigger throttling during real-world use.U.2's advantages are irrelevant to the vast majority of consumers, and it comes with the downsides of extra cost and complexity for cables and connectors. Demand for consumer U.2 is way too small to be worth any SSD vendor going to the trouble of developing such a product. The enthusiast niche is more easily served by the PCIe add-in card form factor.
DigitalFreak - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link
If only there were an NVMe 4TB drive, even if it were a 22110 form factor. I'm done with SATA & 2.5"DigitalFreak - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link
I should say non-enterprise driveBilly Tallis - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link
You're asking for a consumer SSD that would be more expensive than the average sale price of an entire consumer PC. The market really isn't broad enough to make that happen.DigitalFreak - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link
I don't have a problem with the price of the 860 EVO 4TB (~$650). I just don't want SATA or 2.5" anymore.Qasar - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link
a 2 TB 860 evo is $650 cdn.. the 4TB version is $1299 CDN... the 970 evo 2TB $879 CDN i dont want to know what the 4TB version would be....Magichands8 - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link
I can totally agree with half of this. SATA is absolutely abysmal for SSDs. And I'm amazed they keep releasing SATA SSDs. SATA needs to become a relic of the past just like the spinning rust for which it was designed. Has no business being anywhere near solid-state memory.pavag - Thursday, January 3, 2019 - link
I still have an X58 motherboard. Only SATA 2 support, and no plan to upgrade the mother until a new processor absolutely kills my I7 920 in single thread, or something like a 20 cores processor gets cheap enough to justify an entire new sistem.Not happening in the near future, so I will keep upgrading to SATA SSDs.
Harry_Wild - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
Many PC manufacturers decided not to upgrade the BIOS to support M.2 and NvME SSDs. They say that it takes too much time but hacklers can do it in 20 minutes.Showtime - Monday, January 7, 2019 - link
Curious what the average home pc user gains. NVME drives aren't that much faster for home use than the old SS drive's. That, and the added heat have kept one out of my ITX for now.Impulses - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
No thanks? Does every system you use only have a single boot drive or a pair of them at most? Not everyone pushes off their storage to a NAS/DAS, I intend to keep using SATA for mass storage on SSD and HDD for the foreseeable future on my desktop... I've actually moved on mostly to SSD (2x 1TB + a 2TB) and I'm only using HDD for backups.twotwotwo - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link
And fancy users aren't limited to one m.2 device. The high-end NUC has two m.2 slots, and if you're building a full-size desktop there are riser cards. I mean, I dealt with spinning rust for years (in DBs, where seek time kills you), so even the most basic SSD is kinda magic, but there are plenty of neat options out there.Magichands8 - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link
I guess 'it's good enough' works if you're someones grandmother who just wants to check their email every once in a while. Beyond that, I don't know who these people are though. I basically just have a few games and a bit of software and it's totally consumed my 256GB SSD. Where if given a chance I'd have at least 1TB of just games. And I know others who have multiple TBs of games. If you have any media at all, do ANYTHING at all with audio/video, movies, recorded shows (and I don't know anyone who doesn't) M.2 is a joke. If you are any kind of avid gamer, M.2 is a joke. And with all of its limitations it's STILL too expensive. It absolutely boggles my mind that anybody has any interest in this form factor outside of those who NEED it for some sort of embedded application or ultra small form factor setup. Rubs my rhubarb every time I encounter someone online who tells me I'm only supposed to care about M.2 as if I don't actually know any better. Had a conversation with a friend recently who was wanting M.2. Told them about its shortcomings and guess what they did? They did an about-face. There IS something M.2 is good for though... For the manufacturers it's an easy sell to the 14 year olds who are all WOWIE ZOWIE A HARD DRIVE ON A STICK because they just don't know any better.limitedaccess - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link
M.2 itself isn't really a premium. There are M.2 SATA drives now which are roughly in line with their 2.5 inch SATA counterparts.NVMe drives are the one that still carry a large premium that isn't justifiable for the vast majority of users given the limited real world benefits.
Magichands8 - Thursday, January 3, 2019 - link
I'm aware that M.2 is roughly in line with the price of SATA SSDs but my point is that ALL SSDs are still too expensive. If M.2 drives were vastly cheaper than other form factor SSDs then at least they would make SOME sense. As is the prices are just one more downside.Impulses - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
Well, prices got sort of frozen over the last 2-3 years and only started dropping over the latter half of 2018... We're seeing encouraging signs now tho. $100/TB is not too shabby...Qasar - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link
how is M.2 a joke ?? you keep saying this.. but you dont explain why it is.......jabber - Thursday, January 3, 2019 - link
Yeah U.2 is way too niche. How many domestic motherboards did AT review in 2018 that had one?Not many I guess. Probably be even fewer in 2019...
BurntMyBacon - Thursday, January 3, 2019 - link
U.2 is only niche because motherboard manufacturers decided not to support it. Without going into the reasons of varying validity as to why they made that decision, I can safely say that it wasn't a technical or cost decision. U.2 Connectors were comparable to M.2 connectors in cost when they were first being added to boards. Additionally, it is much easier to design in an edge connector than to allocate the required space for M.2 mounts.Nonetheless, the current market heavily favors M.2 making U.2 a niche product. That said, it may not be as niche as you imply or perhaps I'm just an extremely odd example. I have four boards in my possession from four different generations that have a U.2 connector. Two are not currently in play, but they will be brought back up soon and likely sold off. U.2 was not a even a consideration for the first two boards as I wasn't yet in the market for an nvme drive. For the last two, U.2 was dismissed as a differentiator due to lack of support from SSD manufacturers.
Magichands8 - Thursday, January 3, 2019 - link
Exactly! It's niche because manufacturers decided to MAKE it niche. As if it would have been difficult to get consumers to replace their spinning rust with SSDs that look the same, use similar connections, fit in all the standardized cases... Would have been the easiest thing in the world for consumers to segue into using U.2 coming from traditional HDDs. My guess is the predetermined outcome we've been handed was designed to allow manufacturers to strengthen market segmentation and protect their enterprise revenue. Would be more challenging I think to charge dollars per GB for the tech if everyone understood that it was just as cheap to make as SATA and everybody and their grandmother had access to it. And/or they wanted to protect prior investments in SATA commercialization. Both are insults to my intelligence.jabber - Friday, January 4, 2019 - link
Yeah as I said...niche. Not gonna happen. Plenty other abandoned connectivity methods out there to keep it company....looks at his SATA Express port...Impulses - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
The desktop upgrade market is too niche, it's not a mass conspiracy... U.2 wasn't any more ideal for servers than M.2.PeachNCream - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link
Outside of NUC-like compact systems, desktops are a shrinking niche in the overall PC market. No one is going to move an expensive interface over from the enterprise segment to reap a small number of potential sales. Hardware companies will just graft laptop storage interfaces onto second-string motherboards.III-V - Thursday, January 3, 2019 - link
I bought my first M.2 drive recently for my desktop... And I couldn't disagree more. It's so lovely not having to deal with cabling and brackets.BurntMyBacon - Thursday, January 3, 2019 - link
I've got 7 M.2 drives (5 nvme) in play (not including laptops) across 6 systems. In two of those systems, the M.2 drive is a plus. In one system it has pluses and minuses, so I call it neutral. In two of those systems, it is a minor inconvenience. In one of the systems, it is a major inconvenience. Three of those systems, if I had a U.2 connector, I would use it to add additional nvme storage despite already having an M.2 drive. I can see where M.2 is useful, but also where U.2 would be nicer if only it were supported.Magichands8 - Thursday, January 3, 2019 - link
Well you're an odd one. I buy memory for storage space and performance when accessing and maintaining what I store. It would never occur to me to buy into a new, exorbitantly overpriced form factor with all the limitations of M.2 just so that I could avoid having to plug a cable into it. When I build a system I typically connect the cables once and I'm done until the system is replaced. I guess there are other people who... are doing something different. But like I said, if all you ever need your computer for is checking your email or Facebook or whatever just ditch the whole 'computer' thing and get a beefy smartphone or laptop. M.2 might actually be really useful for a small laptop. But either way, I for one have no interest in paying more money for less.Lord of the Bored - Thursday, January 3, 2019 - link
Sorry, that can't happen. The modern market requires all interfaces to be different between business computers and personal computers.If they let the peasants use U2, it starts the entire business model tumbling down. Next thing you know, business users are buying home computer parts for a tenth the price of the modern inflated business pricing and hardware manufacturers can't get away with price-gouging anymore because there isn't even the slightest hint of an illusion that business hardware is worth the extra cash.
Magichands8 - Thursday, January 3, 2019 - link
Pretty much this!emn13 - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link
That "QLC = More Density Per NAND Cell" is extremely misleading; is that from a press release?The diagram doubles the number of cylinders each column to the right, i.e. SLC => MLC => TLC => QLC each involve a doubling. And in terms of possible states for each NAND cell that's true, but the way it's presented kind of suggests each cylinder is a "thing", which is particularly misleading because although you can store twice as many "things" in MLC flash as in SLC flash, that's obviously not true for QLC vs. TLC - you only yet 1.33x as many "things" (and slightly less than 4/3 really due to increased need for spare area and ECC).
So the diagram makes it look like that doubling is a good thing; when in fact it's twice as hard to tell the voltage levels apart, but only on the order of 30% more storage.
Billy Tallis - Wednesday, January 2, 2019 - link
That diagram is a slide from Micron. I don't think it's misleading if you bother to read any of the labels, which make it clear that the slices of the cylinders are representing the voltage states and not the number of bits directly. The diminishing returns are spelled out in the labels below the cylinders.erple2 - Thursday, January 17, 2019 - link
Wait, QLC provides 1 more bit of information, which, by definition, doubles the amount of information you can store, so I'm not sure where you got the 1.33x number from.It really is double the amount of information you can store per cell, as that's how binary numbers work. 2 bits can store twice as much info as 1 bit. 3 bits can store twice as much info as 2 bits. 1000 bits can store twice as much info as 999 bits.
Though your point about increased need for spare area is correct.
erple2 - Thursday, January 17, 2019 - link
Hmm. I think what might be confusing then, is that for 1.33x as many voltage states that can be read from TLC to QLC, you get double the amount of capacity per cylinder, as that 1.33x increase in voltage states implies 1 extra bit.Martin84a - Thursday, January 3, 2019 - link
"PCIe 4.0 is still far off for the consumer market"Did you mean PCIe 5.0?
Martin84a - Thursday, January 3, 2019 - link
Never mind, I was under the impression that 5.0 was supposed to finish in 2019 but naturally that doesn't mean that it'll be seen on consumer products the same year.beisat - Thursday, January 3, 2019 - link
Can’t wait for the day I can finally replace all my HDDs with SSDs. Just bought 2x 12TB for my NAS and they are loud as hell, hating it. But allas, that day is still a while away it seems, even if 2018 really did help finally grow SSD sizes (2 TB are beginning to get affordable).letmepicyou - Saturday, January 5, 2019 - link
7 months ago I purchased a 500 GB Samsung EVO 860 for $130. 1 month ago I purchased a 1 TB Samsung EVO 860 for $130.IT'S LIKE FLIPPIN CANDY LAND!
The age of the mechanical hard drive is over!
LONG LIVE SOLID STATE DRIVES!
Impulses - Tuesday, January 15, 2019 - link
2TB MX500 were as low as $210 during Black Friday, I missed it but still grabbed a SanDisk Extreme for like $250 and the WD equivalent was $230 as recently as last week... I imagine there's been some further drops closer to $110 for 1TB drives.Prior to the last 2-3 years and the demand/shenanigans therein, these kinda drops were the norm every 1-2 years thru the first gen SSD and the 430, 830, 840 series. I went from 80GB to 128GB to 500GB to 1TB within a couple years each and had paid $200-300 each without fail.
Then around 2015 my 1TB 850 got stuck at $300+ until early 2018... -_-