Here's a shocking thought: If you produce new products that have more capacity, lower power draw, higher speeds, or some mix of all three for the same or a lower price, people will continue to buy and upgrade.
If you keep jacking up prices to try and offset sliding sales, and stop innovating, then is it really a surprise that people will stop buying? If you think your products are good enough, so do the people who have already bought them. They have no impetus to purchase new products other than failure rates.
> If you produce new products that have more capacity, lower power draw, higher speeds, > or some mix of all three for the same or a lower price, people will continue to buy and upgrade.
Needs only increase at a certain rate. At some point, most people & businesses will have more than enough storage & bandwidth, at which point further purchasing will be fairly unresponsive to such incentives.
meacupla is exactly right. Since the 90's, this industry has been embarrassingly cyclical. It has claimed numerous companies on the process. Japan has been consistently hit most while Korea and Taiwan have consistently benefited, but there is no immunity. Those with the ability to subsidize the loss over the downturn, or those with vertical integration where they can run lean, are the survivors. I'm not really sure where Solidigm fits into this because while Hynix has fully integrated their production portfolio, there was a lot of fat absorbed from Intel.
Sometimes the company with the best product has the most trouble and this is certainly the case. Their engineering talent is impressive, I just hope they keep it.
if your storage needs are modest (not thousands of videos, for example), and your space is in the form of MLC (mine are), it's likely that you'll never need new devices. you'll die first.
as to pricing: there's a problem with any tech-driven product, which is feeding fixed cost. I suspect that the NAND/SSD manufacturers have it down to +/- $.000x per unit. labour is an ever smaller fraction of product cost, which means that if you cut output, you must, of necessity, increase price to clear that fixed cost. or, to put it another way: for centuries bidnezz has used capital not for its intrinsic value, but as labour substitution. production gets to the point where there's little to no labour to substitute out. what does bidnezz do then? the smart ones, minuscule few, realize that moving more widgets is the answer, but said solution is not fully under their control. in order to move more output, the public must needs have sufficient funds, and needs, to buy evermore. quoth the Raven.
> it's likely that you'll never need new devices. you'll die first.
Don't expect sympathy when they die. And don't bother using a data recovery firm, as I've heard SSDs tend to be entirely unrecoverable, whereas you can usually salvage something from HDDs.
Oh, and don't keep them nearly full. The drive's wear-leveling filesystem needs a fair amount of free space to do its thing. So, buy larger than you think you'll need.
That would either need a massive increase in potential market share, or a massive decrease in manufacturing costs per TB. Neither of those are possible anymore. Flash had it's decade of massive growth as it displaced HDDs from primary storage; the only way it could do that again would be if it got an order of magnitude cheaper and was able to displace HDDs from NAS/SAN usage.
Unfortunately, like every other semiconductor product NAND is running into the limits of physics and only small generational improvements are possible at ever increasing R&D costs.
The Solidigm P5520 series seems to be a good value for pro users and gamers. It's a PCIe 4.0 TLC drive, but Solidigm claims its tail latencies are some of the lowest in the industry, which should result in a stutter-free gaming experience (which StorageReview.com's testing seems to confirm).
You just need a free 2.5" drive bay and a cable + adapter, or you can use a PCIe caddy (though cooling would probably be better in the 2.5" bay).
Also, I got a SK hynix Gold P31 @ 2 TB for < $100, earlier this year. It's one of the more power-efficient drives out there, for those of us with laptops that only have PCIe 3.0.
This is one case where it really paid NOT to try to ride the wave of advancing technology. Seagate just ignored SSDs and sticks with conventional hard drive manufacturing and it continues to print money year after year. Whereas WDC chose to embrace the future and has experienced nothing but trouble and financial struggle ever since.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
18 Comments
Back to Article
James5mith - Thursday, October 26, 2023 - link
Here's a shocking thought: If you produce new products that have more capacity, lower power draw, higher speeds, or some mix of all three for the same or a lower price, people will continue to buy and upgrade.If you keep jacking up prices to try and offset sliding sales, and stop innovating, then is it really a surprise that people will stop buying? If you think your products are good enough, so do the people who have already bought them. They have no impetus to purchase new products other than failure rates.
lemurbutton - Thursday, October 26, 2023 - link
Macro forces are often much stronger than micro forces. If the overall market is done, then there's not much they can do to stop bleeding sales.mode_13h - Thursday, October 26, 2023 - link
> If you produce new products that have more capacity, lower power draw, higher speeds,> or some mix of all three for the same or a lower price, people will continue to buy and upgrade.
Needs only increase at a certain rate. At some point, most people & businesses will have more than enough storage & bandwidth, at which point further purchasing will be fairly unresponsive to such incentives.
TheinsanegamerN - Monday, October 30, 2023 - link
640k will be enough for anyone!meacupla - Thursday, October 26, 2023 - link
This is just a normal boom-bust cycle that DRAM and NAND go through every 3 to 4 years.Samus - Friday, October 27, 2023 - link
meacupla is exactly right. Since the 90's, this industry has been embarrassingly cyclical. It has claimed numerous companies on the process. Japan has been consistently hit most while Korea and Taiwan have consistently benefited, but there is no immunity. Those with the ability to subsidize the loss over the downturn, or those with vertical integration where they can run lean, are the survivors. I'm not really sure where Solidigm fits into this because while Hynix has fully integrated their production portfolio, there was a lot of fat absorbed from Intel.Sometimes the company with the best product has the most trouble and this is certainly the case. Their engineering talent is impressive, I just hope they keep it.
cane - Thursday, October 26, 2023 - link
They have released new products. They are not for average Joe, though...https://www.solidigm.com/products/data-center/d5/p...
mode_13h - Thursday, October 26, 2023 - link
That's QLC, FYI. Furthermore, because it's a new product, I wouldn't expect as much discounting as you can find on some of their existing models.FunBunny2 - Thursday, October 26, 2023 - link
people will continue to buy and upgradeif your storage needs are modest (not thousands of videos, for example), and your space is in the form of MLC (mine are), it's likely that you'll never need new devices. you'll die first.
as to pricing: there's a problem with any tech-driven product, which is feeding fixed cost. I suspect that the NAND/SSD manufacturers have it down to +/- $.000x per unit. labour is an ever smaller fraction of product cost, which means that if you cut output, you must, of necessity, increase price to clear that fixed cost. or, to put it another way: for centuries bidnezz has used capital not for its intrinsic value, but as labour substitution. production gets to the point where there's little to no labour to substitute out. what does bidnezz do then? the smart ones, minuscule few, realize that moving more widgets is the answer, but said solution is not fully under their control. in order to move more output, the public must needs have sufficient funds, and needs, to buy evermore. quoth the Raven.
mode_13h - Friday, October 27, 2023 - link
> it's likely that you'll never need new devices. you'll die first.Don't expect sympathy when they die. And don't bother using a data recovery firm, as I've heard SSDs tend to be entirely unrecoverable, whereas you can usually salvage something from HDDs.
Also, don't leave them powered off, too long.
mode_13h - Friday, October 27, 2023 - link
Oh, and don't keep them nearly full. The drive's wear-leveling filesystem needs a fair amount of free space to do its thing. So, buy larger than you think you'll need.DanNeely - Monday, October 30, 2023 - link
That would either need a massive increase in potential market share, or a massive decrease in manufacturing costs per TB. Neither of those are possible anymore. Flash had it's decade of massive growth as it displaced HDDs from primary storage; the only way it could do that again would be if it got an order of magnitude cheaper and was able to displace HDDs from NAS/SAN usage.Unfortunately, like every other semiconductor product NAND is running into the limits of physics and only small generational improvements are possible at ever increasing R&D costs.
mode_13h - Thursday, October 26, 2023 - link
The Solidigm P5520 series seems to be a good value for pro users and gamers. It's a PCIe 4.0 TLC drive, but Solidigm claims its tail latencies are some of the lowest in the industry, which should result in a stutter-free gaming experience (which StorageReview.com's testing seems to confirm).You just need a free 2.5" drive bay and a cable + adapter, or you can use a PCIe caddy (though cooling would probably be better in the 2.5" bay).
The best prices I've found are at provantage.com.
mode_13h - Thursday, October 26, 2023 - link
Also, I got a SK hynix Gold P31 @ 2 TB for < $100, earlier this year. It's one of the more power-efficient drives out there, for those of us with laptops that only have PCIe 3.0.https://www.anandtech.com/show/16012/the-sk-hynix-...
"The Best NVMe SSD for Laptops and Notebooks: SK hynix Gold P31 1TB SSD Reviewed"
Here's the 2 TB review: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16890/sk-hynix-rele...
ABR - Friday, October 27, 2023 - link
This is one case where it really paid NOT to try to ride the wave of advancing technology. Seagate just ignored SSDs and sticks with conventional hard drive manufacturing and it continues to print money year after year. Whereas WDC chose to embrace the future and has experienced nothing but trouble and financial struggle ever since.Golgatha777 - Friday, October 27, 2023 - link
What? Seagate has a whole line of SSD products. Not to mention they were the primary partner with Microsoft to supply SSDs for the XBox Series X/S.ABR - Sunday, October 29, 2023 - link
Ok they have SSDs but stayed out of NAND, besides their Kioxia investment.erotomania - Friday, October 27, 2023 - link
BarraCuda SSD - https://www.seagate.com/products/hard-drives/barra...FireCuda SSD - https://www.seagate.com/products/gaming-drives/pc-...
600 (Pro) SSD - https://www.seagate.com/support/internal-hard-driv...