Like how you can get 30 TB hard drives for like $600.
The price point is determined by the benefit provided over the expected lifetime of the device, so, if you have a ~150 PB data footprint you'll needn't about 1 full rack of these drives (for 12 bays per rack unit, which is a low density).
To do the same with current HDDs, you'll get, at best, 360TB per rack unit, meaning you'll need roughly 10 full racks, a 10x increase in datacenter space. So, in space alone, you'll be spending 10x more with the HDD solution. If power and speed were the same (they aren't), this would mean that paying $48,000 for a drive like this would still be a good deal.
So, I assume it'll be a long time before we see a 245TB flash drive selling for $600.
Some years back, I read this short PR style article[1] about how the LHC produces 10 petabyes of data per second. Which was (then) impossible to store in any meaningful way. So the folks at CERN came up with a clever triggering system that discarded 99.9+% of the data.
Now a wimpy 50 racks can provide minutes (well ~2.5 minutes) of buffer. A well planned 'university scale' data center could give them close to an hour. And a proper state-of-the-art hyper-scale data center would get dangerously close to a day. Wild.
I'm glad this flyer at least uses KiB; you'll see drive spec sheets with base-2 "KB" and "MB" but base-10 GB and TB.
But with another prefix transition I'm once again hoping us consumers can get GiB/TiB/PiB values up front.
metadat•6mo ago
Flash manufacturers not feeling an incentive to compete?
imtringued•6mo ago
metadat•6mo ago
For reference, here is a graph of storage prices over time. The observation is flash-based storage plateauing at a significantly higher baseline compared to magnetic.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1emh1f4/oc...
So it becomes a question of how long will the high baseline hang around with only a few scaled up manufacturers in existence?
The top 4 supply the vast majority of the market from a handful of factories: Samsung, SK Hynix, Kioxia, Micron
Building a new flash or memory factory is a hugely capital-intensive undertaking.
Anyhow, thanks for your reply! Interested in any insights or points I'm missing.