Baseline name brand SSDs got down to about $75 for 2TB, and I'm not going to be impressed by anything until I see similar numbers again.

As there are many consumer level producers (who all buy from a smaller set of actual producers), it may seem like the market is close to perfect competition (which would justify price=cost).

But actually there are many low quality producers that frequently burn those stupid enough to buy from them. And a few high quality producers who generally sell what they advertise. So if you are trying to buy a high quality SSD, you are buying from an oligopoly that have built their brands over the years. So they can charge significantly higher than cost due to this reason.

And I imagine that others can't drop their prices much lower than this price because then people get suspicious and don't buy it at all.

Professionals like us know of course that the SSD is an easily upgradable component. But we also tend to know how to set up a NAS with 4x 18TB HDDs in a zfs pool that can saturate the bandwidth of any reasonable home network when transferring large files. So the market for professionals and enthusiasts don't always translate into a market for large SSDs.

SSD price may have fluctuating for the last few years but their cost model are now similar to HDD. And so is DRAM.

Mainly cost to produce GB of DRAM / NAND / HDD are roughly the same for many years. You may get better performance or lower energy usage. But cost hast changed. And all fluctuations in market are supple and demand dynamics, which is why many saw 4TB for $150 in 2023 and thought things will drop soon. But that has not been the case.

We need breakthroughs to further reduce the cost per GB. Although one could argue we have half the cost already if we accounted for inflation for the past 20 years.

For SSD, there definitely appears to be a floor price.

The floor price for new hard drives is somewhere around $50-$80. When a drive at a certain capacity is only sellable for $50, most of the options disappear. Looking at newegg, you can get a 1TB drive for $60, 2TB for $65, and 4TB for $75 ... The price floor is around there. But if you want the best $/TB, you've got to get larger drives.

For SSDs, the floor is a lot lower. You can get a 128gb ssd for $22, 256Gb for $25, 512GB for $33, 1TB for $50, and then after that $/TB stays pretty consistent, there's not a lot of reduction in cost due to density like with hard drives.

A ton of affordable SSDs can do this, and after that (well, I'd pay for 2TB but not more), any upgrade is not noticeable for the end user.

Every now & then there's an article on shrinkflation, and it's incredibly noticeable to all of us that what we're buying in the supermarkets we're getting less for more. Do we do anything about it? Nah.

A lot of it is down to endless growth, investors hopping on the last few carriages of the train and demanding that more carriages be added after them, and everyone else already on-board obviously support that as well.

There are very few companies that are run as "at capacity" ie fully satisfying their market size, competing with competitors, organically staying the same size due to external factors.

Now it's all internal factors (which I include investors in) trying to balloon every company as large as they can.

On the other hand, an enterprise drive like Kioxia CM7 will offer either 1 or 3 drive writes per day (for regular and write-intensive drive models, respectively), across the 5 year warranty. That's ~1800 cycles or just shy of 5500 cycles.

In addition to your comment (related), when 3D-NAND cells are read, interference by the traces (charge-trap disturbs) requires the neighbour cells to be refreshed with writes, if the controller wants to conserve data integrity. This did not happen with 2D-NAND in the past.

Reading data from one cell in 3D-NAND involves writing cells; reading data in 3D-NAND consumes disk endurance.

(Not to mention, temperature/number of layers/endurance)

What makes NVMe endurance ratings even better (though not for warranty purposes) is when your workload has sequential writes you can expect much higher effective endurance as most DWPD metrics are calculated for random 4k write, which is just about the worst case for flash with multi-megabyte erase blocks. It's my understanding that it's also in large part why there is some push for Zoned (hm-smr like) NVMe, where you can declare much higher DWPD.

* [1] https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...