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Flash Memory Won't Get Cheaper Any Time Soon

Posted by Soulskill on from the and-you'll-forget-to-send-in-the-rebate-anyway dept.

jfruh writes "Some melancholy news from the Hot Chips symposium last week: NAND memory, which powers the solid-state drives that have revolutionized storage, has broken the $1 per gigabyte barrier and isn't getting any cheaper. 'They will always be ten times the cost of a hard drive,' says analyst Jim Handy. There are newer technologies in development, but they won't be able to beat NAND on price for years."

3 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Depends on your definition of "soon" by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 4, Informative

    What the article actually says in the last paragraph is that there's currently a capacity shortage, that's expected to be resolved by 2015. The article also says manufacturers think they can go down another process node, and then do another 3 after that using 3D stacking. Then he says new technologies "with the speed of DRAM and the storage capacity of NAND" might make their way out of the lab next year.

    Overall, the article's contents don't really seem to support the notion that it's game over for SSD capacity improvements.

  2. Re:10X my white and flabby ass by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Speaking of newegg you can get a samsung 1TB for $635. That's quite a ways below the $1 per GB price point.

  3. Re:10X my white and flabby ass by Solandri · · Score: 3, Informative

    The spot price for NAND right now is about $5 for 8 GB (64 Gb). So 4 TB of NAND costs $2560. Which is pretty close to 10x the cost of a $200 4 TB hard drive.

    When you buy a 4 TB SSD, you're not paying $29k for the NAND. You're paying for someone to go through the trouble of amassing 4 TB of flash, design an arrangement with controllers which can address that huge amount, and produce it in bulk. Very few people are demanding that much capacity in an SSD, so the cost of that engineering and tooling work gets amortized over fewer customers. About $2.5k for the NAND, about $26.5k for the engineering and tooling.

    With the lower capacity SSDs, those production costs are amortized over much larger volumes, and a much greater fraction of the drive cost is the NAND. A 128 GB Crucial M4 drive contains $80 worth of NAND (actually probably a bit more since there's some overprovisioning to substitute for cells which die early), and sells for $100.