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Laptop SSD Capacity To Remain Flat As NAND Flash Dearth Causes Prices To Rise (computerworld.com)
Lucas123 writes from a report via Computerworld: Laptop manufacturers aren't likely to offer higher capacity standard SSDs in their machines this year as a shortage of NAND flash is pushing prices higher this year. At the same time, nearly half of all laptops shipped this year will have SSDs versus HDDs, according to a new report from DRAMeXchange. The contract prices for multi-level cell (MLC) SSDs supplied to the PC manufacturing industry for those laptops are projected to go up by 12% to 16% compared with the final quarter of 2016; prices of triple-level cell (TLC) SSDs are expected to rise by 10% to 16% sequentially. "The tight NAND flash supply and sharp price hikes for SSDs will likely discourage PC-[manufacturers] from raising storage capacity," said Alan Chen, a senior research manager of DRAMeXchange. "Therefore, the storage specifications for mainstream PC [...] SSDs are expected to remain in the 128GB and 256GB [range]."
They're still using 5400 RPM HDDs in their low-end-yet-too-expensive Macs.
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I'm in the hard drive industry.
I had to load my FORTRAN programs from paper tape.
I had to load my ASSEMBLER programs from carved rocks.
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I don't trust SSDs. They always seemed like a ticking time bomb. When a spinning disk fails, you usually get some auditory clues beforehand.
When an SSD fails, you loose everything immediately and all at once. Plus they wear out all too quickly. You can only write to the same region hundreds of times before it fails.
Is it more reasonable to assume that the markets have legitimately drained the supply, or that the whole industry is keeping a lid on it? SSDs seem to have become nigh ubiquitous on the convertible laptop/tablets, and an extremely common upgrade for even low-end laptops... Also, older news on this (i see things dating from Q4'16) offered the suggestion that relief might be coming by now. https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
At any rate, let's just hope that as many manufacturers as possible survive as long as possible to avoid establishing one of them as the WD of NAND. Hopefully things will stay competitive for a while longer.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
I don't see this as a problem (although, after reading this, I'm really glad I just bought my college-age daughter a 2-in-1 with an 256GB SSD at a phenomenally great discount from Dell Outlet..)
Most of the (highly educated) people I deal with have a) no idea what a megabyte/gigabyte/terabyte actually is, and b) if you gave them a terabyte, they would use less that 10% of it in the next three years, if even half of that. IMHO, *all* consumer, and most business tech is so far beyond what is needed by the intended audience it's not funny, unless you are one of those weirdos that actually needs 9.2TB for their pr0n collection. (No! Those are my tiny-house designs!) It's fantastic that a bunch of labcoats are constantly striving for ever higher densities, and I'm sure that somewhere in some burbling iridescent data-center that shit is needed, but Mom, Dad, all the cousins, Uncle Bill, your congressman, and the slightly plump yet somehow attractive lady at the local supermarket have bigger fish to fry..
They're still trying to figure out how to turn off the digital voice feedback on their step-tracker app.
When I first started to buy SSD's for my school, I tried to do some research and quickly became confused about the differences between TLC, MLC, and SLC. I found various sites like this one that gave a good overview, but I didn't find very many that really analyzed the performance differences.
I settled on the Kingston V300 series of disks, an MLC unit that seemed to get decent reviews. It's been treating us well, but I always wonder whether the MLC was worth the extra money over the UV400, a slightly cheaper TLC variant.
Has anyone ever used both MLC and TLC drives and care to comment about whether the differences in performance justify the cost?
How many times have storage/memory makers colluded to keep prices artificially inflated? HM? A lot more times than they've been CAUGHT!
TRUMPower!
The price of a Mac includes an Xcode license. If you don't need Xcode, consider buying something other than a Mac.
Well, today's 5400 RPM drives are not the same as yesterday's. Increased density makes them much faster than they used to be
An increase in density increases throughput, not latency. It still takes the same amount of time (up to 60000÷5400 = 11 ms) to spin a particular sector toward the head, plus however long it took the head to move to the appropriate cylinder.
let's just hope that as many manufacturers as possible survive as long as possible to avoid establishing one of them as the WD of NAND.
I thought SanDisk was the WD of NAND since May 2016
If you need more, then you should be using a networked drive. You don't have to be a network engineer anymore. There are a LOT of good wifi connected hard drives for you to work off of. If you actually do need more than that in your laptop then you should consider a traditional hard drive.
> Has anyone ever used both MLC and TLC drives and care to comment about whether the differences in performance justify the cost?
That completely depends on you - what you're using them for and how much you value money and performance. Also your operating system, to a lesser extent.
My wife loves her $200 mini laptop. She wouldn't want anything else. The cheap mini-laptop replaced her Chromebook when it broke and she wanted something very much like a Chromebook. On the other hand, I cost my employer about $150/hour. If they can spend $200 to upgrade hardware and thereby save me 30 seconds per day, it's worth it to upgrade the hardware. (30 seconds X 250 work days per year = 125 minutes @ $2.50 / minute = $312.50 to pay me to wait 30 seconds per day.)
For some tasks, it's not worth using anything more than a Raspberry Pi, or even an Arduino (16 Mhz). For use cases where it's not worth more than a 16 Mhz CPU, it's definitely not worth SLC or MLC. On the other hand, I've put dual 8-core CPUs on a motherboard. Multiple SLC drives make sense in some applications.
You can look at your usage and see how often you are waiting on your drive. Is that while working or only while booting/opening large applications for the first time? If you're using Linux especially, you can make sure you've maxed out your RAM first. Linux works hard to avoid using the drive, caching things in RAM instead. With enough RAM, drive performance may be largely a moot point - the drive may only used when starting up and when saving changed parts of files, which may not happen often.
Processing your work is not actually something you turn on and off, yet people treat it that way.
I find it almost unbelievable that people are still sold computers with old-fashioned HDDs. At the coffee machine, a secretary told me they bought a spanking new iMac. "But it's so slow", she asked, "is that normal?"
I told her to bring it back and get a model with an SSD. She didn't know what it was. I find it unbelievable that salespersons still sell this shit to consumers.
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I'd agree with you if HDDs didn't have any advantage over SSDs like price per byte...but since they do it's fair to think that someone may prefer the larger storage offered by HDDs
We've got a few dl360's with 8 2tb pros in them doing doing db work in RAID10. About a full write a week. We plan to pull them every three years preventative because of lack of HP trim support. We fill,them max 60%. On another one we have the actual branded HP 960GB ones. More pricey, but we can use trim and see 'life remaining'. We don't keep logs or dump files on them.... They are fast as shit... The users love it.
And cheaper prices for those bigger sizes. It is easy to fill up those tiny cheap SSDs. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Clearly, we need a "100% opaque" upmod.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
What year is this, 2004?
on typical flash memory... might as well go back to HDDs, they seem to at least become larger, faster, and cheaper, all the time.
Does that reflect in Apple's products? No... it's still the same $1000+ no matter how much cheaper the HDDs and other components have gotten over the years.
These days, when people call a computer "slow" they mean that it takes a while to load web pages -- usually Facebook. Most web pages take a long time to load these days because of all the JavaScript and ads on them. It probably has nothing to do with the disk.
Shortage of NAND flash?
Did we have a bad crop this year? How can you have a
sudden "shortage" -- or is it that no one bothered to expand capacity in a growing market to meet demand? Is that normal market strategy?
(maybe it is, but having paid $60 for an optical drive that cost $40 about 5 years ago and $25 for a comparable about 5 years before that, AND seeing big BluRay drive manufacturers had to pay large fines and 10-30$? rebates to end-buyers of computer manufacturers like Dell for illegal price fixing, I was surprised to see such a large price tag on the retail market.
Maybe the price fixing remedies only address manufacturers of computers and not retail sales?
Now how long before we get a 30$ rebate for flash price fixing?>
1st, there is a large inventory of HDDs. So they have to sell/unload them somewhere.
2nd, HDDs are sold with larger storage maximums than SSDs, so a sales guy can say 'this is bigger', (interpreted as better).
3rd, after a year of clutter & fragging the customer will come back and say 'my computer is slow' and be sold another one.
See? That last bit ensures a self-fulfilling sales record!
I also agree with you. At this point, it's kind of crazy that you would be buying an computer with an SSD. Of course SSD can't really be summed up with a nice big number. When they see one laptop with 1TB storage, and another laptop with 240 GB storage, most unaware users aren't going to really understand just how big the performance difference is between the two, but they will grasp the difference between 1 TB and 240 GB.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Shit? When you can get an 8TB SDD for $300 then come back and tell us that HDDs are shit.
Frankly I'd be more concerned if the consumer choice was no longer available.
She provides such useful tips on how to better masturbate.
An accident. They know exactly what they are doing.
I'm guessing the industry is in a transitional phase from the old to new fabrication (lithography) with no overlap in production.
Life is not for the lazy.
I like that reason ... sounds almost truthy! :-)
Makes me even happier about my recent purchase!
A lot of mac haters and people saying SSD are unreliable, etc. Guess what, even the touch bar is way better than I would have expected based on the flames on Slashdot.
Well I have lost 1 or 2 files in the past on my 2009
MBP 17in which I loved, despite the weight, until the HDD errors started piling up. I use Windows and run some linux servers too. The price was quite high but I configured the best model I could since I expect to get 5-10 years of use out of it. I know 500gb was not enough to hold 5 years of cruft and VMs. This is my first SSD and surprised to hear how brittle people find them, so will do some research and set up some local storage. I remember a video studio that often had HDDs fail so thought SSD would be more reliable.
It would be more useful to me to hear what mac users recommend for backups - a tethered drive set up for time machine? Or one set up as a bootable backup with Carbon Copy Cloner? Or a local linux box and rsync? Ideally I'd like a fine granularity versioned backup that combines these worlds.
Obviously....
Maybe she didnt want it to be touched with in the first place no matter what.
But personally I think all mac people are stupid because they trust apples icloud crap shit, when you can backup 1tb photos to flickr, or unlimited to google.
iCloud, fuck, what a joke , 5gb, pile of shit.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Not to mention the temp folder that is anything but temp, but perm, and fills up forever.
also every Chrome update, and iTunes updates keep the last few versions and at least two copies somewhere incase malware infects it - taking gigs.
Dont forget to purge it with diskcleanup
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
connecting to abc.xyz.adsvr.adcorp.com ....
Fucking ads, they wont render the rest of the page if that one img/vid isnt loaded.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.