SSD Pricing

M

mda

2[H]4U
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Mar 23, 2011
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Hi All,

Just wondering if anyone has any insight on the status of the SSD Market.

I understand that prices are decently low compared to a year or two ago where DRAM and NAND prices were at an all time high.

But I recently read that there will be no more DRAM pricing drops projected anytime soon since:
DDR4 production will eventually be winding down to make room for production of DDR5
Average RAM per device is going up

On the NAND side, QLC NAND does not seem to really have 'lowered' pricing for SSDs in addition to the relatively bad performance, and that TLC pricing seems to have come down a bit in the process.

My question is:
Are there any developments coming soon on the NAND side that should bring down pricing/bring up performance? It would seem that TLC pricing seems to have come down only because of increased supply.

Do process shrinkages also apply? I read a bit of a while back that smaller processes 'hurt' the max number of writes that could be written to a piece of NAND.

Thought came around since I'm running a homelab with some office database backups that require a big amount of space, and HDDs are quite slow for what I'm doing, considering moving to a few 2TB/4TB SSDs.

Thanks!
 
I don't see prices moving down anytime soon. If nothing else, they'll blame COVID-19 even if that has nothing to do with it.

QLC is only as good as the DRAM cache. Depending on the size of your backups, you could very well outpace the size of the cache and then you're going to have slow writes. You're also going to get a lot less lifetime writes.
 
Denpepe said:
Samsung is working on some new tech that coulld help https://www.techspot.com/news/84905-samsung-developing-industry-first-160-layer-nand-flash.html
Click to expand...

Interesting. Given how the 980s aren't even out yet though, it looks like this will take another two years to ever see the consumer market. What's interesting is that the 128 layer NAND has supposedly been released... which means consumer components should see a refresh soon?

kirbyrj said:
I don't see prices moving down anytime soon. If nothing else, they'll blame COVID-19 even if that has nothing to do with it.

QLC is only as good as the DRAM cache. Depending on the size of your backups, you could very well outpace the size of the cache and then you're going to have slow writes. You're also going to get a lot less lifetime writes.
Click to expand...

Yep, the VMs I'm working with are about 400GB in size... doing chunk sized IO on that (restoring/cloning/etc) will see looooooooooooong times with QLC.
 
kirbyrj said:
I don't see prices moving down anytime soon. If nothing else, they'll blame COVID-19 even if that has nothing to do with it.

QLC is only as good as the DRAM cache. Depending on the size of your backups, you could very well outpace the size of the cache and then you're going to have slow writes. You're also going to get a lot less lifetime writes.
Click to expand...

I'm currentlu using an 860 2TB QVL drive as a games drive, should be more then good enough for that, even got a 2nd one a while ago on sale at amazon for 149 €
 
The absolute lowest prices were during Black Friday this past year, where TLC 1tb drives can be found under $100 and TLC 2tb drives under $200, and many others right around the $100 and $200 mark respectively. Prices have since gone up, and I expect them to stay up as manufacturers cut back capacity to inflate prices, which they announced they were planning to do even before Covid-19 hit.

I would consider getting one of those Fusion-IO PCI-E SSDs if it's for VM work. Some people are still having success snagging 6.4 TB SSDs for $400. Since they use MLC NAND, they have a lot of life left in them even if they've been used a lot.
 
Tsumi said:
I would consider getting one of those Fusion-IO PCI-E SSDs if it's for VM work. Some people are still having success snagging 6.4 TB SSDs for $400. Since they use MLC NAND, they have a lot of life left in them even if they've been used a lot.
Click to expand...

This is probably what you want for your use case. It's a server grade product for a server style workload.
 
Tsumi said:
The absolute lowest prices were during Black Friday this past year, where TLC 1tb drives can be found under $100 and TLC 2tb drives under $200, and many others right around the $100 and $200 mark respectively. Prices have since gone up, and I expect them to stay up as manufacturers cut back capacity to inflate prices, which they announced they were planning to do even before Covid-19 hit.

I would consider getting one of those Fusion-IO PCI-E SSDs if it's for VM work. Some people are still having success snagging 6.4 TB SSDs for $400. Since they use MLC NAND, they have a lot of life left in them even if they've been used a lot.
Click to expand...

kirbyrj said:
This is probably what you want for your use case. It's a server grade product for a server style workload.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately that means I'll probably need an X570 upgrade too...

I'm running out of PCIE slots since I'm using a 4 Port NIC to play with VLANs/Networks as well and B450/X470s have very limited PCIE lanes, but I'll keep that in mind.

I recently picked up an SN550 1TB for $100 and while that isn't bad at all, I'll need a little more than that for my VMs. Too bad ESXI can't "JBOD" hard drives.
 
Prices are stable or slightly up but will stagnant and likely go down before coming back up. Check my subreddit for regular news on pricing.
 
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