Funny thing is that one of the best you can get is the Crucial (Micron) 8TB one but even that one gets more expensive. I have the feeling it will be gone completely soon.
The old SATA SSD form factor is dead and wont come back.
OWC ThunderBlades exist, but 32TB will set you back 9 grand.
You should be able to assemble something with USB-C for under 5k. That's not a mass consumer market thing, but perfectly doable, if your use case warrants it. We are stuck with 2021 pricing, but now with options of 8TB per NVMe drive at way higher speed.
36TB+ HHD external WD drive combos were always around EUR 1000 over last 5 years. With a short low end around EUR 600 in 2023
https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderblade?sku=OWCTB3TBL8X32
That's more expensive than buying a single large capacity drive. It's also a terrible idea. I would never trust a low cost chinese controller with terabytes of my data.
>The old SATA SSD form factor is dead and wont come back.
That's true and very unfortunate.
Now that's a terrible idea. You shouldn't trust any single device with terabytes of your data, regardless of whether it is low-cost or Chinese.
But if you're buying a $500k GPU server putting 100TB of nvme in there for $50-100k is justifiable.
Nowadays it feels like that this time and price region is like decades away in the future. I was hoping I can store more data in future on modern tech like SSDs and not less.
there is no sign of any impending breakthroughs that would change flash economics much.
slc-mlc-tlc-qlc was very nice but plc will not happen. layer-based flash was also nice but it is ultimately linear (more layers, more cost, lower yield). dimensional shrinks are already stalled because of a tragic electron shortage (per cell).
I guess there's no harm in pining for some other NVRAM technology (spins, etc).
Despite the recent AI bubble you can still buy HDDs in the tens of TBs for a few hundred EUR/USD and you still don't see them in every computer. How high could the 30TB SSD demand be to justify the kind of volumes that drive price down?
In the DC it's the opposite, large and efficient drives are a must to save support all those fancy workloads while driving down space, power, cooling needs.
With regards to the new Micron SSD - I wonder how they keep it cool? I don't see coolant ports on it so they must strap a heatsink on.
P.S. I had to shuck 20TB WD drives that cost 350EUR on sale (now at 400EUR). 26TB drives are now ~700EUR. These external drives were the cheap option. Standalone drives usually cost more.
The average user consumes that much quite regularly. They've been taught to stream it off of someone else's computer, mostly so that the next time they stream it they can be compelled to pay for it again. It's fun going back to dumb terminals.
Why would you want to store every movie or series you watch? 30TB of data is something like 1 year of uninterrupted streaming at average Netflix 4K bitrates. Even more at HD bit rates. How many people would ever store years worth of movies on SSDs no less? Enough for it to drive huge sales in the market?
