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News SanDisk warns of NAND flash oversupply

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by brumgrunt, 4 Apr 2012.

  1. brumgrunt

    brumgrunt What's a Dremel?

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  2. Phil Rhodes

    Phil Rhodes Hypernobber

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    So what, they experienced a sudden and unprecedented explosion in demand, and their highly-paid and expert financial analysts instantly leapt to the conclusion that good things absolutely always last forever and ever more?

    Well, I suppose that's the sort of fairytale gibberish that highly-paid and expert financial analysts normally spout, which is of course why the world economy is in such fantastic shape.
     
  3. flibblesan

    flibblesan Destroyer

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    Woop! Cheap SSDs coming :D
     
  4. ChaosDefinesOrder

    ChaosDefinesOrder Vapourmodder

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    Doubtful, will probably mean a new and more expensive controller will be included that will "justify" keeping the prices high.

    SSD prices still haven't come down anywhere near quickly enough because they keep retiring the older models and releasing a newer faster model instead!

    Just like how electric cars are still unaffordable because the manufacturers spend all their resources on unaffordable electric sports cars to show off at trade shows

    /rant

    Cheaper SSDs would be nice, though! Maybe they'll start approaching sane prices soon! Maybe...
     
  5. west

    west What's a Dremel?

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    I think SSDs will go down in price and get faster. cheaper nand chips = more nand chips per SSD = faster storage.
    Current controllers can handle more nand chips on mid level SSD (note all the empty nand chip sockets on so many mid-level SSD boards).
     
  6. Flibblebot

    Flibblebot Smile with me

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    I don't see what the problem of a "small" 64Gb SSD is - after all, my current Win7 partition is only using around 50Gb, so surely 64Gb is more than enough for most users?

    I, for one, would welcome a drop in prices of SSDs to sane levels - and in the long run, this has got to be a better thing for the market?
     
  7. Gareth Halfacree

    Gareth Halfacree WIIGII! Lover of bit-tech Administrator Super Moderator Moderator

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    As a boot drive, possibly; as the only drive in a system - as with the vast majority of laptops - it's too small. I take my laptop to events, and regularly dump my camera's memory card onto the drive. That's a few hundred photos a day, at around 10MB a photo. Then there's video. Oh, and audio recordings of interviews...
     
  8. RedFlames

    RedFlames ...is not a Belgian football team

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    While I probably don't come under the 'most users' umbrella [and neither would most people on here], if you discount my steam folder [which on it's own wouldn't fit on a 64GB drive] my 'C:' drive is in the region of 75GB, and that's not including the afore-mentioned steam collection, and all the music, videos and work that's kept on an external drive... 120/128GB would be the bare minimum I'd consider if I completely lost my mind and decided to buy an SSD...
     
    Last edited: 6 Apr 2012
  9. mdshann

    mdshann What's a Dremel?

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    SSD prices really should have come down when hard drive prices went up. They really missed an opportunity to get SSDs into a lot of computers by instead raising prices at the same time that traditional drive prices went up.
     
  10. IvanIvanovich

    IvanIvanovich будет глотать вашу душу.

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    Some ssd have been coming down, at least in the US. Models like the ocz petrol 128GB can be had for $100 - $130 from most sources. Granted it is a mid range model, but plenty of performance for most with enough capacity for most as well. I imagine other drives will need to reduce prices as well to be competitive.
     
  11. mclean007

    mclean007 Officious Bystander

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    That's economics - as traditional HDD prices increased, the differential between an HDD and an SSD shrank, so SSD uptake picked up. Basic supply and demand tells you that when demand goes up for a product in limited supply, the price has to rise. What we're now seeing is the back end of the same mechanism - manufacturers respond to increased demand by hiking prices and ramping up production. Now the demand spike has receded, there is overcapacity so prices should retreat.
     
  12. Aragon Speed

    Aragon Speed Busily modding X3: Terran Conflict

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    And that's why you have to be taught economics. You have to unlearn all the common sense and logic you have managed to acquire throughout your life... ^^
     
  13. Landy_Ed

    Landy_Ed Combat Novice

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    +1
     
  14. thil

    thil What's a Dremel?

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    Now, now, to be fair to those experts: they were only consultants and their contract was for only a few months...it's obviously not a problem from their end. Anymore.
     
  15. digitaldunc

    digitaldunc What's a Dremel?

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    Not really -- I've just bought a M4 256 as I've found my current M225 128Gb to be limiting -- I want more than half a dozen games and other randomness on my main drive.

    Ideally SSDs will be ubiquitous (as I no doubt expect they will be in 5 years or so) and all our storage will be lightning fast.
     
  16. jimmyjj

    jimmyjj Minimodder

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    I really want an SSD,

    However for me I only want it when I can buy one big enough to fit all my crap on one drive - just like my hard drive is.

    My C drive is currently 350 GB, so really I would want a 512GB drive.

    I could move some of my TV programmes to a an external drive but I damn sure want my games on my SSD (my Steam folder alone is 180GB and that is just current games).

    Otherwise I need another hard drive which is either on my desk, or in my case (obstructing air flow with its extra cables).

    Never seen the point of just using an SSD for a boot drive, the only time windows is unresponsive is just after boot up. Give windows a couple of minutes to cache everything and all my programmes start instantly

    I want games to load and respond faster - which requires a much bigger drive to pull off and alas I can not afford one.
     
  17. Flibblebot

    Flibblebot Smile with me

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    But doesn't using an SSD like a "normal" drive (i.e. lots of moving, deleting & copying) degrade the lifespan of an SSD? I always thought that the limiting factor of SSDs (apart from their hight price) was the limited number of write cycles compared to hard drives? Or does this no longer apply to current SSDs and they have a lifespan comparable to mechanical disks?
     
  18. Leona74

    Leona74 What's a Dremel?

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    Woop! Cheap SSDs coming
     
  19. digitaldunc

    digitaldunc What's a Dremel?

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    Use will obviously degrade the NAND over time but that isn't any reason to minimise the use of your SSD -- it's there to be used, after all.

    I can't comment on MTBF figures between HDDs and SSDs without doing some googling but I'd think that the chance of catastrophic failure (head crash, for example) at least is less due to the lack of mechanical parts. In any case, with either storage device it's not a case of *if* but *when* the device will fail.
     
  20. west

    west What's a Dremel?

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    @Flibblebot
    each flash cell can be expected to fail after about 10,000 writes.

    Sum it up with a quote from an awesome article:
    "7GB of writes per day. That means in roughly 29 days my SSD, if it wear levels perfectly, I will have written to every single available flash block on my drive. Tack on another 7 days if the drive is smart enough to move my static data around to wear level even more properly. So we’re at approximately 36 days before I exhaust one out of my ~10,000 write cycles. Multiply that out and it would take 360,000 days of using my machine the way I have been for the past two weeks for all of my NAND to wear out; once again, assuming perfect wear leveling. That’s 986 years. Your NAND flash cells will actually lose their charge well before that time comes, in about 10 years."

    [http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829/6]
     
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