6.4 Tb... anything between 4000-8000$ Those bigger models are premium stuff so expect 1$/Gb or more... Of course it can be less, so 4000$ is not impossible, but not likely...
Not going to happen, similar drives retail for about $2000/TB so I'm thinking at least $10k even with TLC price reductions. You can get bulk SSD space for cheaper, but not the 1 million IOPS and 5 DWPD then more like 100k IOPS and 0.3 DWPD.
It will be high, but I don't see how it will be $10K. This is Samsung, not Apple with the gold watch. I think it will be under $5K.
It will have competition from 1TB drives under $200. 16 1TB drives at $200 plus a $650 RAID card come in around $3850 with much better performance. That RAID card will be choking. We are talking TLC, which will immediate scare enterprise at first.
I don't know how 16 1TB drives will compete with a single PCIe card. On a 1U you might put this card alone on PCIe bus, not the 16 1TB drives AND the RAID card (that will be probably 2X to 10X slower depending on the test!)
On a 4U, you will be able to put 3 to 6 cards like this, able to compete with 48 to 96 SSD and 3 to 6 RAID cards. I would choose the NVMe PCIe card anytime.
And I don't even take power consumption into accounts, with limited power supply, and cost of energy on datacenter (and problems to dissipate it). These PCIe cards are winners
Many who bought the 840 EVO weren't worried either. But, now, as far as I know, all of the "fixes" for the TLC's weakness involve re-writing the data over and over again to work around the speed degradation.
This 3D TLC is supposed to be more robust but as it is shrunk that advantage will decrease. How many shrinks can be done before it's equivalent to the TLC in the 840 EVO is a good question.
Also, this article mentions power savings and density improvements but doesn't mention the drawbacks of NAND shrinkage: increased latency and reduced longevity.
The scaling of 3d NAND isnt going to be done via shrinks, but adding layers. MAYBE they will shrink it later in the future, but I think we will have some newer/better tech by then, so honestly, I doubt there is much to worry about in this regard.
Samsung did not shrink their NAND here -- they just added layers, so there is no reduced longevity or increased latency like we would see on a typical node shrink.
I thought the first fix was working fine for my 840 evo until last night when I launched a game I hadn't played in a few months. Incredibly slow. Now I have to image the drive again so I can run the second fix. How the second one actually works (or maybe I don't so I can justify a new drive to my wife)
I didn't use the first fix - didn't have confidence in it, and looks like I was right not to use it. What I do instead is use diskfresh (by puransoftware) every month or so. If samsung are not lying too badly about the 1000 write cycles, things should be fine. I'm not going to use their 2nd fix either, maybe if I hear good things and no bad things about it a year or two from now ;).
@eek2121 You really have a foul mouth and no brain. If you're too lazy to read, why don't you run a speed test on your 840 EVO then compare the results to listed specs?
Got any interpretation for the 40% density number? Assuming same process, 50% more layers, how do they get to 40%? They factor in the logic when they talk density or is it all because of the dual plane,or both... I was assuming this is about 85mm2 (without trying to be very precise) while costs are maybe 1.8x vs 2D plus a yield penalty.Even so 3D TLC vs 2D MLC would be plenty cheaper. Hynix said they want to get to above 190 layers in 2019. So that would be 48 in 2016-2017 (really high volume) , then double that some one year later and again double in 2019 to 192 layers. If prices keep declining 30% + per year for NAND i'm not sure how many HDDs will still ship in PCs by 2017 (even in low end laptop a 128GB eMMC could be bellow 20$) and in 2019 midrange 100$ and up phones should have 128-256GB NAND.
The 40% density increase is definitely affected by the fact that the logic and cache portions of the chips aren't growing vertically. The dual-plane addressing adds some complexity but not enough to show up in rough numbers like these.
I'm not sure how how yields for 3D compare to planar. Costs are definitely higher due to the more complex fabrication process, but the flash cells are bigger and everything about flash has to be built with fault tolerance/repairability anyways.
So you assume the density is for the entire die and not the cells? If that would be the case, given that their 128Gb 32 layers TLC is 69mm2, this one would be 98.57mm2 and bit density at about 2.6Gb per mm2. But if you take AT's estimates of 72% array efficiency and you assume cell size and the logic remain the same size while going bigger and adding 50% more layers , you get to 85.5mm2. If they are talking 40% theoretical increase if the 48 layers die would be same size in mm2 then ,this die would be some 92mm2. So ,unless i messed up some of the math, i'm lost. In any case it's much higher density than what Micron announced and this one fits in microSD cards too,that's a plus. We'll see how Toshiba/Sandisk compares, they got same capacity and number of layers, the process is unclear though. For yield there are speculations but no idea if any are reliable.
Samsung's slides put the 40% as being an increase of capacity per wafer. If the die size or shape changed, then the number of dies per wafer would change and that would throw off the math a bit. But then, the diagrams they had on the slide depicted a significant die shrink, which is obviously wrong, so we should take everything with a grain of salt and hope that we can get a good wafer photo to clear things up.
In the end the cost of adding layers is the bigger news and encouraging. Nothing is problem free but if the industry manages to scale up at a decent pace , prices should keep the trajectory of healthy declines we are used to.
I don't think anyone is targetting such a number of layers (yet). Road maps talk about 48 (now), 64 (next year), 96, then 128. So, a linear growth, not geometric.
They are also talking about improvements in process, layer thickness, edges, etching and precision, which should all have positive effects on density and yields.
Companies went on record against scaling in X/Y, planning only to improve the number of layers.
"Density is improved by about 40% while production costs only increased slightly, so price per GB will be going down." "3.2 TB, 6.4TB"
Excellent. As soon as we have 6TB SSDs that are price competitive with their HDD brethren, I'm all in. Can't wait to get rid of mechanical drives for good! Price just has to be equitable, which shouldn't be hard once these processes have matured a year or so.
By 2021-2022 it should get to 30$ per TB if NAND is still alive but hard to say where HDD prices would be. Prices for HDDs stayed rather flat since the Thai floods ,should be way lower by now but no real competition kept prices high. HDDs in PC are about to go away for the most part, then console and other consumer electronics, portable storage next so only high capacity consumer and enterprise will be be left in a few years. It's unavoidable now .In most segments it won't matter that HDDs are cheaper anymore, NAND is getting cheap enough while having a big speed, power and density advantage.
Wrong, they made a huge jump and then resumed falling in price as they always have. They are now cheaper than they were before the floods. Evidence: http://www.jcmit.com/disk2015.htm
"Should be way lower by now"
Do you claim this based on any actual facts? Or merely the human fallacy to expect previous trends to continue indefinitely?
"but no real competition"
There IS real competition, but hard drive margins are already pretty low and the market is fully mature. That means there's no incentive to squander money on research & manufacturing on huge improvements to this dead end technology.
Yes prices jumped after the flood on shortages, came down fast in the next few quarters as supply caught up and then got stuck on minimal declines so now are just slightly lower.That does mean prices stayed flatish, now vs then. Yes i claim on actual facts and unlucky for you i know a lot more than you hope. I'm not gonna bother with someone that likely works for a HDD maker but it's very easy to just show margins for every quarter in the years before and after (or just q2 2011 vs q2 2015 up 7-10% for the 2 main players), how margins scale with volumes , calc ASP per segment and show you where it all lands. And then lets factor in the number of heads and platters and see how prices aren't where they could be. So yeah i claim with facts and can bury you in facts but is there is no good reason to waste 30minutes with that when you go all bananas with absurd claims? We went from 5 HDD makers to 3 and only one of them tries to gain any share every so often. Or lets put it this way, any reader here that's been around for a while , knows that before the floods good HDD deals were at 30$ per TB, and now 4 years later prices aren't much better at 25$ - and that's only now because the PC market has been really poor and some HDD makers got hungry for revenue.-as in Seagate trying to get closer to market expectations. At the same time the platter went from 750GB to 1.2-1.33TB.and that's a 60 to 78% increase. That is coupled with the numbers of platters going from 4 to 5-6, more platters means lower per unit cost. So i won't ask for 10$ per TB deals or even 15$ to prove that prices are fine but don't you dare claim that prices are fine and the market functional.
And just for the hell of it lets go back. In 2006, 5 years before the floods, the Cuda 7200.10 went 188GB per platter, in 2007 Hitachi went 200GB, in 2008 WD went 320GB , in 2009 WD went 500GB platters and then in 2010 750GB platters. Prices evolved accordingly and then the floods hit, WD bought Hitachi, Seagate bought Samsung and they all hit the breaks. They got no reason to push, they can just maximize profits while the market dies.
You claim you can "bury me in facts" but then you confirmed what I originally said: prices have indeed fallen.
Apparently you are unhappy they are not lower, but out of all the facts you claim to have, but all you talk about his how in the past there was some trend line and you (via normal human nature) believe that alone is sufficient evidence that the trend "should" continue in perpetuity.
They're hitting some hard limits the same way chip manufacturers are because the technology is so mature - which is why you're getting helium/SMR etc. now. We're going to have to live without the geometric expansion in speed/storage we've enjoyed, as it's now more linear or even logarithmic. More people also build RAID / NAS systems rather than keeping everything on one or two big disks.
Well sure, if HDD prices continue to fall. But so long as we get to where we're close to the $0.05/GB HDDs are at today, that'll make 4-8TB drives feasible for the consumer.
Huh, that's curious... Between that and the 2.5" SATA Express variant I question whether it's really intended as the SM951's replacement or whether that's just the assumption based on the model number.
The PM953 is an enterprise version of the SM951 (same controller, but M2 22110 form factor with power-loss protection), Hence the performance numbers are for sustained performance.
I'm always happy to see capacity increases in the solid state world. Even now, it's still a bit too pricey for me to want to spend the money on something other than old magnetic disks since the performance benefits don't quite outweigh the excessive price premium.
Uhhh, yes they do! At least for a system/OS drive, they sure do! Hell, I bought my first SSD in 2009, a 128GB Indilinx Barefoot based drive, and it cost me over $320 and it was STILL worth it even at THAT price!
I've had an 80GB X25-M G2 ($220, it actually went UP in value thru the first 8 months as vendors mercilessly price gouged), a 40GB X25-V (netbook), a single 128GB 830 then later two in RAID (2nd one was on sale for $75, hard to pass up), and a 1TB 850 EVO...
Adding a 256GB SM951 once my Sky lake build is complete (6700K wru). I can't imagine using HDD for system OS drives all these years, heck I'm trying to move away from them even for current data (probably get another 1TB EVO soon)... They've completely spoiled me.
Vast majority of systems I deal with at work still have HDDs and it always feels ancient and like I'm wading thru molasses. Hate to use such a cliche but once you've had a SSD you definitely can't go back. Single best investment there is for any semi recent system that lacks one.
Oh no, don't get me wrong, for some people it's a very worthwhile purchase and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. This is more of it not weighing heavily enough in benefit on my personal cost-versus-performance scale. While I've used enough SSD-equipped systems to note that they're quicker to boot up, shut down, and opening programs, the difference in tangible terms is a matter of a few seconds here and there when the SSD is paired up with hardware that can take advantage of the more responsive disk subsystem. That difference just doesn't mean anything to me since the majority of my time on a home computer is spent in a word processor. Once it's open and I'm happily typing away, there's absolutely nothing that SSD technology offers in terms of performance that I'd notice which is why I contend to people who ask me for an opinion that SSDs are among the most overrated upgrades that are commonly encouraged by the tech community today. They're right up there with vastly overspec'ed power supplies and pushing meaninglessly high resolutions that solely drive up the cost of a computer to increase margins on sales in an era of otherwise declining, commodity computing prices.
It's just another way for a company to command a larger dollar margin on parts that runs along the same lines as top end GeForce 8800 GPUs selling for far less on their release day than top end GeForce Titans do today, even after factoring economic inflation into the mix. No thanks hardware companies. I'll purchase your overpriced stuff off the secondary market in three to five years for 5% of the original cost and put the 95% difference into a retirement account where compound interest will at least do something worthwhile with that money over the course of the coming decades.
Sounds like SSD caching would be for you, then. I bought a 60 GB Agility III a few years ago for to cache my HDD. It's a lot faster and still has ~85% endurance left today. It was 100€, but today the 120 GB drives have hit 60€ and would be a good choice.
I'm still running a 64 GB OCZ Cache SSD + a regular 640GB mechanical HDD as my OS+applications drive in my main rig. Most of the time it feels like a 640 GB SSD (I have a laptop with a 256 GB SSD, so I know what a proper SSD "feels like"). I was actually considering a 500GB Samsung Evo, but decided to stick with the current solution until either the cache drive wears out, or 1TB SSD's become truly affordable.
Glad you didn't post this idiotic picture of 1633a having 16TB, like all the other copy-paste macarena-news sites.
Putting 500+ current-generation 256Gb ICs in 2.5" box does not seem possible (well, I mean without using the road roller)
The interesting question here, is WHEN do they plan to achieve this 16Tb in 2.5" box? The HOW part is quite obviously by increasing the number of layers.
With a 256Gbit (32GB) die and 16 dies per package, there are "only" 32 NAND packages, which isn't out of reach with a multi-layer PCB design like the 2.5" 15mm drives are.
Are the Current 850 EVO SSD Based on 1st Generation V-NAND? They are 128Gb V-NAND? If so the 2nd Gen V-NAND are not yet on market SSD yet? If they are 2nd Gen, What happened to 1st Gen -V-NAND? Never went to market?
So assuming perfect scaling, I could expect 2TB SSD in the same current ~$350 price range next year? And 3TB for $350 in 2017?
Yeah the gens thing confused me too, I dunno about 2TB for $350 next year tho. I'm gonna guess $500 at best, they *just* debuted the 2TB EVO for $800. Even if you assume street price will soon drop by $100 to better align with it's smaller siblings, a 50% price drop in a year seems unlikely.
NAND price is one thing, what the market will bear due to demand and competition is another. I paid $380 for a 500GB 840 EVO I gifted in September of 2013 and it wasn't until very recently that the 1TB 850 EVO started going under that. So it took two years to see the kinda price drop you're talking about..
I'll be pleasantly surprised if more TLC competition starts driving prices down quicker tho, I'd totally add a 2TB next year for $350 to the two 1TB I'll have by then. :P
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nathanddrews - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
32TB of writes per day for 5 years. Yeah, I can't say that I'm too worried about TLC endurance. LOLEven though I know I can't possibly afford it - how much do you think the 6.4TB model will be?
haukionkannel - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
6.4 Tb... anything between 4000-8000$ Those bigger models are premium stuff so expect 1$/Gb or more... Of course it can be less, so 4000$ is not impossible, but not likely...close - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
There's already a 16TB model announced so I think you should wait for that one. I know I will :)).nathanddrews - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
I'll install it alongside my 80-core CPU. ;-)ddriver - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
It's just a kidney away :)Kjella - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Not going to happen, similar drives retail for about $2000/TB so I'm thinking at least $10k even with TLC price reductions. You can get bulk SSD space for cheaper, but not the 1 million IOPS and 5 DWPD then more like 100k IOPS and 0.3 DWPD.eanazag - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
It will be high, but I don't see how it will be $10K. This is Samsung, not Apple with the gold watch. I think it will be under $5K.It will have competition from 1TB drives under $200. 16 1TB drives at $200 plus a $650 RAID card come in around $3850 with much better performance. That RAID card will be choking. We are talking TLC, which will immediate scare enterprise at first.
Kjella - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
800GB = $1726https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/SAMSUNG-PM1725-2...
Multiply that with 8 for 6TB and you're at ~$13-14000.
Director12 - Monday, August 17, 2015 - link
10K..I can remember when 15Mb hard drives cost that much.iAPX - Tuesday, August 18, 2015 - link
I don't know how 16 1TB drives will compete with a single PCIe card.On a 1U you might put this card alone on PCIe bus, not the 16 1TB drives AND the RAID card (that will be probably 2X to 10X slower depending on the test!)
On a 4U, you will be able to put 3 to 6 cards like this, able to compete with 48 to 96 SSD and 3 to 6 RAID cards. I would choose the NVMe PCIe card anytime.
And I don't even take power consumption into accounts, with limited power supply, and cost of energy on datacenter (and problems to dissipate it). These PCIe cards are winners
Oxford Guy - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Many who bought the 840 EVO weren't worried either. But, now, as far as I know, all of the "fixes" for the TLC's weakness involve re-writing the data over and over again to work around the speed degradation.This 3D TLC is supposed to be more robust but as it is shrunk that advantage will decrease. How many shrinks can be done before it's equivalent to the TLC in the 840 EVO is a good question.
Also, this article mentions power savings and density improvements but doesn't mention the drawbacks of NAND shrinkage: increased latency and reduced longevity.
extide - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
The scaling of 3d NAND isnt going to be done via shrinks, but adding layers. MAYBE they will shrink it later in the future, but I think we will have some newer/better tech by then, so honestly, I doubt there is much to worry about in this regard.extide - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Samsung did not shrink their NAND here -- they just added layers, so there is no reduced longevity or increased latency like we would see on a typical node shrink.frenchy_2001 - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Correct. Latency is even going down due to the higher density.eek2121 - Friday, August 14, 2015 - link
My 840 EVO is working fine. Thanks. Stop trolling.Gigaplex - Friday, August 14, 2015 - link
It's not trolling, it's a well documented issue.http://www.anandtech.com/show/8997/samsung-release...
abhaxus - Friday, August 14, 2015 - link
I thought the first fix was working fine for my 840 evo until last night when I launched a game I hadn't played in a few months. Incredibly slow. Now I have to image the drive again so I can run the second fix. How the second one actually works (or maybe I don't so I can justify a new drive to my wife)lyeoh - Sunday, August 16, 2015 - link
I didn't use the first fix - didn't have confidence in it, and looks like I was right not to use it. What I do instead is use diskfresh (by puransoftware) every month or so. If samsung are not lying too badly about the 1000 write cycles, things should be fine. I'm not going to use their 2nd fix either, maybe if I hear good things and no bad things about it a year or two from now ;).sonny73n - Sunday, August 16, 2015 - link
@eek2121You really have a foul mouth and no brain. If you're too lazy to read, why don't you run a speed test on your 840 EVO then compare the results to listed specs?
jjj - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Got any interpretation for the 40% density number?Assuming same process, 50% more layers, how do they get to 40%? They factor in the logic when they talk density or is it all because of the dual plane,or both...
I was assuming this is about 85mm2 (without trying to be very precise) while costs are maybe 1.8x vs 2D plus a yield penalty.Even so 3D TLC vs 2D MLC would be plenty cheaper.
Hynix said they want to get to above 190 layers in 2019. So that would be 48 in 2016-2017 (really high volume) , then double that some one year later and again double in 2019 to 192 layers.
If prices keep declining 30% + per year for NAND i'm not sure how many HDDs will still ship in PCs by 2017 (even in low end laptop a 128GB eMMC could be bellow 20$) and in 2019 midrange 100$ and up phones should have 128-256GB NAND.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
The 40% density increase is definitely affected by the fact that the logic and cache portions of the chips aren't growing vertically. The dual-plane addressing adds some complexity but not enough to show up in rough numbers like these.I'm not sure how how yields for 3D compare to planar. Costs are definitely higher due to the more complex fabrication process, but the flash cells are bigger and everything about flash has to be built with fault tolerance/repairability anyways.
jjj - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
So you assume the density is for the entire die and not the cells? If that would be the case, given that their 128Gb 32 layers TLC is 69mm2, this one would be 98.57mm2 and bit density at about 2.6Gb per mm2. But if you take AT's estimates of 72% array efficiency and you assume cell size and the logic remain the same size while going bigger and adding 50% more layers , you get to 85.5mm2. If they are talking 40% theoretical increase if the 48 layers die would be same size in mm2 then ,this die would be some 92mm2. So ,unless i messed up some of the math, i'm lost. In any case it's much higher density than what Micron announced and this one fits in microSD cards too,that's a plus. We'll see how Toshiba/Sandisk compares, they got same capacity and number of layers, the process is unclear though.For yield there are speculations but no idea if any are reliable.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Samsung's slides put the 40% as being an increase of capacity per wafer. If the die size or shape changed, then the number of dies per wafer would change and that would throw off the math a bit. But then, the diagrams they had on the slide depicted a significant die shrink, which is obviously wrong, so we should take everything with a grain of salt and hope that we can get a good wafer photo to clear things up.jjj - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
In the end the cost of adding layers is the bigger news and encouraging. Nothing is problem free but if the industry manages to scale up at a decent pace , prices should keep the trajectory of healthy declines we are used to.frenchy_2001 - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
I don't think anyone is targetting such a number of layers (yet).Road maps talk about 48 (now), 64 (next year), 96, then 128.
So, a linear growth, not geometric.
They are also talking about improvements in process, layer thickness, edges, etching and precision, which should all have positive effects on density and yields.
Companies went on record against scaling in X/Y, planning only to improve the number of layers.
sonicmerlin - Friday, August 14, 2015 - link
That's incredibly lame. Shrinking the node would bring dramatic density increases and drop the cost/GB like a rock.Scootcha - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
I care more about the "SSD Update" to fully support the use of Magician with Windows 10, Samsung.Impulses - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Read elsewhere the 2.5" version of the PM953 uses SATA Express, wouldn't that bottleneck it to an extent?extide - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Yes, as thats only 2 lanes, vs M.2 or U.2 being 4 lanes.jay401 - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
"Density is improved by about 40% while production costs only increased slightly, so price per GB will be going down.""3.2 TB, 6.4TB"
Excellent. As soon as we have 6TB SSDs that are price competitive with their HDD brethren, I'm all in. Can't wait to get rid of mechanical drives for good! Price just has to be equitable, which shouldn't be hard once these processes have matured a year or so.
Duraz0rz - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
You'll be waiting for ever, then. I don't think NAND will ever reach price parity with regular mechanical HDDs.jjj - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
By 2021-2022 it should get to 30$ per TB if NAND is still alive but hard to say where HDD prices would be. Prices for HDDs stayed rather flat since the Thai floods ,should be way lower by now but no real competition kept prices high.HDDs in PC are about to go away for the most part, then console and other consumer electronics, portable storage next so only high capacity consumer and enterprise will be be left in a few years. It's unavoidable now .In most segments it won't matter that HDDs are cheaper anymore, NAND is getting cheap enough while having a big speed, power and density advantage.
grant3 - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
"Prices for HDDs stayed rather flat"Wrong, they made a huge jump and then resumed falling in price as they always have. They are now cheaper than they were before the floods. Evidence: http://www.jcmit.com/disk2015.htm
"Should be way lower by now"
Do you claim this based on any actual facts? Or merely the human fallacy to expect previous trends to continue indefinitely?
"but no real competition"
There IS real competition, but hard drive margins are already pretty low and the market is fully mature. That means there's no incentive to squander money on research & manufacturing on huge improvements to this dead end technology.
jjj - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Yes prices jumped after the flood on shortages, came down fast in the next few quarters as supply caught up and then got stuck on minimal declines so now are just slightly lower.That does mean prices stayed flatish, now vs then.Yes i claim on actual facts and unlucky for you i know a lot more than you hope.
I'm not gonna bother with someone that likely works for a HDD maker but it's very easy to just show margins for every quarter in the years before and after (or just q2 2011 vs q2 2015 up 7-10% for the 2 main players), how margins scale with volumes , calc ASP per segment and show you where it all lands. And then lets factor in the number of heads and platters and see how prices aren't where they could be. So yeah i claim with facts and can bury you in facts but is there is no good reason to waste 30minutes with that when you go all bananas with absurd claims?
We went from 5 HDD makers to 3 and only one of them tries to gain any share every so often.
Or lets put it this way, any reader here that's been around for a while , knows that before the floods good HDD deals were at 30$ per TB, and now 4 years later prices aren't much better at 25$ - and that's only now because the PC market has been really poor and some HDD makers got hungry for revenue.-as in Seagate trying to get closer to market expectations. At the same time the platter went from 750GB to 1.2-1.33TB.and that's a 60 to 78% increase. That is coupled with the numbers of platters going from 4 to 5-6, more platters means lower per unit cost. So i won't ask for 10$ per TB deals or even 15$ to prove that prices are fine but don't you dare claim that prices are fine and the market functional.
jjj - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
And just for the hell of it lets go back.In 2006, 5 years before the floods, the Cuda 7200.10 went 188GB per platter, in 2007 Hitachi went 200GB, in 2008 WD went 320GB , in 2009 WD went 500GB platters and then in 2010 750GB platters. Prices evolved accordingly and then the floods hit, WD bought Hitachi, Seagate bought Samsung and they all hit the breaks. They got no reason to push, they can just maximize profits while the market dies.
grant3 - Friday, August 14, 2015 - link
You claim you can "bury me in facts" but then you confirmed what I originally said: prices have indeed fallen.Apparently you are unhappy they are not lower, but out of all the facts you claim to have, but all you talk about his how in the past there was some trend line and you (via normal human nature) believe that alone is sufficient evidence that the trend "should" continue in perpetuity.
darkfalz - Wednesday, August 19, 2015 - link
They're hitting some hard limits the same way chip manufacturers are because the technology is so mature - which is why you're getting helium/SMR etc. now. We're going to have to live without the geometric expansion in speed/storage we've enjoyed, as it's now more linear or even logarithmic. More people also build RAID / NAS systems rather than keeping everything on one or two big disks.sonicmerlin - Friday, August 14, 2015 - link
Dude look at your own graph. The "small drives" line is at the same level now as it was pre flood.thetuna - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Wat.You're not going to see price parity with HDD's for many years yet.
SSD space is still over 10x the cost of HDD space.
jay401 - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Well sure, if HDD prices continue to fall. But so long as we get to where we're close to the $0.05/GB HDDs are at today, that'll make 4-8TB drives feasible for the consumer.RealBeast - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Thanks Billy, it's nice to see so many great announcements related to SSDs recently.Hopefully, Samsung will see the wisdom in selling NVMe drives in their retail channel soon now that consumer motherboard support is improving.
ilkhan - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
http://scr3.golem.de/screenshots/1508/Samsung-PM95...Is it just me or is 1GB/s read / 870MB/s write a bit slow for an NVMe PCI-E M.2 SSD?
Impulses - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Huh, that's curious... Between that and the 2.5" SATA Express variant I question whether it's really intended as the SM951's replacement or whether that's just the assumption based on the model number.extide - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
It's not a replacement, the SM951 is 2D MLC and this is 3D TLC -- they are meant to go along side each other.Kristian Vättö - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
The PM953 is an enterprise version of the SM951 (same controller, but M2 22110 form factor with power-loss protection), Hence the performance numbers are for sustained performance.Impulses - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Thanks for the extra info Kristian!BrokenCrayons - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
I'm always happy to see capacity increases in the solid state world. Even now, it's still a bit too pricey for me to want to spend the money on something other than old magnetic disks since the performance benefits don't quite outweigh the excessive price premium.extide - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Uhhh, yes they do! At least for a system/OS drive, they sure do! Hell, I bought my first SSD in 2009, a 128GB Indilinx Barefoot based drive, and it cost me over $320 and it was STILL worth it even at THAT price!Impulses - Friday, August 14, 2015 - link
I've had an 80GB X25-M G2 ($220, it actually went UP in value thru the first 8 months as vendors mercilessly price gouged), a 40GB X25-V (netbook), a single 128GB 830 then later two in RAID (2nd one was on sale for $75, hard to pass up), and a 1TB 850 EVO...Adding a 256GB SM951 once my Sky lake build is complete (6700K wru). I can't imagine using HDD for system OS drives all these years, heck I'm trying to move away from them even for current data (probably get another 1TB EVO soon)... They've completely spoiled me.
Vast majority of systems I deal with at work still have HDDs and it always feels ancient and like I'm wading thru molasses. Hate to use such a cliche but once you've had a SSD you definitely can't go back. Single best investment there is for any semi recent system that lacks one.
BrokenCrayons - Friday, August 14, 2015 - link
Oh no, don't get me wrong, for some people it's a very worthwhile purchase and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. This is more of it not weighing heavily enough in benefit on my personal cost-versus-performance scale. While I've used enough SSD-equipped systems to note that they're quicker to boot up, shut down, and opening programs, the difference in tangible terms is a matter of a few seconds here and there when the SSD is paired up with hardware that can take advantage of the more responsive disk subsystem. That difference just doesn't mean anything to me since the majority of my time on a home computer is spent in a word processor. Once it's open and I'm happily typing away, there's absolutely nothing that SSD technology offers in terms of performance that I'd notice which is why I contend to people who ask me for an opinion that SSDs are among the most overrated upgrades that are commonly encouraged by the tech community today. They're right up there with vastly overspec'ed power supplies and pushing meaninglessly high resolutions that solely drive up the cost of a computer to increase margins on sales in an era of otherwise declining, commodity computing prices.It's just another way for a company to command a larger dollar margin on parts that runs along the same lines as top end GeForce 8800 GPUs selling for far less on their release day than top end GeForce Titans do today, even after factoring economic inflation into the mix. No thanks hardware companies. I'll purchase your overpriced stuff off the secondary market in three to five years for 5% of the original cost and put the 95% difference into a retirement account where compound interest will at least do something worthwhile with that money over the course of the coming decades.
MrSpadge - Friday, August 14, 2015 - link
Sounds like SSD caching would be for you, then. I bought a 60 GB Agility III a few years ago for to cache my HDD. It's a lot faster and still has ~85% endurance left today. It was 100€, but today the 120 GB drives have hit 60€ and would be a good choice.JimmiG - Friday, August 21, 2015 - link
SSD caching works better than you'd expect.I'm still running a 64 GB OCZ Cache SSD + a regular 640GB mechanical HDD as my OS+applications drive in my main rig. Most of the time it feels like a 640 GB SSD (I have a laptop with a 256 GB SSD, so I know what a proper SSD "feels like"). I was actually considering a 500GB Samsung Evo, but decided to stick with the current solution until either the cache drive wears out, or 1TB SSD's become truly affordable.
avamonster - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Glad you didn't post this idiotic picture of 1633a having 16TB, like all the other copy-paste macarena-news sites.Putting 500+ current-generation 256Gb ICs in 2.5" box does not seem possible (well, I mean without using the road roller)
The interesting question here, is WHEN do they plan to achieve this 16Tb in 2.5" box?
The HOW part is quite obviously by increasing the number of layers.
MikhailT - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Samsung is the one that posted the slide that shows clearly a 16TB in a single SSD called 1633a: http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2015/08/samsung-u...How is idiotic if Samsung is the one presenting the picture?
Kristian Vättö - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
With a 256Gbit (32GB) die and 16 dies per package, there are "only" 32 NAND packages, which isn't out of reach with a multi-layer PCB design like the 2.5" 15mm drives are.iwod - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Are the Current 850 EVO SSD Based on 1st Generation V-NAND? They are 128Gb V-NAND? If so the 2nd Gen V-NAND are not yet on market SSD yet?If they are 2nd Gen, What happened to 1st Gen -V-NAND? Never went to market?
So assuming perfect scaling, I could expect 2TB SSD in the same current ~$350 price range next year? And 3TB for $350 in 2017?
iwod - Thursday, August 13, 2015 - link
Another thought is how far we are from having the V-NAND built on top of the NAND Controller? Essentially a single Chip / package SSD solution?hojnikb - Friday, August 14, 2015 - link
We already have that for quite some time.Its called eMMC.
Impulses - Friday, August 14, 2015 - link
Yeah the gens thing confused me too, I dunno about 2TB for $350 next year tho. I'm gonna guess $500 at best, they *just* debuted the 2TB EVO for $800. Even if you assume street price will soon drop by $100 to better align with it's smaller siblings, a 50% price drop in a year seems unlikely.NAND price is one thing, what the market will bear due to demand and competition is another. I paid $380 for a 500GB 840 EVO I gifted in September of 2013 and it wasn't until very recently that the 1TB 850 EVO started going under that. So it took two years to see the kinda price drop you're talking about..
I'll be pleasantly surprised if more TLC competition starts driving prices down quicker tho, I'd totally add a 2TB next year for $350 to the two 1TB I'll have by then. :P
JackNSally - Friday, August 14, 2015 - link
First generation was a "test" generation.Right after the first graph.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8216/samsung-ssd-850...
Kutark - Sunday, August 16, 2015 - link
Ugh, i just want a 512gb NVME or m.2 pcix thats not $400