| > This thread is about SSDs. This sub-thread is about your unhelpful and misleading equivalence and analogy. :) Silicon wafer costs are like silicon wafer costs. Your diamond analogy is simply inappropriate. We don't say "Aircraft grade aluminium costs are like diamonds, rather than hard drive aluminium platters." or "Fission reactor grade steel costs are like diamonds, rather than..." because this is an immensely silly thing to say that obfuscates the true cost of the material in question. What's more, we can generally discover the high end of the true price of the material in question with a little work. As I demonstrated in my replies to you, silicon wafer costs are substantially cheaper than equivalent diamond costs. If you had said something along the lines of "Due in part to the cost of silicon wafers, silicon-based data storage technologies are now and will be for the foreseeable future substantially more expensive on a per-GB basis than spinning rust or tape-based technologies.", I would have had absolutely nothing at all to object to. > Consider the $0.24/die... That figure is based on a particular die area. I would expect a flash memory die to be substantially smaller than a CPU die. This would drive the base cost per die down even further. Moreover, that figure was from 2009. Up to date figures are required to really put a floor on chip prices. :) > And [that 1TB SSD] competes against 5TB hard drives that sells for $100. Sort of. For every use that I have except for bulk data storage, I recognize the vast superiority of an SSD. The only HDDs in my computers are the ones I got for free with my laptops-turned-servers that don't do much disk IO, and the disk array that holds my 5TB-and-growing Postgres database. For the average computer user, I would strongly recommend replacement of the HDD in their computer with an SSD. If you don't need to store more than 1TB of data[0], the performance gains over HDDs are just too great to use anything else. I'm fairly confident that HDDs will be substantially cheaper per GB than SSDs for the foreseeable future. I'm -however- not convinced by your implicit argument that SSDs will always be -price-wise- unattractive when compared to HDDs. SSDs seem to be sold at the price-per-GB of the HDDs of ~3->5 years ago. We will inevitably see 500GB SSDs at the $80 retail price point.[1] This will make them a no-brainer for every big computer manufacturer. A really fast disk makes slow kit feel really fucking fast. [0] In my experience, almost no non-technical user has more than 500GB of data that they care about on their machine at any one time. [1] They're only a little more than twice that price now. |
We need to make sure that everyone understands why, and part of that is because we're using lots of silicon crystals, which have the same lattice structure as diamonds, which are going to be more expensive than aluminum platters.
If you take it to the limit, an SSD won't be cheaper than hard drives even as processing costs go down, because they use so much silicon.
You say the silicon costs are insignificant, but it will be a limit as prices go down.
The diamond analogy works appropriately, and it's unhelpful and inappropriate to claim material costs are insignificant.
And people are always going to end up using as much space as given, so that's another mistake you're making. They will find ways, especially given high-res smartphones everywhere with cameras.