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by dcip6s 3763 days ago
Anyone care to take a guess how much the 15TB version will cost?
2 comments

The projected cost when it was announced was $5000.
10,000 USD?
I don't see any SAS SSD's going for much less than $1,000/TB. Some of them are twice that! And I'm sure the density will let it command a premium by targeting users who really need more storage in tight spaces. My guess is $50,000.
On the other hand, I still remember when hard drives (the spinning platter ones) reached the $1/GB mark ~10 years ago. Now high-end SSDs are there. A billion bits of storage costing $1 is pretty amazing, I think.
Hell, I remember reading PC Mag and being SHOCKED about a 4GB HD that cost a few hundred bucks. (Also shocked that I subscribed to PC Mag.)
I was shocked when 200GB drives were called drivezilla and cost $400.
And I was shocked when Seagate announced a 8TB HDD for $200..
Our brain thinks linear, technology grows exponentially.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns

Kurzweil also claims, as the capstone final paragraph in this piece, that human life expectancy is on an exponential curve, which is false. Not just a little wrong, it's all the way wrong, and intentionally misleading, there's no possible way he doesn't know it's false. It's very easy to check the basic facts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy. Lifespan for people who live past 20 (discounting infant mortality) has been around 70 for at least a thousand years. It's gone up a little in developed countries recently, but he intentionally uses only a small window of time, and includes infant mortality in his stats. If we eliminate all infant mortality, still nobody will live forever, and average lifespan will not be on an exponential curve. This intentionally misleading falsehood alone makes me doubt all the rest of his claims about exponential and double exponential trends. (And I don't doubt Moore, only the additional unsupported implications and loose associations that Kurzweil adds to Moore's law.)
I agree that the claim that lifespan is on an exponential curve is bogus. Modern medicine basically extended extremal lifespan up to the maximum attainable without fixing the underlying causes of aging and then stopped. There is for example some research that shows that the oldest woman's blood was derived from just two stem cells.[1] We currently don't have the technology to fix problems like that

I disagree however that nobody alive today will live "forever". The technology that might allow us to fix aging is on an exponential curve, look for example at the cost of genome sequencing. So the time is ripe for some breakthrough results in aging research that actually address some causes of aging.

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25458-blood-of-worlds...

I think you are understating the improvements in adult life expectancy. 1000 years ago, the very wealthy (the aristocrats) were getting to their 60s. The population wasn't.

The improvements have mostly come from violence reduction and public health and dealing with disease though, I agree that those things aren't really part of a life extension technology trajectory.

About 20 years ago, I worked on a project replacing/rewriting servers and their management software for a manufacturer. They had an already aging *nix system (circa 1990). Story went that not long before we came in for the project they had to replace a HDD that was out of production to the tune of about $50k.
Samsung's 2TB SSD is $860 so maybe something like that.

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-Inch-SATA-Internal-MZ-7KE2...

That's a consumer SSD. The 16TB looks like an enterprise SSD (much higher endurance).
You could extrapolate from the PM863 series which seems to be the closest to this: http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Pm863-Internal-Solid-State/dp/...
Well, I doubt this study will make Samsung charge less for enterprise drives