[rasz_pl]

Because 128GB piece of second/third grade flash is ~$20, and those go into cheaper SD cards/usb drives. $160 in cheap memory alone.

There are manufacturers playing aggressive race to the bottom, they make drives with neither ram nor even SLC buffer. Mostly JMicron and Silicon Motion controllers, but more and more companies jump on this opportunity like Marvell. Im not even talking about garbage bin chinese "vendors" like kingspec/kingdian/kingrich/ki..you get the picture, I mean SanDisk Z400 or OCZ TL100, proper manufacturers.

At the end of the day those are pretty much USB pendrives with switched PHY, you can expect same prices and performance. That also means drastically lower write endurance, ~20-40TB Total lifespan. ~20GB/day in an age of Windows 10 writing ~1-2GB of logs(you know, so they can upload them to ze cloud, harmless telemetry ..) alone every single day.

[mtanski]

Thanks, that was helpful.