[NL807]

The point I was making is that there is no profit to be made by extending the life of drives. And sample size of one (i.e. you) is not representative of the market. There is always a demand for storage and people will keep buying worse products because there is no other choice.

[AnthonyMouse]

I don't understand this logic. Consider the two possibilities here.

The first is that only weird tech people are interested in doing this. Then they might as well allow it because it's a negligible proportion of the market but it makes those customers favor rather than dislike your brand, and makes them more likely to recommend your devices to others, which makes you some money.

The second is that it would be widely popular and large numbers of customers would want to do it, and thereby choose the drives that allow it. Then if Samsung does it and SanDisk doesn't, or vice versa, they take more of the other's customers. Allowing it is the thing makes them more money.

Meanwhile the thing that trashes most SSDs isn't wear, it's obsolescence. There are millions of ten year old QLC SSDs that are perfectly operational because they lived in a desktop and saw five drive writes over their entire existence. They're worthless not because they don't work, but because a drive which is newer and bigger and faster is $20. It costs the manufacturer nothing to let them be more reliable because they're going in the bin one way or the other.

The status quo seems like MBAs cargo culting some heuristic where a company makes money in proportion to how evil they are. Companies actually make money in proportion to how much money they can get customers to spend with them. Which often has something to do with how much customers like them.

[userbinator]

There are millions of ten year old QLC SSDs

In 2014 QLC was nothing but a research curiosity. The first QLC SSD was introduced in 2018:

https://www.top500.org/news/intel-micron-ship-first-qlc-flas...

You have to also remember that people buy storage expecting it to last. I have decades-old magnetic media which is tiny but still readable.

[AnthonyMouse]

QLC has shipped in flash storage devices since 2009:

https://www.slashgear.com/sandisk-ships-worlds-first-memory-...

But that it doesn't really matter what people were using 10 years ago is the point. Devices from that era are of negligible value even if they're perfectly operational because they're tiny and slow.

The point you raise is a different one -- maybe you have an old device and you don't want to use it, you just want to extract the data that's on it. Then if the bits can no longer be read, that's bad. But it's also providing zero competition for new devices, because the new device doesn't come with your old data on it. The manufacturer has no reason to purposely want you to lose your data, and a very good reason not to -- it will make you hate them.