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by el_snark 39 days ago
They haven't released details but I was able to find a Solidigm D5-P5336 122.88TB drive for around 40,000 USD, as a guideline. So ... more than that.
3 comments

Okay, so that 122TB drive costs about $330/TB.

I haven't bought a hard drive or an SSD in at least a decade (I get stuff for free, basically) but…that seems a bit high, right?

Seems like well-rated consumer-level SSDs cost around $250 for 1TB right now.

What accounts for the premium price/TB of these extremely high capacity enterprise-targeted drives?

> What accounts for the premium price/TB of these extremely high capacity enterprise-targeted drives?

Spare capacity, mostly. That’s why they have higher endurance. If you want to double the endurance of a given drive, tell the controller to allocate twice as many spare blocks and report less capacity than you would otherwise.

In this case, you are also paying a premium for the PCIe attachment instead of SAS, and a lot for price elasticity. You see, with drives like these you slash space and energy consumption in relation to HDDs by a large number, and that allows you to pay a premium for the device, because, at the end of its lifetime, it’ll have more than covered the cost difference in saved space and energy.

What accounts for the premium price/TB of these extremely high capacity enterprise-targeted drives?

The word "enterprise".

I fondly remember when i could buy a well-rated consumer-level SSD for a lot less per TB...
I paid $300 each for my last two SSDs, 4 TB Samsung 990 Pros.

They’re currently selling for $942.72 on Amazon.

> They’re currently selling for $942.72 on Amazon.

The price graphs of these are wild, wow. https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B0CHGT1KFJ

Looks like prices for NAND spiked at the end of last year, a couple of months behind DRAM.

Happy not to be building or buying any new computers these days.

What accounts for the premium price/TB of these extremely high capacity enterprise-targeted drives?

The extremely high capacity and the enterprise targeting.

Density, power efficiency, write endurance, sustained write speeds under continuous load, power-loss protection.
And out of band management, hot plug capable form factors, and a bunch of other things described in the OCP NVMe SSD spec.

https://www.opencompute.org/documents/datacenter-nvme-ssd-sp...

I was quoted $18K for a 3.7 TB Dell NVMe disk the other day. I'm gonna guess these drives are literally a quarter million each
> I was quoted $18K for a 3.7 TB Dell NVMe disk

surely you don't actually think that's realistic pricing?

What is "realistic" in this context?

It is very real, that is the price they quote. You can buy it through Dell at that price.

as in that it reflects market prices in any way. I feel like anybody who works in this field knows that Dell etc. rip off naive customers this way and you can either negotiate it back to reality or just buy 1 small drive and order your own separately
Various Dell prices from the US website:

  3.84TB SSD SAS ISE, Read Intensive, up to 24Gbps 512e 2.5in with 3.5in HYB CARR, AG Drive 
  Dell Price $8,825.13 /ea.

  3.84TB SSD SATA Read Intensive 6Gbps 512e 2.5in Hot-plug AG Drive,3.5in HYB CARR, 1 DWPD 
  Dell Price $7,893.91 /ea.

  3.2TB Enterprise NVMe Mixed Use AG Drive U.2 with carrier 
  Dell Price $6,596.39 /ea.
I don't see a 'write intensive' option (I only looked around for a few minutes), but I can imagine them being 2-4x those prices.
$200/TB is reasonable. $300 if it is VERY fast. That is just robbery.
You're getting ripped off. NVMe SSDs are expensive, but not THAT expensive. A 4Tb drive should be around $1k even with some "enterprise" markup.
Apparently $80k, not that terrible in comparison