this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2024
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I don't think anyone has much issue with our current write speeds, even at dinky old SATA 6/GB levels. At least for bulk media storage. Your OS boot or game loading, whatever, maybe not. I'd be just fine with exactly what we have now, but just pack more chips in there.
Even if you take apart one of the biggest, meanest, most expensive 8TB 2.5" SSD's the casing is mostly empty inside. There's no reason they couldn't just add more chips even at the current density levels other than artificial market segmentation, planned obsolescence, and pigheadedness. It seems the major consumer manufacturers refuse to allow their 2.5" SSD's to get out of parity with the capacities on offer in the M.2 form factor drives that everyone is hyperfixated on for some reason, and the pricing structure between 8TB and what few greater than 8 models actually are on offer is nowhere near linear even though the manufacturing cost roughly should be.
If people are still willing to use a "full size" 3.5" form factor with ordinary hard drives for bulk storage, can you imagine how much solid state storage you could cram into a casing that size, even with current low-cost commodity chips? It'd be tons. But the only options available are "enterprise solutions" which are apparently priced with the expectation you'll have a Fortune 500 or government expense account.
It's bullshit all the way down; there's nothing new under the sun in that regard.
The reason is transfer speeds. SATA is slow, M.2 is a direct PCIe link. And SSDs can saturate it, at least in bursts. Doubling the capacity of a 2.5" SSD is going to double its price as you need twice as many chips, there's not really a market for 500 buck SATA SSDs, you're looking for U.2 / U.3 ones. Yes, they're quite a bit more expensive per TB but look at the difference in TBW to consumer SSDs.
If you're a consumer and want a data grave, buy spinning platters. Or even a tape drive. You neither want, nor need, a high-capacity SSD.
Also you can always RAID them up.
For the context of bulk consumer storage (or even SOHO NAS) that's irrelevant, though, because people are already happily using spinning mechanical 3.5" hard drives for this purpose, and they're all already SATA. Therefore there's no logical reason to worry about the physical size or slower write speeds of packing a bunch of flash chips into the same sized enclosure for those particular use cases.
There are reasons a big old SSD would be suitable for this. Silence, reliability, no spin up delay, resistance to outside mechanical forces, etc.
Sure it makes sense: Pretty much noone, but you, is going to buy them, and stocking shelves and warehouses with product costs money. All that unmoved stock would make them more expensive, making even more people not buy them. It's inefficient.