Micron rolls out 276-layer SSD trio for speed, scale, and stability
20 comments
·July 30, 2025userbinator
jauntywundrkind
To ground these endurance figures a little more concretely, consumer drives will advertise 600TBW:TB, or 600 cycles! Starting at 10x that is a very solid starting place!
On the other hand, an enterprise drive like Kioxia CM7 will offer either 1 or 3 drive writes per day (for regular and write-intensive drive models, respectively), across the 5 year warranty. That's ~1800 cycles or just shy of 5500 cycles.
ggm
I purchased 2TB ssd for a home nas. I watched prices for 18 months. They didn't move an inch.
Prices for HDD do drop when the TB available rises but there seems to be a "floor" price.
For SSD, there definitely appears to be a floor price.
I am pretty convinced this is not cost btw. This is classic cost/price disjoint stuff.
The price is tracking people's willingness to pay.
Dylan16807
SSD prices cratered in 2023, then shot way back up, and have barely dropped since then.
Baseline name brand SSDs got down to about $75 for 2TB, and I'm not going to be impressed by anything until I see similar numbers again.
adastra22
Also the capacities for SSDs have barely budged. Many years ago I went all-out and equipped my PC with a 4TB SSD. Just last week I went SSD shopping for the first time in ages.. and 4TB was the largest drive anyone had. It's a few generations later and the new NVME/PCIe standards mean faster, lower-latency drives. But where are the 8TB, 12TB, or 24TB drives?
radicality
They exist but definitely more painful to use at a home setup since their formats are more server oriented, like U.2/U.3 or E1S and few others. And for course the prices - you can get 30,60 TB (and even more), but it’s gonna be >$4k.
And versus the normal M2 drives, the larger server grade are more annoying. For example, I got recently a 15.36TB Kioxia Cd6-R in U.3 format, for $1.3k, which is not bad for ssd prices. After getting the right adapters and fitting it inside a minisforum ms-01. It’s working fine, but it immediately reached its “critical” temperature (while doing nothing) so I had to attach a big fan and cool it. All the larger SSDs which are meant for server rooms will expect lots of cooling.
https://www.serversupply.com/SSD/PCI-E4.0/15.36TB/KIOXIA/KCD...
adastra22
Why not get 4x 4TB drives and stripe?
Dylan16807
There's a couple 8TB options, but with the twin constraints of M.2 size and price nobody is really bothering to go bigger for consumer parts.
And the technologies for fast connections to 2.5" drives keep failing to get a foothold in consumer products.
abdullahkhalids
Why do you think the price of SSDs should be close to cost?
As there are many consumer level producers (who all buy from a smaller set of actual producers), it may seem like the market is close to perfect competition (which would justify price=cost).
But actually there are many low quality producers that frequently burn those stupid enough to buy from them. And a few high quality producers who generally sell what they advertise. So if you are trying to buy a high quality SSD, you are buying from an oligopoly that have built their brands over the years. So they can charge significantly higher than cost due to this reason.
And I imagine that others can't drop their prices much lower than this price because then people get suspicious and don't buy it at all.
ggm
> Why do you think the price of SSDs should be close to cost?
Not close, but closeER and at least some evidence of tracking. That's what I'd expect if they were ubiquitous.
Some goods track commodity prices closely. Shrinkflation happens when you can't easily alter the unit price, chocolate bars are a good example. Not that we pay anything like as little as the producers get: there's enough competition that putting valhrona to one side, chocolate prices reflect commodity prices. Same with fuel. Same with ROHC compliant resistors. SMD components. PCBs. Batteries, led light bulbs. DDR memory.
Not SSD. There is no reason it must, this isn't the laws of physics. I just observe it doesn't. If there was more visible competition in supply of inputs, they MIGHT. But it looks like at best a duopoly or tri-opoly of inputs, and prices reflect demand a lot more. Supply isn't even close to demand, there's no surplus.
Those other things are somewhat peripheral. Not saying they don't have a role, but I don't think it's fundamental. I bought 6 "patriot" P210 and they get average to poor reviews for speed and reliability.
lazide
Eh, probably RAM’esque price fixing. Not that anyone is going to look too closely with all the geopolitical fuckery right now.
kijin
There is no consumer market for 4TB+ SSDs. There never was, and there probably won't be for the foreseeable future. Most non-technical people have been conditioned to store their data on their phones and/or in the cloud these days. When they need more storage, their first thought is to upgrade their cloud plan, not to open up their device and void the warranty.
Professionals like us know of course that the SSD is an easily upgradable component. But we also tend to know how to set up a NAS with 4x 18TB HDDs in a zfs pool that can saturate the bandwidth of any reasonable home network when transferring large files. So the market for professionals and enthusiasts don't always translate into a market for large SSDs.
wmf
The floor for hard disks is the cost of the case, motor, controller board, etc. The floor for SSDs is the controller and the PCB.
ggm
We're nowhere near floor cost in SSD because the cost of the PCB and controller is cents.
We're not even tracking the chipcost for the storage. There's no linear function between them in terms of numbers, or die space.
The price is just "the price"
elchananHaas
Not true. High end controllers need DRAM for caching indexes. That's at least a few dollars.
Flash storage is a commodity, we are paying close to the amortized cost of manufactured and sales.
dopa42365
Price/TB is nearly identical for ancient SATA and new "high-end" PCIe 4 M.2 SSDs. The cost is EVERYTHING except the controller and the PCB. Which would be the memory, shockingly.
ggm
Do you think they have a yield problem? The price on chips usually drops when the production tech matures. I could believe the fab lines are running smoking hot, but surely by now lower density fab in all kinds of economies could be making this tech.
Absolutely zero mention of retention for a storage device is disturbing.
The endurance figures seem to suggest anywhere between 6.6k and 11k cycles, which is both a wide range and unusually high for TLC flash - this is the normally expected range for decent MLC and 5 years of retention, so I suspect they're massaging the retention downwards to get those numbers.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43702193