Technology

Who needs computers anyways?

Just go outside and play with real people

glad i recently bought an SSD. it was expensive, and it will be more expensive in the future, damn :(

I got an old Nitro 5 with a rickity old 500gig hard drive. Will a Crucial BX500 1TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5-Inch Internal SSD be a good Christmas present for it?

Probably should get something while prices are somewhat more reasonable.

Glad that I recently bought a bunch of storage so that I'll be covered for a good amount of time.

Syrup of Squill.

AFAIK this has already been a problem, you can find Samsung M.2 SSDs for cheaper than Samsung SATA SSDs at the same capacity, because their cloud customers have all flown past classic SATA/SAS for NVME U.2 and U.3, which is much more similar to M.2 due to NVME.

I was planning on adding a big SSD array to my server which has a bunch of external 2.5 SAS slots, but it ended up being cheaper and faster to buy a 4 slot M.2 PCIe card and buy 4 M.2 drives instead.

Putting it on a x16 PCIe slot gives me 4 lanes per drive with bifurication, which gets me the advertised maximum possible speed on PCIe 4.

Whether or not the RAM surge will affect chip production capacity is the real issue. It seems all 3 OEMs could effectively reduce capacity for all other components after slugging billions of dollars into HBM RAM. It wouldn't just be SSDs, anything that relies on the same supply chain could be heavily affected.

AI has taken more things since it's big push to be adopted in the public sector.

Clean Air

Water

Fair electricity bills

Ram

GPUs

SSDs

Jobs

Other people's art and writing.

There are no benefit to this stuff. It is just grifting.

Aside: WTF are they using SSDs for?

LLM inference in the cloud is basically only done in VRAM. Rarely stale K/V cache is cached in RAM, but new attention architectures should minimize that. Large scale training, contrary to popular belief, is a pretty rare event most data centers and businesses are incapable of.

…So what do they do with so much flash storage!? Is it literally just FOMO server buying?

The leak comes after another report detailed that Samsung has raised DDR5 memory prices by up to 60%.

MF.. And why they wind down SSD production this time? Last time was 2 years ago, because the SSD prices were low and they wanted to raise them (which happened).

This bubble is going to become the entire market, isn't it. Until it becomes too big to fail because 80% of the workforce is tied up in it. Then it is allowed to pop, costing the western world everything, all going into the pockets of the super rich, and we get to start over.

Crap, I really wanted to buy a new external HD for my home server setup sometime soon.

I take issue with this forced distinction they are making

Micron, like Samsung and SK Hynix, already supplies memory chips directly to third-party brands such as G.Skill and ADATA. Even without Crucial-branded kits, Micron DRAM continues to reach consumers through other manufacturers, meaning overall supply remains largely unchanged.

Nobody ever officially suggested the Crucial supply was likely to shift to the other manufacturers for consumers. On the contrary people expect this to be a step towards a general redistribution of manufacturing capacity towards HBM for parallel compute products.

By comparison, Samsung exiting SATA SSDs removes an entire class of finished consumer products from one of the world’s largest NAND suppliers. Tom argues that this is why the Samsung move is “worse” for consumers: it directly affects how many drives are available, not just who sells them.

If you wanted you could make the same argument as for Micron. Who says the Samsung NAND couldn't be bought by other OEMs to make consumer SSDs. It's just as possible as the Micron supply shifting to other OEMs who make consumer RAM sticks.

To me neither are likely. The manufacturing capacity both companies are pulling from the consumer market in both cases is going to go to the higher profit margin parallel compute server market. Neither is worse than the other, they are both equally bad news for us consumers.