The high price of entry level primary storage

[cbn]

I've noticed that prices for the cheapest level of HDD have actually increased over the last 2+ years.

Looking at some of the earlier Anandtech buyer guides hard drives were priced at $40 for 500 GB.

Two examples from late 2010 and early 2011:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4164/budget-system-builders-guide-february-2011/2
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4025/holiday-2010-system-builders-guide/2

Some comments from late 2011:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5005/holiday-budget-system-buyers-guide/4

In my previous buyers' guides, I've recommended 500GB drives that were available at every day prices of $40 shipped. Unfortunately, $40 500GB drives are not currently available from any of the major US internet retailers. How long these elevated prices will persist is anyone's guess, but from what I can gather, the supply disruption will last at least a few more months. It's possible prices will continue to rise, but for now, it's difficult to find 500GB drives for less than $50 shipped (day to day pricing). As much as it pains me to say it, you can save a few dollars by going for smaller capacity drives. For many basic users, 160GB might be enough storage space.

Some current examples from Newegg:

1. 3.5" Internal HDD pricing: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...TA%206.0Gb%2fs (The cheapest hard drive listed is $55 for mix of 250GB, 320GB, 500GB. Although there is a 1TB listed at $60)

2. 2.5" Internal HDD pricing: http://www.newegg.com/Laptop-Hard-Dr...80?Order=PRICE (Cheapest hard drive is $50 for 250 GB and 320 GB)

I've noticed some of the cheapest 2.5" SSD are breaking the $50 price point on Newegg, but the capacity listed is only 32GB--> http://www.newegg.com/Internal-SSD/S...36?Order=PRICE

I would just love to see some new form factor that lowers the barrier of entry for primary storage back down to $40 and lower. (Ideally much lower than $40). Anything on the horizon I should look out for that can do that?

 

[Concillian]

Hard drive industry consolidation + Thailand floods = Industry reset the "floor"

It definitely happened that way. One reason for a price war is to force a competitor into bankruptcy. Now that there's 2 primary competitors (plus Toshiba in a couple markets,) there's no incentive to push prices down in the low end drives. Both companies are shoring up their average selling prices.

The timing of the floods with the Hitachi and Samsung acquisitions was downright perfect for all of this to happen. Those $40 bottom end drives are likely gone for a long time... until an alternate (faster) storage medium can put some real pricing pressure on HDDs. I don't you'll be seeing what you're hoping for anytime soon. I'm no psychic though.

 

[ShintaiDK]

SSDs replacing HDs and HD volume dropping is not helping either,

 

[24601]

I'd say it's mostly that we are in an age of 1tB per platter 3.5 inch drives, with some lingering 750 gB per platter 3.5 inch drives, making any drive smaller than 750 gB in 3.5 inch form factor exorbitantly expensive per gB.

Same thing applies to 2.5 inch drives.

 

[corkyg]

Also, during that time frame the value of the US dollar has dropped - that makes the price appear higher. Overall, I say they are still pretty darn cheap.

 

[cbn]

I'd say it's mostly that we are in an age of 1tB per platter 3.5 inch drives, with some lingering 750 gB per platter 3.5 inch drives, making any drive smaller than 750 gB in 3.5 inch form factor exorbitantly expensive per gB.

Same thing applies to 2.5 inch drives.

That is a good point.

How about the floor on SSD pricing? How much room is left in 32GB and 64GB SSD for further drops?

Ideally I would like some cheap primary storage for Linux BGA Mini-ITX builds. As currently stands the primary storage is, in some cases, actually more expensive than the BGA motherboard itself. (This seems like an unbalanced relationship to me)

CPU soldered on motherboard.....cheap (super cheap when it is on blow out sale.)
Memory DIMM.....cheap.
Primary storage.....still expensive.

 

[Cerb]

How about the floor on SSD pricing? How much room is left in 32GB and 64GB SSD for further drops?

Practically none. We're already at a point where 120GB are underperformers, due to not filling up the channels/dies. 64GB will hang around, if just for caching drives and embedded, but they already seem to be shrinking in terms of what's available.

That said, except for caching and embedded, that's not a bad thing. The last thing we need are PCs and notebooks with 64GB non-cache SSDs inside. You can take whatever drugs you want to think it's OK (some people around here do), but it's generally a PITA--regular internal drives need to be 100GB+.

 

[cbn]

How about 32GB or 64GB eMMC?

How much would that add the retail price of BGA mini-itx board?

 

[RU482]

Also, during that time frame the value of the US dollar has dropped - that makes the price appear higher.

really? - http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/currency

http://pricedingold.com/charts/USD-2006.pdf

 

[24601]

How about 32GB or 64GB eMMC?

How much would that add the retail price of BGA mini-itx board?

You're basically installing your OS on an SD card then. (bad idea mmkay?)

 

[Cerb]

How about 32GB or 64GB eMMC?

How much would that add the retail price of BGA mini-itx board?

Good question. We won't find out, because having storage that is much slower than a HDD when a HDD is fast, would not go over well.

 

[cbn]

You're basically installing your OS on an SD card then. (bad idea mmkay?)

eMMC 5.0 will be a lot faster than an SD card according to this.

Samsung said the 32 GB and 64 GB models have a random read speed of 7000 IOPS (inputs/outputs per second), and a random write speed of 7000 IOPS. They also read sequentially at 250 MB/s and write sequentially at 90 MB/s. By comparison, an external memory card may read at 24 MB/s and write at 12 MB/s.

With that said, I have seen Anand write about some current eMMC here.

With all of that out of the way, how does the eMMC solution in the new Nexus 7 stack up? Sequential read performance continues to be quite good for such a small/lower power device. Sequential write speed isn't terrible either. Even random read performance looks solid. It's random write performance that just needs work across the industry. We realistically need to probably be at 10x where we are today in random write performance, perhaps a bit lower if the storage makers can focus on IO consistency/minimum sustained IOPS.

 

[cbn]

Anandtech on SanDisk iNAND extreme for Bay Trail:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7347/sandisk-announces-optimized-inand-extreme-emmc-for-bay-trail

We've started looking more closely at the embedded storage used in smartphones and tablets, and have mostly come away disappointed. Thankfully there appears to be some progress being made in the space. I remember being relatively impressed with the behavior of the eMMC in Intel's Bay Trail FFRDs at their benchmarking event a week and a half ago. The IO performance wasn't perfect, but it was definitely much better than I had been expecting.

Today SanDisk announced that it will be bringing an optimized version of its iNAND Extreme solution to Bay Trail tablets. Architecturally iNAND Extreme is a combination of NAND and eMMC controller in a single package. The device supports eMMC 4.51 (HS200) and uses SanDisk's own 19nm MLC (2bpc) NAND. Capacities go all the way up to 128GB for a single device, which SanDisk arrives at by stacking 16 x 64Gbit 19nm MLC NAND die.

Sustained performance isn't too shabby. SanDisk promises sequential reads/writes of up to 150/45MBps and 4KB random read/write speeds of up to 4K/800 IOPS. I suspect these numbers are based on the largest configurations, but I would expect similarly good performance even for the 64GB and maybe even 32GB versions. The 4KB random write results are sustained, not peak, and are measured by looking at performance across a 1GB LBA range. In the case of the 128GB drive that test leaves a ton of spare area, which helps explain the relatively good performance compared to what we're used to in the market. I'd love to see true worst case scenario performance for SanDisk's iNAND. The promised sequential read performance is outstanding. We've seen mobile devices break the 100MB/s sequential read barrier, but none have hit 150MB/s yet. Sequential write performance is also pretty good.

The Bay Trail optimizations come via some custom tuning on the firmware. I suspect Intel has its own performance targets and behaviors it wants to encourage on Bay Trail tablets and SanDisk is likely just responding to those requests. You can also find iNAND Extreme on other, non-Intel platforms as well.

Samsung eMMC 4.5 specs as a comparison can be found here.

 

[cbn]

Some fast SD cards with 260MB/s read and 240MB/s write coming in October:

http://gizmodo.com/these-are-the-worlds-fastest-sd-cards-for-now-at-lea-811597534

Some fast (up to 160MB/s read and up to 150MB/s write) models already out:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...&SID=u00000687 64 GB Toshiba SD ( $259.99 on Newegg)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820168054 (32 GB Toshiba $139.99 on Newegg)

$259.99 for 64GB and $139.99 for 32GB (At $4+ per GB it isn't cheap)

Good news, though, is if a person drops down to a slower, but still respectable speed of up to 95MB/s Read and up to 60MB/s write the price drops considerably.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...9SIA12K0TH8902 64GB Toshiba $66.95 on Newegg)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...9SIA12K0TH8898 32GB Toshiba $41.95 on Newegg

Unfortunately, the 95MB/s read and 60MB/s write 64GB and 32GB SD cards are still rather expensive, but I wonder if there is potentially much more room here (compared to SSD) for the a lower price floor?

 

[cbn]

Some of the fast usb 3.0 64GB flash drives I found on Newegg:



Corsair Voyager GS--> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820233560

(up to 260 MB/s read and up to 70 MB/s write, $74.99 plus .99 shipping)



ADATA Dashdrive Elite UE700--> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820211749

(up to 200 MB/s read and up to 95 MB/s write, $64.99 plus .99 shipping)



Patriot Supersonic Rage XT--> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820220791

(up to 180 MB/s read and up to 50 MB/s write, $54.99 plus .99 shipping)



ADATA N005 Pro---> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820211576

(up to 180 MB/s read and up to 90 MB/s write, $48.99 plus .99 shipping)



Mushkin Enhanced Ventura Plus--> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820226378

(up to 200 MB/s read and up to 90 MB/s write, $44.99 plus .99 shipping)



Silicon Power Marvel M60---> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820301046

(up to 180 MB/s read and up to 85 MB/s write, $44.99 plus free shipping)






Cheapest 64GB usb 3.0 flash drive listed on Newegg:



Silicon Power Marvel M01 ---> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820301233

(No speed listed, $39.99 plus .99 shipping)

 

[cbn]

Some fast usb 3.0 32GB drives on Newegg:




Patriot Supersonic Rage XT---> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820301045

(up to 180 MB/s read and up to 50 MB/s write, $37.99 plus .99 shipping)





Corsair Voyager GT----> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820301045

(up to 190 MB/s read and up to 40 MB/s read, $36.99 plus .99 shipping)





Silicon Power Marvel M60---> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820301045

(up to 180 MB/s read and up to 85 MB/s write. $36.99 plus .99 shipping)





ADATA Dashdrive Elite UE700 ---> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820211748

(Up to 190 MB/s read and up to 50 MB/s write, $25.99 After rebate with free shipping)





Mushkin Enhanced Ventura Plus----> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820226367

(Up to 200 MB/s read and up to 40 MB/s write, $25.99 plus .99 shipping)






After the $23 price point, the read and write slow down as the price drops lower. Here are two examples:


Team F108 32GB---> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820313156

(Up to 54 MB/s read and up to 30 MB/s write, $22.99 plus .99 shipping)


Team Color Turn----> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820313252

(up to 54 MB/s read and up to 30 MB/s write, $22.99 plus .99 shipping)




Cheapest usb 3.0 32 GB drive listed on Newegg:

PQI Clicker ---> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820141628

(No speed listed, $17.99 plus .99 shipping)


Overall, this 32GB flash form factor has a respectable price floor of $25.99 for the fast stuff. This is much lower than the price floors for SD cards, 3.5" HDD ($55), 2.5" HDD ($50), 64GB SSD ($60). 32GB SSD ($47), "Fast" 64GB USB 3.0 ($45).

This is somewhat encouraging to me as I really believe some of us Linux users don't really need so much primary storage for a cheap BGA (Atom CPU, Jaguar CPU, ARM CPU etc) desktop machine. (If additional storage is needed a second hard drive can be added or external hard drive, NAS, cloud, etc can be used.)

 

[cbn]

Did some more research on usb 3.0 drives and found this article.

Those 4K random writes are very slow, with the exception of the San Disk Extreme 64GB (8.84 MB/s). The Toshiba Transmemory-EX 64 GB comes in second place (2.0 MB/s). Patriot Supersonic Magnum 64 GB comes in third (1.25 MB/s).

According to this Anandtech article from post #12 (in reference in the Nexus 7) :

With all of that out of the way, how does the eMMC solution in the new Nexus 7 stack up? Sequential read performance continues to be quite good for such a small/lower power device. Sequential write speed isn't terrible either. Even random read performance looks solid. It's random write performance that just needs work across the industry. We realistically need to probably be at 10x where we are today in random write performance, perhaps a bit lower if the storage makers can focus on IO consistency/minimum sustained IOPS.

10x the random write of Nexus 7 (.77 MB/s & .96 MB/s) = 7.7 MB/s to 9.6 MB/s. The only usb 3.0 drive in that Tom's review that fulfills Anand's 4K random write requirement (at least as I understand it) for a primary drive is San Disk Extreme 64 GB (8.84 MB/s in 4K random write). Unfortunately it is $72.95 on Newegg ---> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820171649

The 16 GB version of San Disk Extreme is much cheaper ( $30 on Newegg ---> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...xtension-kb-20 and $25 on Amazon --> http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008C7C5OW/?tag=extension-kb-20 ) unfortunately its 4K random write is only ~ 2.1 MB/s according to this review.

 

[Vinwiesel]

Probably has as much to do with the decreasing value of the dollar in the last few years as anything else.

Given the recent turbulence in the HDD market, they probably decided it wasn't worthwhile to make smaller budget hdd's when a typical platter is 500gb+ anyway. They'd practically have to short-stroke a single platter drive to make anything smaller.

Right now on newegg the cheapest desktop hdd is $54 for a 500gb, but $45 for a 500gb laptop drive. The whole world's gone crazy.

 

[cbn]

Price has dropped on the SanDisk Extreme usb 3.0 sticks---> http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Extrem.../dp/B008AF383S

16 GB: $21.99 FS
32GB: $34.99 FS
64 GB: $59.99 FS

 

[cbn]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7686/adata-at-ces-sf3700-power-banks-etc

More interesting perhaps was the XU41 SI-uSSD, a “micro SSD” designed to be surface mounted by system integrators. It’s a 16x20mm BGA package available in capacities ranging from 8GB up to 128GB (in powers of two), and ADATA rates it at 20K IOPS and 400/180MB/s read/write. In the right hands this could be a great solution for something like a tablet or laptop (assuming power use is where it needs to be), perhaps as a less expensive alternative to M.2 drives.

Glad to see low cost primary storage competition increasing.

I wonder how well this will compete against eMMC 5.0 (see post #12)?

From the description it sounds like it will be faster, but I bet It will be more expensive at the same time too. Still I'd think having something like this integrated is going to be a lot more affordable than buying a 32GB or 64GB mSATA drive.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Hard drive industry consolidation + Thailand floods = Industry reset the "floor"

It definitely happened that way. One reason for a price war is to force a competitor into bankruptcy. Now that there's 2 primary competitors (plus Toshiba in a couple markets,) there's no incentive to push prices down in the low end drives. Both companies are shoring up their average selling prices.

The timing of the floods with the Hitachi and Samsung acquisitions was downright perfect for all of this to happen. Those $40 bottom end drives are likely gone for a long time... until an alternate (faster) storage medium can put some real pricing pressure on HDDs. I don't you'll be seeing what you're hoping for anytime soon. I'm no psychic though.

Just a short footnote. It was obvious after the Tsunami floods that the prices spiked, and I think it was rumored that the price-level would last until the Thai factories cleaned up and rebuilt.

So -- the footnote. "Free markets." "Perfect competition." All being said -- nothing like that is near-perfect.

I buy navel oranges here in So-Cal -- locally grown -- for a price/lb that would be the envy of anyone anywhere else. About three or four years ago, I was getting them at $5 per 25-lb bag. Then, there were some winter storms -- bad weather -- and the price went up to $7. Now, they've gone up again . . .

While there are often good reasons why prices go up, price decreases never come close to the ideal. The trend is always increasing in the long-run.

 

[cbn]

Toshiba and Qualcomm set to introduce UFS 2.0 solutions in 2014:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7696/toshiba-and-qualcomm-set-to-introduce-ufs-20-solutions-in-2014

Since they first started showing up on the market, most smartphones and tablets have used eMMC flash storage. While in some ways similar to the NAND flash used in SSDs – and some devices have even gone so far as to call eMMC storage “SSD storage” – the reality is that eMMC has always been much slower than what we’re used to seeing in SSDs. UFS – Universal Flash Storage – is looking to become the successor to eMMC, and we’re very much looking forward to the host of improvements it brings.

Let’s start with a brief recap of eMMC. Initially designed as an open standard for flash memory cards, MMC (MultiMediaCard) has been around since 1997. eMMC basically takes that standard and embeds the controller and flash memory into a small BGA package for use in devices like smartphones and tablets, or anywhere else where having some flash storage might prove useful. Like most flash memory cards, MMC/eMMC has seen improvements to read and write speeds over the years, and more recently we’ve gone from 104MB/s (eMMC V4.41) to 200MB/s (eMMC V4.5) to 400MB/s (eMMC V5.0). However, eMMC is based on an 8-bit parallel interface, and scaling of interface performance is nearing its limits. UFS looks to move to a new standard.

Instead of a parallel interface, UFS uses a serial interface. Toshiba first announced support for UFS 1.1 and enabled chipset support last year, which has allowed vendor and OS support to mature. Now that they’ve had time to work out the initial kinks that new technologies inevitably bring, Toshiba is taking the standard to mass production with UFS 2.0 controllers and flash, targeting 2Q’14 for the release.

Already there are two options, HS-G2 and HS-G3, with two lanes providing an aggregate 5.8Gbps (~725MB/s) of bandwidth for HS-G2, and HS-G3 doubles that to 11.6Gbps (~1.45GB/s). Effectively that means nearly double and quadruple the interface performance compared to eMMC V5.0. Besides increasing the interface speed, UFS also brings full duplex operation (read and write simultaneously) and command queuing, which will both improve performance

UFS is a JEDEC defined standard, and as we move into 2014 we should start seeing devices adopt the standard in place of eMMC. Short-term, UFS isn’t necessarily superior in every area compared to eMMC – Toshiba notes that eMMC is likely to be more power efficient and cheaper right now, though the gap should narrow over time. Long-term, however, devices continue to need additional performance and eMMC may not get us there (4K video is one example cited).

In their press release, Toshiba specifically mentions working to enable UFS 2.0 on Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 SoC devices. Qualcomm notes that UFS will enter at the high-end of the smartphone and tablet markets, with eMMC continuing to fill the needs of the midrange and entry-level devices for the time being, but eventually we should see UFS trickle down to all markets. Now let’s just see about improving some of the random read/write struggles we encounter on smartphones and tablets….

Some cliffs for UFS 2.0: Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 utilizing Toshiba's UFS 2.0 are scheduled to go into production 2Q 2104. UFS 2.0 has a much faster interface (allowing more room for speed increases in the future compared to eMMC), Full Duplex (supports read and write at the same time) and Command Queuing. It also looks to be a replacement for eMMC, but Toshiba does admit eMMC still has an advantage in price and power at this time. (A gap which Toshiba would like to close)

Looking forward to seeing the comparisons between this technology and eMMC 5.0.

 

[goobee]

Both HD and memory prices have been going up and down (mostly up) in cycles during the past few years. With the PC/laptop boon pretty much subsided and fewer suppliers, the days of rock bottom pricing is probably gone for good.

 

[Lonyo]

Both HD and memory prices have been going up and down (mostly up) in cycles during the past few years. With the PC/laptop boon pretty much subsided and fewer suppliers, the days of rock bottom pricing is probably gone for good.

It's irrelevant for mechanical drives.
There's a minimum cost to manufacture a mechanical drive due to materials and the process. That's why the cheapest drives are all around the same price, but can have capacities from say 160-500GB.
You just cannot make a mechanical drive cheaper. You can reduce the cost/GB of platters but there's a minimum base cost just for the other stuff that isn't the platters.

That means the only way to reduce the cost of storage is for fast enough flash to eventually drop to a lower price than a low end mechanical drive. Eventually at the low end flash will be a better choice than mechanical even from a price perspective.

 

[goobee]

It's irrelevant for mechanical drives.
There's a minimum cost to manufacture a mechanical drive due to materials and the process. That's why the cheapest drives are all around the same price, but can have capacities from say 160-500GB.
You just cannot make a mechanical drive cheaper. You can reduce the cost/GB of platters but there's a minimum base cost just for the other stuff that isn't the platters.

That means the only way to reduce the cost of storage is for fast enough flash to eventually drop to a lower price than a low end mechanical drive. Eventually at the low end flash will be a better choice than mechanical even from a price perspective.

I agree with you that the law of diminishing returns applies. There are certain economies of scale that just can't be ignored. However, with so few suppliers, they will price their products at the high end of what the market will pay. There is no incentive to cut prices.