I expect to see a rise in SSD form factor home NAS boards & enclosures. The pain-point right now is the PSU. If its built in it usually incurs the fan.
If you want actually decent performance, you need a board with real I/O available (like PCI-E and SATA). And full speed gigabit, if you want to be able to access your data at reasonable speeds.
And if you want it to be quiet + cool your drives, that costs money. Not to mention the software — Is this bare metal or does it come with a base OS? Does the vendor offer driver support or are you stuck with ancient Debian?
What about manufacturing volume, is it 1000 units or 10 million units?
Those all will influence the price, especially for something fairly niche. ;)
I wonder if there is demand. People go crazy about their data, and the way they "protect" it is with fancy bits of metal, not reed-solomon codes.
I have found 3D printing very fruitful for all of my one-off enclosure needs. For larger things (i.e., 100 hard drives, not O(10) SSDs) I recommend looking into bending sheet metal. This is a technique that I just learned about and it's been eye-opening. Everything in the world is bent sheet metal. And the CAD skills you learn doing 3D printing translate nicely to sheet metal.
I definitely felt the same way when I was shopping for my first NAS. A two-bay Synology ran about $300 for new on Amazon and I just couldn't figure out why it was so expensive.
A few months later I picked one up used on Ebay for $120, and after using it for a few weeks, I can now report why these cost so much.
The amount of software that comes on this thing is absolutely mind blowing. I was able to set up a bidirectional sync to my cloud drive, differential backups, compressed folders for archival, and a backup to Glacier for off-site backup without writing a single line of code.
With a bit of additional digging into their package center, I found out I could install Docker & run GitLab on the NAS, along with a bunch of other self-hostable software.
I realize I could have probably built my own NAS and used FreeNAS for a fraction of the price of buying new, however the amount of time that would have spent configuring/debugging/setting up FreeNAS makes the vendor-purchased NAS a much better investment.
But those features weren't in your original specification ( 'I need a NAS enclosure' ) so why pay for them?
The manufacturers know that plain mechanical enclosures have very low margins so they implement features that are perceived-needs ( 'oh that sounds cool!' ) and crank the margins by hundreds of per cent.
I haven't dealt with hard drives in a decade. hashtag blessed. but more like hashtag priorities as there are plenty of things I didn't spend that extra few hundred dollars on.
Apple charged multiples of the market price when they were installing user upgrade able consumer grade 2.5” HDDs into their laptops, this won’t stop them.
I hate the fact that in the year of our lord 2020, Apple is still selling new iMacs with HDD, and to add insult to injury, charges an arm and a leg to upgrade to SSD. SSD should not be an upgrade in 2020. It should be the base level default. If they want to allow upgrading to Optane or something else, fine; but not SSD. Apple is so behind I feel like a parody twitter account similar to Internet Explorer one is in order.
Apple products are not just worth the sum of their components, they are an “experience” unto themselves.
I type that both sarcastically and with complete sincerity. Apple is vertically integrated, which puts their products in a different class than Intel/Windows, ARM/Android. If you’re an Apple user you’re not worried necessarily about the CPU or memory, your concern is whether you can run the Mac OS or iOS and the ecosystem that goes with it. So Apple doesn’t have to compete on price for its hardware, but rather on other intangibles.
Agreed. I’m just pointing out that the price that Apple charged and the underlying price of the components is poorly correlated. Apple will charge what you’ll pay, not what it costs to produce.
Meanwhile, high-end 1 TB drives -- e.g. Samsung 970 EVO, ADATA XPG SX8100/SX8200 -- are if anything more expensive now than they were 6 months ago, ~175 EUR. At least where I live.
The price just shot up from $97.99 to $250+ in the past few minutes (Amazon algo due to sudden interest?) and the post was updated with a link that shows ALL SSD drives.
The fact still remains, SSD prices for 1TB drives have dropped significantly.
At the end of 2019, everyone was expecting the NAND flash memory market to be on its way toward a shortage in 2H2020, and the major oversupply that pushed prices so low was over. When the coronavirus hit, it was initially unclear whether it would do more to depress supply or demand, so price trends weren't very consistent (especially with lots of stuff going temporarily out of stock). Now the picture seems to be that NAND production hasn't been slowed much but demand is way down, especially for client/consumer drives (as opposed to server SSDs).
Amazing. I remember the original Zip drives (and Jaz drives after that) and the price point was somewhere around $200 for 100MB. Would be nice to see this sort of progress in quality and price in, say, healthcare.
Cheap QLC (not the DRAM-less crap) was sub-$100 per TB last year (closer to $90/TB). This is not the first time flash has crossed this particular arbitrary price threshold.
This seems like a straight up ad with affiliate links. The price of SSDs has been going down for months, and if anything they went up since the pandemic began. You can check the price history of popular ones on camelcamelcamel to confirm.
I'm thinking about putting an NVMe SSD in my Haswell-based desktop from 2013. The BIOS can't boot from NVMe directly, but I should be able to install Clover EFI on a flash drive, and mount it to an internal USB header.
However, the idea is mildly ridiculous because I only have PCIe 2.0 x1 slots available (and one 3.0 x16 slot for the GPU), which is limited to 500 MB/sec, compared to SATA-III at 600 MB/sec.
Most NVMe drives support PCIe 3.0 x4, which is 3940MB/s. It'd be nice if I could bond two of the x1 slots into an x2, but that would require exotic hardware and chipset support.
A basic x1 -> M.2 adapter is $5 on AliExpress, so I'm going to run at 500 MB/sec for the heck of it.
Check out diskprices.com for a great resource that’s not just ads. I found out about it via HN originally and use it often when making purchases or suggesting purchases to others.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 81.4 ms ] threadRaspberry PI and a bit of plastic.
And if you want it to be quiet + cool your drives, that costs money. Not to mention the software — Is this bare metal or does it come with a base OS? Does the vendor offer driver support or are you stuck with ancient Debian?
What about manufacturing volume, is it 1000 units or 10 million units?
Those all will influence the price, especially for something fairly niche. ;)
I have found 3D printing very fruitful for all of my one-off enclosure needs. For larger things (i.e., 100 hard drives, not O(10) SSDs) I recommend looking into bending sheet metal. This is a technique that I just learned about and it's been eye-opening. Everything in the world is bent sheet metal. And the CAD skills you learn doing 3D printing translate nicely to sheet metal.
A few months later I picked one up used on Ebay for $120, and after using it for a few weeks, I can now report why these cost so much.
The amount of software that comes on this thing is absolutely mind blowing. I was able to set up a bidirectional sync to my cloud drive, differential backups, compressed folders for archival, and a backup to Glacier for off-site backup without writing a single line of code.
With a bit of additional digging into their package center, I found out I could install Docker & run GitLab on the NAS, along with a bunch of other self-hostable software.
I realize I could have probably built my own NAS and used FreeNAS for a fraction of the price of buying new, however the amount of time that would have spent configuring/debugging/setting up FreeNAS makes the vendor-purchased NAS a much better investment.
The manufacturers know that plain mechanical enclosures have very low margins so they implement features that are perceived-needs ( 'oh that sounds cool!' ) and crank the margins by hundreds of per cent.
I haven't dealt with hard drives in a decade. hashtag blessed. but more like hashtag priorities as there are plenty of things I didn't spend that extra few hundred dollars on.
I type that both sarcastically and with complete sincerity. Apple is vertically integrated, which puts their products in a different class than Intel/Windows, ARM/Android. If you’re an Apple user you’re not worried necessarily about the CPU or memory, your concern is whether you can run the Mac OS or iOS and the ecosystem that goes with it. So Apple doesn’t have to compete on price for its hardware, but rather on other intangibles.
"Good" drives like the Crucial MX500 were regularly found for $100 during the second half of last year Prices jumped and are slowly coming back down.
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B077SF8KMG
I initially misread the domain as 'anandtech.com', and the logo sure seems like it would be happy to be mistaken for AnandTech's. The site also carries explicit adverts like https://arador.com/how-to-earn-176-in-under-an-hour-by-learn... .
The fact still remains, SSD prices for 1TB drives have dropped significantly.
However, the idea is mildly ridiculous because I only have PCIe 2.0 x1 slots available (and one 3.0 x16 slot for the GPU), which is limited to 500 MB/sec, compared to SATA-III at 600 MB/sec.
Most NVMe drives support PCIe 3.0 x4, which is 3940MB/s. It'd be nice if I could bond two of the x1 slots into an x2, but that would require exotic hardware and chipset support. A basic x1 -> M.2 adapter is $5 on AliExpress, so I'm going to run at 500 MB/sec for the heck of it.