It’s not disappeared. It’s just been priced out.
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2026
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I still have my price watcher for 8TB 2.5” drives at $320, intending to buy them when they fell to that price again.
Almost exactly 3 years later they are $1,440 during a sale.
Last year, one of the executives where I work decided they wanted an 8 terabyte SSD, and we bought them one, and it was like $800, and we were like, man, that is crazy. That's a halfway good deal for an 8 terabyte SSD.
Literally two months later, I remembered that and I was like, you know, I have a little extra money in the budget. I might want to upgrade. Yeah, it was like $1,800.
If the guy ever takes his eyes off his laptop for more than 20 minutes, I may swap him out for a two terabyte and just act confused when I don't know what happened.
I almost bought a 4TB for ~$400.
Wish i would have—now a 16g flash drive is that much.
No way. 16 gigs for $400? Where?
So there's this thing called exaggeration
MMW in the 2050s people will be ripping apart tablets from the 2010s for their base components and rigging together electronic monstrosities comparable to what we see African mechanics doing with old cars.
Start watching Cuba for more tips and tricks on how to make obsolete components run for decades.
in the 2050s
As long as demand is steady and predictable, I'd expect prices to ultimately be lower, because it reduces the costs for NAND memory makers by increasing their economies of scale. Spreads the fixed costs of manufacture over more units.
That doesn't solve things for those who need SSDs now, though.
IMO this whole AI/Data-Center/Chips debacle is because the billionaire class expects a long term, possibly permanent, interruption of the global chips supply chain. That's why they've pre purchased the next several years of supply.
Because once China invades Taiwan there will be no more chips. If they could outsource this shit to an African nation it would have 100% happened by now. Taiwan is a modern day Murano Island, which had a centuries long monopoly on glass making because of their population of highly skilled glassmakers. China can't just bomb Taiwan cuz it'd literally kill Taiwan's value as a chip supplier.
The billionaires have realized that the iphones and the algorithms are the only thing keeping them in power. If they don't build a subscription model for computing than people will solve all the problems capitalists hves been artificially creating.
china is not going to invade Taiwan, they have already seriously expanded their production capabilities.
Well, if they do it won't be because they want chips. So that's comforting.
I wonder how that could have happened.
Weird. There's a market, soon as they get weary of the sketchy funding.
It's funny. My company, us enterprise, just saw cursor claude bills.
We are now looking into open router Chinese models haha. And we are gonna switch for sure.