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The progression in solid-state drives (SSDs) shows slow, unreliable, and "damn expensive" 30GB drives in 2005. Those drives were roughly $10/GB, but today's rack-mounted (3U) 512TB SSDs are less than $1/GB and can achieve 7GB/second performance. That suggests to him that by 2025 we will have 3U SSDs with 8EB (exabyte, 1000 petabytes) capacity at $0.1/GB.

Ignoring the limitations of physics, 8EB at $0.1/GB comes out to $858,993,459. I don't think there will ever be enough of a market to support the mass production of billion-dollar disks.



If the price per GB scales down to more "typical" sized drives, it still has interesting implications for filesystem devs.

And given XFS being the strongest of the Linux filesystems for large systems they will undoubtedly try and handle the high capacity drives and arrays too (relative to today).


On the other side of the spectrum, I am totes hyped for the day soonish when a 3TB SSD costs $80. Sooner rather than later. In the shorter term, I'm super hyped to see $200 1TB SSDs in the next year or so.


$200 TB SSDs is not what you should be excited about... sub-$400 400GB 2400MB/s consumer NVMe SSDs (Intel 750) is what's exciting.


Really hard to see trends from two observations :) I'd be curious to see more serious predictions.


You can guess at trends from the fact that most improvement curves tend to be roughly exponential. Moore's law is the most spectacular, but similar (if less extreme) ones have been found in everything from battery capacity to the maximum size of scoops in a hydraulic backhoe.

You can find verification and many more examples in The Innovator's Dilemma.




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