I live and work by SSD alone. Regardless, its a rip off. Time for the prices to come down on them. Its just pathetic.
It might be time for you to learn a bit about physics and economics. NAND prices are at historic lows at the moment, and you're barely paying a premium over the price of the silicon itself when you buy an SSD right now.
The highest capacity MLC chips available in shipping devices are Micron's 20 nm, 128 Gb chips with a die size of 202 mm^2. Back of the envelope, they might yield 260 good die per 300 mm wafer with a tested wafer cost of $1700. That means each die costs in the neighborhood of $6.54 to produce. Those die currently have a spot price of $8.00, which makes for a pretty thin margin. However, a single 960 GB SSD requires 64 of these die, and connecting that many to a single controller is about the limit of what's reasonable in terms of parallelism for a consumer device these days. But first they need to have their backs lapped until they are paper thin before being stacked 8 high, wire bonded, bumped and packaged. The 8 finished packages then need to be paired with an 8-channel controller on a PCB to create an SSD. Now remember, just the NAND die alone cost Micron $418.46 to produce, yet right now you can pick up a 960GB Crucial M500 2.5" SSD from B&H for $449.99.
Why would Micron possibly do this? Because Samsung has 19 nm TLC NAND and will eat their lunch otherwise. By storing 3 bits per cell Sammy's 128 Gb TLC chips can pack the same number of bits onto a die that I'd wager is close to (but not smaller than) 170 mm^2. This means that from the same $1700 wafer they can yield 314 die at a cost of just $5.41 per die. So that Samsung EVO 1 TB 2.5" SSD that you can buy today for $509.00 is packing $346.50 worth of raw NAND silicon, but somehow Samsung and the channel might possibly still be making a couple bucks. Mind you, Samsung is the largest and most vertically integrated player in the space, making everything from the NAND to the controller to the finished product itself.
funny, i just got a special sale email from newegg with 240GB M500 SSD for $112 and a 500GB samsung evo for $270. while its nowhere in the same league performance as this monster, i really think the whole premium pricing on SSD thing is not as much a factor as it used to be. the constantly lowering price threshold on drives like samsung evo series go to underscore its not the same market it used to be.
while i agree this is for a niche market and priced to match, its no secret that LaCie charges an exhorbitant premium on their products. theyve been like that since the 90s. no surprises here.
I think you'll find that LaCie is a rather different company now that they're owned by Seagate. While they're still not shy about taking a healthy margin, it seems as though they at least had actual engineers working on this design, as opposed to just iconic industrial designers. And there is simply no way that LaCie's release price for this device can match that of the cheapest commodity SSD ever produced from a high-volume, discount e-tailer like Newegg.
2 * $270 + $180 = $720 (i.e. the cheapest this thing could reasonably retail for)
Now if you figure that this product could end up retailing at a 30% discount in the not to distant future, then LaCie needs to pad the release price (just like Samsung didthe MSRP on that 500 GB EVO was originally $369.99).
$720 / 0.72 = $1000
When you build in the fact that these are more rarified, performant and expensive PCIe M.2 SSDs, and you get a Thunderbolt cable in the box, the "LaCie tax" doesn't seem so bad after all.
$1299 = totally reasonable.
Flash prices are high because they are a semiconductor memory type, more like DRAM, not a magnetic media. However, the bigger problem is the end of Moore's Law. That's why hard drives still cost $80/TB after 6 years and DRAM still costs $5-$10/GB. Flash only has at most two generations of scaling left, so it will likely NEVER get as cheap as hard drives. (The only reason flash is as cheap as it is is because of MLC - being able to store 8 values per bit instead of 2.)
This is what the end of Moore's Law will mean for all of us - you'll still be able to buy cool things, but it will cost you big time. Ten times the storage will cost 10x as much as 1x the storage. And like the 1980's, people will think nothing of a $2,500 peripheral if it's high end. In fact, that will be the STANDARD price for high end peripherals. (Of course, I haven't adjusted $2,500 from 1985 dollars to now, so you can only imagine...)
BTW - get ready to start seeing high end components get physically BIG again, since density increases are nearly finished...
Don't worry; things will keep shrinking.
Going vertical will keep Moore's law chugging along for quite a while yet.
