Can't wait for the inevitable discovery that NAND chips are being price-fixed. You would think after the exact same companies price-fixed RAM and LCD panels that peoples radars would go off faster. You expect me to believe that the metals and neodymium magnets and now helium containing drives are cheaper to manufacture than an array of identical NAND chips? NAND chips which are present in a significant percentage of all electronic products purchased by anyone anywhere? When a component is that widely used, it becomes commoditized. Which means its price to manufacture drops exponentially, not linearly like the price drops of NAND has done. This happened with RAM and LCDs as well. When you can look around and see a technology being utilized in dozens of products within your eyesight no matter where you are, and those products are still more expensive than the traditional technology they replace, price-fixing is afoot.
I am open to being wrong on this, but I don't think I am. Can anyone give a plausible explanation why 4TB of NAND storage should cost more to manufacture than a 4TB mechanical hard drive does, given the materials, widespread demand for the component, etc?
"Apples do not cost the same as oranges, therefore oranges are being price-fixed" is not a convincing line of reasoning. The two technologies are very different and NAND storage is much newer, and has always been much more expensive than disk storage.
The correct thing to compare NAND prices to is other chips that are being fabbed at the same process node, by die area.
I am open to being wrong on this, but I don't think I am. Can anyone give a plausible explanation why 4TB of NAND storage should cost more to manufacture than a 4TB mechanical hard drive does, given the materials, widespread demand for the component, etc?