Price fixing in the NAND market has been rife for years now. All the same companies that have previously been busted for price fixing DRAM, LCD panels, then DRAM again, are involved in NAND. There is no rational reason why SSD storage should be as expensive as mechanical storage, let alone come at a premium. No rare materials are involved. No exotic manufacturing processes are needed. It's just a stupid regular grid of NAND cells. They're used in parallel, so it's hard to make them slow, not fast. By every logical measure, we should be able to get 10TB SSDs for $100. Instead, we see mechanical hard drive manufacturers stuffing high powered intricately machined motors into helium-charged cases with platters coated with rubidium and other rare exotic materials now talking about adding lasers into the mix and somehow THAT is the cheap option for capacity.
It's really pretty absurd how far they're pushing their price-fixing, but I suppose it's been made clear to them that this time they won't be busted for it. South Koreas president closed the investigation into it shortly before being jailed for corruption, and I haven't heard anything about re-opening it.
The depreciation on the equipment used to make NAND would not come close to supporting the prices you describe. In a market with a small number of players, public disclosures of capacity adjustments are sufficient to "collude". But 10 TB for $100 would require a something like a 10x reduction in pricing. None of the memory manufacturers have margins close to that good.
We could fix part of the problem (and plenty of other problems besides!) by working on best-of-class open-source FTL (Flash-Translation-Layer) and GC (Garbage Collection) for raw NAND or other solid-state storage. This would essentially enable us to open up the "storage" market to essentially any sort of solid-state memory, irrespective of physical implementation; such that cornering that market by intentionally limiting production of NAND Flash memory alone would likely become infeasible.
It's really pretty absurd how far they're pushing their price-fixing, but I suppose it's been made clear to them that this time they won't be busted for it. South Koreas president closed the investigation into it shortly before being jailed for corruption, and I haven't heard anything about re-opening it.