Who was the storage dollar daddy in 2017? S. S. D

Customer spending on SSDs finally ruled the storage roost in 2017 but vendors still shipped more than ten times as much disk capacity as flash. IDC numbers for the fourth 2017 quarter and full year, tweaked by Wells Fargo senior analyst Aaron Rakers, revealed the revenue crossover between the two tech types: …

[Nate Amsden]

Is that another way of saying

Flash is 10X more expensive per EB ?

Seems the spending on disk vs flash was about the same but of course disk is 10X more space.

I would of thought the flash premium would of been much less than 10X by now

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Is that another way of saying

It will remain like that for years to come for the simple reason that there is no incentive for the price of flash to come down. It is all a matter of one ups-man ship on the part of management - 'oh, we use all flash drives' - when disks will do the job adequately for far less cost.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Is that another way of saying

Indeed. I'm confident that over 90% of data stored on flash could be stored on disk.

The tricky bit is separating the stuff that needs flash and the stuff that doesn't, although there are plenty of options out there for doing that.

Then there's the hassle factor. For consumers it is generally not worth the effort, to save a hundred quid or so. Enterprises throw away millions on the stuff and pass it onto their customers.

[chrismevans]

TCO

The trouble with looking at raw media costs is that it doesn't give an idea of the overall cost of operation/ownership. While it makes sense to tier data as much as possible, the process of doing so is hard and can be expensive, especially when the profile of data changes over time. Sometimes it's easier just to leave the data in one place and take a hit on the extra cost.