And here we were only recently, waiting for 8TB to go on sale for ~$500.
For now I have enough NVMe storage, as I use it for work in progress before offloading to HDDs... but those too are going up in price...
It used to be popular to just say 'storage is cheap' to casually justify the massive amount of image generation possible with current imaging technology. But now, storage is NOT cheap!
For my client work, I keep all outtakes, which might comprise 75% or more of a job. Sometimes those are thousands of images. Having recently transitioned from 24MP to 45MP, those outtakes are taking up a lot more space. And they're already compressed CRAW. I might be outright deleting a lot more in the future. And/or adding a storage surcharge.
chez wrote:
Is it all photos or other things. How many images do you have under storage?
Looks like over a million, but about half of those are dead. I just don't know how to analyze it all.
I'd like to get down to 250,000, nto counting composities of 100-1440 images that I can't view naturally.
None of that is counting any engineering and design data from other sources.
It's mental. The Samsung 9100 is $1700 actual everywhere.
I have a feeling they will stop making 8TB M.2s and any hope of 16TB is not in my lifetime.
And 64GB of RAM is now about a grand.
EBH
Wow this is crazy, I wonder how long it's going to last? I'm so glad I stocked up on these right before the big increase, and that I never dumped all my WD Black spinning drives that I thought I wasn't going to use.
When I have seen deals at BH Photo I quickly bought the CFexpress and micro SD cards. I paid $532 for a 2-pack of ProGrade 1TB Cfexpress cards in December that are now selling for $899. I could have waited but decided it was best to buy them in advance.
elkhornsun wrote:
When I have seen deals at BH Photo I quickly bought the CFexpress and micro SD cards. I paid $532 for a 2-pack of ProGrade 1TB Cfexpress cards in December that are now selling for $899. I could have waited but decided it was best to buy them in advance.
It seems like there is some disparity in the cost of NAND flash. A good 1TB M.2 SSD is about $200. A good Type B is about $500. Even if the ratio is 2x the prick increase of NAND flash should not be as much on the finished product.
I don't think it's back down to where these cards were priced prior to ~Sept. 2025, but certainly a lot closer. Too bad though it's Type A (initially I misread it as Type B)...
Even hdd's have gone up over the last year. Doubled or so in general though not all of them.
WD red not too bad not sure if its 5400 rpm though
If you didn't like the environmental cost of water and power usage, in addition to your electric bill going up, to begin with , storage cost is one other reason not to like AI
New build already delayed for years by ridiculous GPU prices, now this. Seeing a new build out of reach, I decided last December to get 2x4GB DDR3 ($32 CAD) and a 4TB Seagate Ironwolf ($120CAD) to add to my computer. Going from 2x2GB to 2x4GB RAM and being able to offload many programs, virtual memory, and files to a secondary drive really speeded up my computer a lot. Despite being 5400rpm, the Ironwolf is actually 2x faster (~100MB/s) than the primary drive (2007-2008 640GB Barracuda, ~100MB/s).
I actually been thinking maybe I will get Macbook Air M5 for editing since they doubled base config SSD to 512GB. The 10-core GPU and 1TB SSD config ($1800 CAD) seems just right for my needs. I will still eventually need to build a Windows machine for gaming though.
Best to buy only what you need for today and avoid faster cards unless actually needed. My new Mini 5 Pro drone works best with V60 micro sd cards for 4K at 60 fps but the V30 one are OK with my Mini 4 when shooting at 4K at 30 fps.
Today, March 31, B&H has some 'deals' on memory products.
Thinking back to the recent good old days when we were waiting for quality 8TB NVMe drives to come down to $500...
I mean, if they can give a $2150 discount on this drive for one day, they can do it every day and they're still making 2x what it was going for 6-8 months ago. But I guess AI datacenters are paying a lot more?
Digging through the deals and actually there are a few that are 'OK' relatively speaking. Such as Delkin Black 512GB CFe Type B for $300 (probably inflated about $120 from 6 months ago and still more than what I paid for a 4TB SN850X NVMe at that time) and an Ultrastar 26TB HDD for about $400.
The large M.2s may be discontinued soon enough. I doubt the 8TB are selling much and even the 4TB are low volume. Datacenters are using EDSFF (E1 and E3 families) lately in addition to the older U.2/U.3 SSDs. But the shortage is in NAND flash.
Too bad though it's Type A (initially I misread it as Type B)...