>your core complaint is that you can't have difficult, expensive technology for cheap.
That's a circular way of putting it, where you incorporate "expensive" (the thing that is under question) into your argument.
His core argument is that it shouldn't be that expensive, and maybe they are using their monopoly / cartel power to fix the prices, so they can milk the < 2TB consumer market first AND charge way higher in the enterprise for "premium" drives that aren't.
That might or might not be the case (they could still be as expensive to manufacture as they claim), but price fixing is something that disk and memory companies have been found guilty of doing in the past (in courts et al).
His core "argument" is that it's fishy that a device can appear that has 16x the storage space. That is precisely what they said, so this really isn't open to debate. But that device will be unfathomably expensive. We all know it will be. It's meant for extraordinarily rich tech companies that need hyper-density, and has positively nothing to do with the consumer market.
What it has to do with the consumer market is that they have the ability to manufacture a drive in the same form factor as the consumer space, at a large enough scale to offer it for sale. That has a lot of implications for the capabilities of their manufacturing processes.
In the past (and I think still currently), the true "bleeding edge" of the SSD market is made up of drives that take up full rack units. So, if this 16TB SSD was in a funky form factor, or even just 3.5", it would make way more sense to me and be less fishy.
So now we're on to completely different argument #3, which is that you don't like the form factor they use.
Again, aside from the fact that it's a new manufacturing process of flash cells, which is rather an important point, the people willing to pay the big dollars -- enterprises -- didn't want flash in hard drive/SSD form. When you're paying 10s of thousands for an extremely high performance system, you don't drop it behind an abstraction of SAS/ATA, but stick it in a PCI-E slot to get extraordinary performance and direct access. The choice of form factor was targeting the market, just as the choice of how much flash to put in a SSD drive is targeting a market.
And the truth is that Samsung didn't even announce a price for this, and it's unlikely this iteration ever becomes a real product. They put it in an SSD case to get press because it's neat, not because it makes sense.
>So now we're on to completely different argument #3, which is that you don't like the form factor they use.
Please stop putting words in his mouth (first you dismissed his accusation of price fixing as "your core complaint is that you can't have difficult, expensive technology for cheap", which was far for his "core complaint").
And, no, we're not "on to completely different argument".
This isn't a rhetorical competition and he didn't put forward false argument to trick anyone.
He just explained further the reason behind his original objection.
I've put no words in anyones mouth. I have no idea why you keep responding while adding literally nothing of substance, but their first argument was that there's a conspiracy because how could densities jump so significantly, clearly showing that they were holding back. The next, in the face of the reality that the consumer market has no stomach for the price of devices with magnitudes less storage, is that the conspiracy is that prices are too high, making larger devices untenable, completely contrary to the first argument. The third is that the conspiracy is that enterprise flash devices come in non-consumer form factors (see points #1 and #2).
This is profoundly ignorant. Save trying to amble up to the high ground when you simply add more noise. It is the sort of tiring entitled nonsense you see on every Facebook post by Anandtech, everyone stomping their feet that they can't have a 2TB SSD for less than $100.
Actually, being the originator of the words in question, I do agree that you are "putting them in my mouth." At the very least, you seem to be inferring a lot of things which I did not imply or intend to imply.
The previous commenter is correct. I view all of these statements as clarification of a single argument and its originations. That argument involves no conspiracy theories, simply a suspicion of price fixing (that's not an outlandish suspicion, in my opinion. I mean...drive manufacturers have been found guilty of it before...)
I don't think it is a conspiracy that some enterprise drives come in odd form factors, you completely misread that part of what I said. My point was that, normally the most advanced enterprise drives come in strange (i.e. much larger) form factors. This is because they have not yet worked the size and power requirements down to fit the smaller form factor, which makes complete sense. However, this drive uses a standard form factor, which tells me it is not "bleeding edge." There are probably rack mount SSDs with much higher capacities than 16TB.
So, the reason it seems weird is that they have obviously passed that hurdle with the 16TB offering. They can now fit 16TBs of SSD storage in a standard form factor. It is odd because if they can fit 16TBs, and we assume that at scale, the variable costs are almost exclusively due to the capacity of the chips, why is there not a consumer drive even a factor of 4 smaller (i.e. 4TB) available? I understand there not being a 16TB drive...or a 12TB, 8TB, etc... available. But a factor of 16 seems oddly large.
That's a circular way of putting it, where you incorporate "expensive" (the thing that is under question) into your argument.
His core argument is that it shouldn't be that expensive, and maybe they are using their monopoly / cartel power to fix the prices, so they can milk the < 2TB consumer market first AND charge way higher in the enterprise for "premium" drives that aren't.
That might or might not be the case (they could still be as expensive to manufacture as they claim), but price fixing is something that disk and memory companies have been found guilty of doing in the past (in courts et al).