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Comment by discodave | Hacker News Reader

One thing about HDDs is that the marginal cost to the manufacturer is basically constant regardless of size. It costs them just over $100 per drive to make a drive. The cost of making 6 or 10TB drives is all in the R&D. Large cloud providers buy drives in such large volumes that they get access to pricing that normal people don't which is why they can provide things like Youtube, S3 and Glacier without going broke.

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If it costs $100 to make an HDD, how are they selling 1TB drives for ~$50, and 3TB drives for ~$85? I sincerely doubt drive manufacturers are working with such terrible (i.e. negative) margins in the consumer space...

I think you're neglecting fabrication yield.

What's the marginal price on a part you can only make successfully one time out of ten?

I couldn't find info on SSD yields, do you know where to find it? I found that HDD factories generally target 97+% yield. So, if SSD yields are much lower, you bring up a good point.

SSDs probably have very very good yield because unlike a CPU if any parts are damaged they can just work around them.

They can even sell them as lower capacity drives. I'd be surprised is the yield was not 100%.

I was referring more to the NAND fabrication yield, eg:

http://semimd.com/blog/2014/01/29/3d-nand-to-10-nm-and-beyon...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/09/3d_nand_gigantically...

I'm making the assumption that NAND flash is binned and derated based on defects. ie, to make this drive, Samsung needs to fab 256Gbit dies. As this is on the leading-edge of their production capabilities, I'm guessing that the defect rate is not negligible, and that they accidentally make lower-capacity chips a significant portion of the time.

The pricing isn't much better than what consumers get. They can charge 200% of cost for the product, though.

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