SSDs were held up in prices artificially for a while related to the memory price inflation that happened throughout 2018 and some of 2017. QLC was mentioned but prices are down across the board and everything in consumer land is down sharply YoY from that period (50%+ discount is fair). I’d expect some price increases coming up due to investor pressure for revenue.
What about SSD reliability? Did it improve in the last year or so?
QLC literally drops write endurance by an order of magnitude but most consumers won’t be hit by it. Most of the performance is from the SLC cache and it tanks once it gets full or with sustained usage. The bet is that won’t matter for 99% of users but most of HN is not that 99% so caution must be exercised when buying these SSDs.
Just this past month every local semi-tech store (think Staples, Best Buy, etc) had sales on SSD's that were nuts. I picked up a stack of 120 Gb HP drives for ~$20 each, and the 256's were not even $10 more. It let me put back in to use a bunch of good-except-for-dog-slow-spinning-rust systems I had lying around. Not complaining!
That was my reaction when I looked again.
You can get a 1TB WD Black nvme m2 ssd for less than half the equiv a year ago, bonkers.
QLC being intro'd, iirc, was the most recent inflection point.