Thank you for taking the time to write and I couldn’t agree with you more. Feel free to jump in with similar educated comments whenever you get the urge!

TEN Years Later: 122TB SSD’s are a reality and soon double, but they are all QLC 3D-NAND based, and are mostly off limits to consumers, not only because of high pricing – availability is a big problem.
AI has changed the Landscape, and we are in a never before seen crisis, DRAM prices got up by 300% to 400% or sometimes more (for DDR5 RDIMM’s). HBM… the “VRAM” for A.I. GPU’s which eat up an extreme amount of wafers – they have up to 288GB of “on-chip” VRAM and cost easily 50’000$. The few big DRAM producers have contracts for years and there is simply no more left for the small people.
15,36TB NVMe PCI 5.0 enterprise SSD’s don’t cost 500$… they cost you about 7000US$ (April 2026) or more.
There was a technology which could have changed the SSD market forever, it was 3DXpoint aka Intel Optane, latency was reduced to near 10µs (write and read) the first generation (P4800X) had 30DWPD and later 60DWPD, the second generation (P5800X) was PCIe 4.0 and had a whopping 100DWPD, sizes maxed out at 1,5TB for the first generation and 3,2TB for the second generation.
It was based on some sort of chalcogenide based phase-change memory with an ovonic threshold switch, which changed electrical resistance to save data. It was much less complex in terms of memor y management, no DRAM buffer needed and is was faster than anything for many years. Only one core in the controller. Power consumption was high because of the memory chips power hunger.
But despite the high price of this new type of memory, Intel made a loss on every sale. The project was discontinued, and the entire memory division was sold to SK-Hynix, which created a new brand now called Solidigm.
SSD’s with 1DWPD or less are standard, 3DWPD are the highest you can get. 7,68TB to 15,36TB is the new sweetspot with up to 2TB per package/chip. SSD-controllers with sometimes more than ten cores.
There was a time (July 2023) when NAND was really “too” cheap, due to an overproduction. But they will not do the same mistake again…