Western Digital and Kioxia announce 162-layer Gen 6 3D NAND flash memory chips

[vertigo]

As for the PRO, IMO the bigger difference isn't the endurance, it's the speed.
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They might claim it doesn't affect the performance (as ADATA did, but from what I could tell they were full of it with those claims) and maybe even genuinely believe that, or at least believe it's not enough to affect 99% of their consumers, but then they should be transparent about it and let the consumers decide for themselves.
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I'm the same with Amazon, but it's getting a lot harder. I actually spent half a day driving around to three or four local computer shops looking for something I needed (mSATA-USB enclosure), and none of them had it... I wonder if there's a block on sale of certain technology to your country.
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But yeah, it sounds like it's largely an issue of buying power, if each country is acting independently in that regard instead of the EU behaving as one large market.

I primarily work with small files. So, it's all about random access for me. Endurance matters to me when it comes to caching, scratch drives, memory swapping, that sort of stuff. To the extent that I even use Optane. In professional settings, some people can generate terabytes of data in a day. And then endurance really matters.

Frankly, SATA is plenty fast for office work. I guess the biggest benefit an ordinary consumer can get from fast NVMe drive is loading in games. They probably don't have a fast enough Internet connection or NAS to see the difference when downloading/ copying. Even their home LAN is probably not fast enough. How many people have 10 GbE or something even better in their home?

Fortunately, around here, all the shops with computers/ electronics worth a dime are on the Internet, they have their e-shops, I can see their inventory across the country, they participate in product comparison sites, so I don't have to go blind. Often, they don't have the part in a store, it's in a warehouse. It can be in a store within hours, but you have to place the order first. We have logistics networks where one store can send a product to a participating, but unrelated store for you to pick up locally that's cheaper than post (great for small stores in small towns). Recently, I was building a PC for a friend, it was a wonderful winter day and so I made a walk out of it (they all happened to be in the same direction). 25 km loop, five stores, under five hours, I did over half of the distance through wooded parks, the rest was mostly in quiet streets. Life is good. :-) I placed orders in the morning and computer was built in the afternoon. They were not easy to get components either, hence why five stores instead of one (among them, 4750G which is currently offered by only one store in the entire country and they had to get it from their supplier as they just sold out their stock before I could place an order).

I think it's the seller who can limit where an item ships. I think it's mainly related to shipping. They're just not interested in dealing with it. Or perhaps they don't want to deal with warranty across border. I have certainly encountered German e-shops that don't ship into all EU countries (not even all Schengen countries).  And they're typically large. The small ones actually tend to be flexible. There are some tax implications for the bigger players (based on volumes delivered into individual countries). We're both in the EU and it's not like I'm buying explosives. :-) There is no legal problem. Amazon DE in general does ship. Funnily enough, I can buy a firearm in Germany and have it shipped home. And on the other hand, there are German e-shop that have language mutations of their website to attract more cross-border business. SK Hynix has, for whatever reason, decided not to. They're new to SSDs and they're probably still in the process of rolling out. I can get RAM from SK Hynix locally so they have distribution channels. It looked like even in Germany, Amazon was the only place that had P31.

It's really not about acting, we get treated that way. And I think languages really play a big part of that. From both sides - it's more difficult to build pan-EU presence, but it's also more difficult for people to shop around the entire EU. It's hard to shop in Spain when you don't know Spanish. And try reaching out to them for help. We've got almost as many official languages as countries. There're many chains that are pan-EU. But not really in consumer electronics. And even pan-EU presence doesn't necessarily mean same prices. I remember a British brand I liked, they set-up a local branch, the British website started redirecting me to a local one, they started refusing fulfilling orders placed with the British one if you managed to get around that geo-IP nonsense. I would happily buy from the local store... if only it wasn't almost twice as expensive as in London. Given how cheap airline tickets were, it was ridiculous. That was an extreme example but it suits many sellers to have EU divided. To have different prices or to even offer different quality in different countries. You can get into a ridiculous situation where you're paying more money for a lower quality. Typically, excuses involve something like differing tastes.

I agree random access is more important, because that's what really drags drives down and most people will rarely, if ever be able to take advantage of the read and write speeds. For me, IOPS are the most important thing, though, and the biggest benefit to NVMe, and why that's all I'll use for a system drive. This is because when I used a SATA SSD, it would get bogged down and Windows would run poorly, which is when I realized just how terribly Windows is coded, that is more so than I already knew, and that's saying something. Since switching to NVMe, I haven't had this issue, even when doing multiple intensive tasks simultaneously. But yeah, for most people, i.e. those doing office work, email, etc, SATA is more than enough. As for professionals needing endurance, sure, but that's a fairly niche requirement, too, and even then one needs to consider whether they should spend the extra money on a drive with higher endurance or save that money to put toward a new, faster, larger drive in a few years. For example, even an EVO+ would probably last said professional at least a couple years. Say they paid $350 for it instead of paying $500 for the PRO. In two years, when they're nearing the EOL of the EVO+, that $150 saved could be put toward, possibly even covering the majority of the cost of, a drive twice the capacity, faster, and/or with higher endurance.

It'll be interesting to see how long, if ever, the SK hynix drives become available for you. It's definitely a bit strange how things are limited to or from certain regions and countries.

What I meant with the EU is that while many countries have grouped together in some senses, they clearly haven't taken appropriate steps to make the EU function as one large market in order to increase their buying power and help control prices. And it was my impression that a large percentage of Europeans speak English--at least that's what I experienced even 20 years ago, except, fittingly based on your example, Spain, where it seemed almost no one did--which I would expect would help enable transnational trade within the EU.

[NikoB]

13-15$ for 1TB on HDD today?! No same prices. It unreal. Real prices - 35$ for WD Purple (3 year warranty, as my old WD Green 2010-2011). No changes in prices for 10 years!!!

[vertigo]

13-15$ for 1TB on HDD today?! No same prices. It unreal. Real prices - 35$ for WD Purple (3 year warranty, as my old WD Green 2010-2011). No changes in prices for 10 years!!!

As discussed between myself and _MT_, the prices clearly vary significantly by country/region. I knew there were differences, but assumed they were similar, at least in the same ballpark. But the bottom line is drives have gotten significantly bigger and cheaper, those lower prices just haven't been distributed equally apparently. And that's definitely unfortunate.

[NikoB]

I can easily, with a link to the price analysis from Forbes (the average prices in $ for HDDs for 10 years have grown almost 2 times!) And a link to the web archive org, where prices for the same American NewEgg sellere are saved, for example, WD Green 2Tb/3 years warranty (65$ in 2011), now only WD Purplé is equal under warranty. You can see the prices for WD Purple 2TB (CMR) for yourself - 67.5$!!! Unlike the lousy WD Green(only 2 year warranty now!)/WD Red with SMR write technology, not normal CMR.

There has been no progress in HDD for 10 years in terms of availability to the average buyer of disks on the planet. Prices only rise, not fall. Earlier, according to Forbes, the average price of a HDD from 1998 to 2011 fell by almost 4 times, while the capacity increased 200(!) Times.

Now over 10(!) years the capacity has grown only shame 4-5 times, and the average price of HDD has almost doubled!

For an ordinary person, progress, when he for the same money, after 2-3 years buys a new HDD 2 times as large as the old by capacity and writes the contents of the old hdd to new hdd and there is still 50% free space for new data. It has been gone for 10 years!

Complete failure of the HDD industry. Or the collusion of producers with copyrists (content sales), for which torrent trackers are extremely dangerous, in order to drive people into the clouds and so that special services can more easily control citizens' data