While people from sunny Ireland are booking New Year trips to Vietnam for Christmas, some enterprising Vietnamese are doing business.
But not in tourism! They are buying solid-state drives that keep getting more expensive.
As you may know, after the collusion between memory manufacturers and AI market leaders, memory prices began to rise. Following RAM, NVMe drives have gone up in price as well.
One Vietnamese citizen decided to prepare for the coming price hikes and bought around fifty Samsung PM991a SSDs with a capacity of 512 GB.
Leaving his most valuable possessions in the care of his beloved son, he went home — and then noticed something was wrong.
His 10-year-old boy had tested every single drive! Not for speed in CrystalMark, but for durability — by bending them.
As a result, supposedly every device was damaged, and warranty claims will almost certainly be denied.
Today, drives with half the capacity — 256 GB — cost €83.
The destroyed ones were most likely worth around €130–140 each.
That puts the total losses at many thousands of euros!!! For Vietnam, where you can dine at a restaurant for just a few euros, this is an enormous sum.
It’s possible that some of the less severely bent drives may still work. And given current NVMe SSD prices, it might even make sense to desolder the working memory chips.
We’ll keep following the story.
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