I'm sitting around .064 average. I'm also a holder of WBT, with an average entry there of .065. I originally thought, based on past transformative technologies, it likely that there will be one RERAM technology that ends up dominating, and thought I should have a bet each way.
I'm rethinking that now. The transition from floppy disks saw technologies like the zip drive, super drive and writeable and then rewriteable CD-ROMs duke it out, with all of them falling into dis-use when USB flash sticks became an affordable option. But there is an interesting difference now: all those competing technologies depended on compatibility with a particular removeable media. Since the advent of USB, there is a universal standard for connecting external storage that means there are, right now, several different technologies for removable storage that from an end-user point of view that don't require committing to one standard. You can have a USB flash stick, an external HDD, an SD card reader or now large capacity external SSD drives. Users can choose whatever suits their storage capacity needs and budget without worrying about compatibility. Similarly, for internal storage you can choose between and HDD or an SSD and they both plug in to the same interfaces on the motherboard. Point being, multiple manufacturers may end up bringing RERAM options to market, and end users may not even be very aware there are different underlying technologies involved. One product doing well will not neccessarily spell the death of others like it has with past technologies.
I'll also mention that we are way overdue for this. I just had to buy a new 4TB backup drive after my previous one, which I think is little more than 12 months old, started to die. There is no good reason for it to be failing other than that it is mechanical and the more we try to cram on these old mechanical magnetic drives the more failure-prone they are. I really, really wanted to replace it with solid state but A) that would have cost $2,000 - more than ten times what an HDD cost; and B) I'm not confident that flash-based SSDs can handle enough write cycles yet for a backup drive that is used to make hourly snapshots of my data. I also looked at the option of cloud storage, but that would have cost me $200 per month for equivalent capacity. RERAM should massively reduce the overheads for cloud storage services, bringing affordable prices to end users. We really, really need new technology in this space.
4DS Price at posting:
6.5¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
