Give it enough money and the thousands of suitcases are going to organize themselves. Don’t underestimate how massive sneakernets can get, bulk of all baby formula consumed in China has been supplied like this, because nobody in China trusts to buy baby formula from local Chinese businessmen after the 2008 scandal.

Which customs, the Chinese customs? They certainly will not.

Yes, it is. But as you might imagine, an export ban on a consumer item is hardly watertight. Anyone can buy one and simply walk over the border. Who is there to stop that?

That’s fine. All other export controls leak too. Export control in the end is just an extra barrier you force a country to jump over and that extra cost causes them to be uncompeditive on global market. They will still be plenty compeditive on local market with their parallel imported consumer cards.

First of all, on all your HDD price graphs there is a clear downward trend.

Secondly the way you are making the comparison doesn’t make sense. On a device SKU level, a particular model of HDD is of course going to remain stable for the life cycle of that model because it’s a complete monolithic design, a HDD factory kitted out for a particular model does just that and nothing else.

A SSD drive on the other hand is just a repackaging of flash chips, if Crucial manages to buy cheaper chips that fit you bet they are going to use them. And the chip fab can make many different chips, not just one model so it’s not comparable economics at all.

What you need to do is compare price/TB on the current market, not of 3 year old devices.