An all-flash footprint prices that margin directly against the SSD market and because serving runs forever, every point of storage cost inefficiency compounds every day. Mixed-fleet tiering takes flash volatility off the table while keeping the hot data that drives training reads, checkpoint bursts and inference on NVMe. “Flash pricing has stopped swinging wildly, but it has settled at a level that breaks the assumptions most all-flash architectures were sold on. The Flash Volatility Index provides a transparent view into SSD pricing, tracking how flash media volatility translates into real-world cost exposure compared to the current HDD market. The Flash Volatility Index and Storage Economics Optimiser Tool is available at vdura.com/flash-volatility-index-and-storage-economics-optimiser-tool, along with supporting technical analysis.