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SSD Prices in a Free Fall

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201–210 of 336 posts

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#201
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if those sell simply because of their positions in the market. Is the average consumer knowledgeable to know whether they need 240 GB, 2 TB, or 6 TB? Or do they simply compare prices and sizes and choose whatever they think is the best value? A 2 TB drive might just be another example of the 2nd cheapest wine trick?

There are 3 reasons people need to buy a new computer- too slow, ran out of HD space, or too slow and ran out of HD space. It was true 10 years ago and even more true now. Backup your 32GB phone a few times and you're wondering where all the space went. It's more like insurance. You buy as much as you can afford. That's why it's painful to by a new MacBook Pro these days. 1TB is very expensive compared to the 1TB I c…

> It's more like insurance. You buy as much as you can afford.

Somewhat OT, but I have to say something about that. With insurance you are almost always better off buying as little as you can afford. The more risk you can afford to take on yourself, the better a deal you get on your insurance. This is why a company like Hertz doesn't buy insurance at all for their fleet: they can spread the risk across all their cars, so they self-insure.

In fact, there are some cases where the "better" insurance is always a worse deal. I've seen this in several employer medical insurance plans where there are two or three different levels of PPO plans with varying deductibles and premiums.

The last couple of Blue Shield plans I looked at were like this. There would be two PPOs with the same doctor network and such, so you could simply compare on the numbers. The more expensive plan offered lower copays and deductibles, but unless you have a large number of prescriptions and doctor visits, you'd never make up the difference - with the more expensive plan you'd be paying more every month regardless.

And in any case, the number you really care about on medical insurance - which seemingly few people pay attention to - is the annual out of pocket max. That's your worst case scenario cost-wise. If you hit the out of pocket max, everything is covered after that.

In the plans I looked at, both the cheapest and most expensive plans had the same out of pocket max. So in almost every case, people who sign up for the more expensive plan are simply spending more money for the same coverage.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's look at the sweet spots, because that's really what many people will buy: Best $/GB HDD on pricewatch.com: $0.024/GB for 2TB at $48.95 Best $/GB SSD on pricewatch.com: $0.387/GB for 240GB at $92.95 That's a 16x price increase, not 10x.

Yeah, 240SSD for The fact that it can take two internal drives (both SSD) is awesome - so having dual 240GB drives allows for plenty of space. I have a 1TB external that I glacerize my other stuff to. Also, get a Flickr account which can host your 1TB of pics for free (money for nothin')... and you wont consume space on your local box with pics.

If Flickr (or their publicly traded overlords Yahoo) decide arbitrarily for whatever reason one day you violated their TOS with an errant nipple or whatever, kiss a decade of professional archives goodbye.

No thanks. My photos live in four places, and two of them are owned by me.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#204
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, get a Flickr account which can host your 1TB of pics for free (money for nothin')... and you wont consume space on your local box with pics. Just make sure you understand the privacy repercussions of hosting your data on Flickr.

Are there any things to know about settings images to 'private' on Flickr?

Photos have lat/lon/timestamp in EXIF. You're uploading a track log to them.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#205

I bought my 180GB SSDs for < 50 cents per GB like 3 years ago and it's barely better than that right now. Storage in general has more to do with availability and demand than technology, there's plenty of times when they've gone up in price.

For me it's like the osbourne effect coming into play.. I would like to switch to full SSD, but I'm not going to do it until the price drops, which if enough people had the same idea, means the demand drops, so the price stays the same... repeat

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#206

Seems like a prime case for using a (bar/line/etc) graph to show the trend. I'm strangely disappointed in not seeing one.

That's because SSDs are still 10x the price of HDDs, have little more than halved in price the past year, and they're talking out the ass.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, Assassin Creed Unity required 50GB by itself. If Windows takes up 30GB, you pretty much need to wipe out everything just to play Unity on 80GB. I think 256GB to 512GB is the best bet for the standard consumer.

I just got a 250GB Samsung EVO SSD. Filled it up in a matter of weeks by installing some of my favorite games from Steam. I'm looking to add a 500GB to my build, but I should have STARTED with a 500GB.

This seems like a big waste. Why would you put games on a SSD?

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if Facebook released some stats, kinda like backblaze, about blu-ray durability.

I thought degradation of optical medium was already pretty well understood? (And happened on timescales generally longer than FB has been in operation)

There is Blu-ray compatible archival disk format that the manufacturers claim will last 1000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

I don't know how this claim could be verified in our lifetimes.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#209
post #202

This article makes a previously unasserted claim that Glacier uses tape. Is this accurate? What is the source?

It's often assumed that Amazon uses tape for glacier but that's actually unfounded. Amazon's keeping the details of glacier as a trade secret[1]

[1]: http://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bdx...

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#210

Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $350 Cheapest 1 TB HDD on Amazon: $40 Expecting a 10x drop in prices in 1 year is ludicrous. Even if the prices follow a pseudo Moore's law and fall by half every 18 months, you're looking at at least 5 years before they reach parity. And in the meantimg HDDs would have gotten cheaper; so expect even more time for parity. In other words: ain't happenin' in 2016.

I'd bet it's something more like a 5x increase in capacity for a 50% reduction in cost over the next year.

Doesn't sound as crazy when you think about it in that way.

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