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SSD Prices in a Free Fall

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Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#221

Post by dangrossman »

rconti wrote: post #198
Amezarak wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I used to have some massive programs installed, a lot of digital media and video games at one point. Now Steam / GOG / Blizzard "stores" my games when not in use. Google / Apple / Pandora / Spotify "stores" my music. Amazon or Netflix "stores" my movies. How sustainable is this for the average consumer with most national ISPs moving towards bandwidth caps? I had to switch to business service because Netflix alone w…

Are they moving towards bandwidth caps? Comcast in the SF Bay Area has claimed a "suspended" 250GB cap for years and years. I get the impression that we're moving away from bandwidth caps.

Data caps on Comcast service are coming back. They started with Nashville and Tucson in 2012. The program's now expanded to Huntsville and Mobile, AL; Augusta and Savannah, Georgia; Central Kentucky; Maine; Jackson, Mississippi; Knoxville and Memphis, Tennessee and Charleston, South Carolina; and Fresno, California. They're testing two different plans: a 300GB cap with overage charges ($10 per 50GB) and flex-data plans ($5 discount for a 5GB monthly cap, and $1 per GB over the 5GB).

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#222

Post by fencepost »

hoprocker wrote: post #158
fencepost wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that SSD performance tends to degrade as the drive approaches full utilization - even if the actual internal capacity includes margin, you're probably best off avoiding approaching the available capacity. Heck, for the 250GB SSD I put in my primary laptop this past spring I intentionally formatted it to ~80% of the available capacity - that gives me plenty of space (~100GB free after all software & data)…

Does the SSD actually use this unformatted space? I know that SSDs from the factory have a lower available space than their nominal space, to account for the eventual dimishing quanitty of functional floating gate transistors (ie 240GB is made available in a 256GB drive), and that OSes usually recommend keeping about 10% of the formatted drive free (for paging iirc). Didn't know that about unformatted space.

I may be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that on SSDs the wear leveling is done over the entire flash capacity. the details of where data is stored are an abstraction layer on top of that unlike on a spinning metal hard disk where specific regions of the drive are allocated to particular partitions

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#223

Post by fencepost »

Daishiman wrote: post #175
fencepost wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that SSD performance tends to degrade as the drive approaches full utilization - even if the actual internal capacity includes margin, you're probably best off avoiding approaching the available capacity. Heck, for the 250GB SSD I put in my primary laptop this past spring I intentionally formatted it to ~80% of the available capacity - that gives me plenty of space (~100GB free after all software & data)…

This is also true for hard drives. Fragmentation and filesystem layout make performance of a 95% full partition on an HDD much slower than a 50% full partition.

Defragmentation and cleanup on traditional hard drives take longer when they're full for different reasons including the increased amount of data being managed and in many cases empty space being further away from the data being moved which will slow down moving of data to clear and consolidate free space. On a solid state drive the bigger issue is that there is a minimum size block of data that can be written in one operation. Having empty space available means that the drive can write data into that empty space without having to do garbage collection first.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#224

Post by dzhiurgis »

jegutman wrote: post #81
discardorama wrote: post #36

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.

Ah zeno's paradox. When the SSD matches the HDD price, in 28.5 months, the HDD will have moved, and so on and so on. Although at some point they'll probably just make many many fewer HDDs so the price will stop moving much. For any storage experts, will HDD still be preferable for long-term cold storage or are those even currently an unacceptable solution? Seems like cold storage might end up being more important ove…

Perhaps this is too simplistic, but I think it should be cheaper to build solid-state chip than mechanical device.

But this also reminds me LCD / CRT wars. LCDs were promised to be cheaper, but it took years to amortize the setup costs, but we got there eventually.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#225

Post by simplexion »

madez wrote: post #207
timboslice wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why wouldn't you?

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#226

Post by jordanthoms »

Vexs wrote: post #134
rorykoehler wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SanDisk . They have always been quick to replace them. The last one they even upgraded to a much more expensive model which makes me think the issue was being widely experienced. If I were to buy today I would buy Samsung as I have heard they are much more durable. Incidentally it was a Samsung phone that died though I don't know who made the memory for that.

There was a review of SSD lifespan a while back, they found the samsung 840 pro was able to survive something to the effect of 2 petabytes of wear before failing. The worst of them all started to fail at 100TB, and failed at 900TB. Unless you're running something with crazy IO, I can't imagine ever practically running into that limit.

Yeah, but the problem is that SSD failures usually have nothing to do with flash wearing out, and more to do with catastrophic, sudden failures somewhere else (mostly the controller AFAIK) causing the drive to stop doing anything at all. I had a 840 Pro fail on me, hadn't had many writes but just stopped showing up in the BIOS one day.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#227

Post by jobjh797878 »

coldtea wrote: post #184
rodgerd wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I ran an HDD, I wanted a TB. Now that I'm running SSDs, 80 GB seems to meet all my needs (thanks to changes in internet services). You seem like a very atypical use case. You can't be playing any of the modern AAA games, for example.

Or have Creative Suite installed. Or any modern sample library (which can get to 80GB for a single piano). Or any video editing projects and/or templates. Just some examples of professional stuff (for graphic designers, musicians/producers and videographers) that take huge space.

There's no reason to put a sample library on an SSD.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#228

Post by simplexion »

mmebane wrote: post #171
fencepost wrote: post #151

I can't comprehend trusting data to a (single) 30TB SSD or even 10TB SSDs given the regularly reported failure modes of "It's not a drive anymore." Perhaps it's because I'm not doing anything where massive storage is a requirement, but having data striped in RAID6 makes me happy. I'd be happy to use SSD for the underlying medium, but I want something that's less prone to single points of failure. Backups are all well…

At least with SSDs, there's much less worry about your RAID 5/6 array self-destructing while it's failing over to a hot spare. With hard drives of that size, I'd only feel comfortable with full mirroring.

Who in their right mind still uses RAID5 with spinning disks in a production system? That is like not wearing a seatbelt and driving above speed limits constantly.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#229

Post by ars »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #152
ars wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LED fixtures are worth it, LED edison base bulbs (replacement bulbs) are not. So new installations get LED, but old ones are not retrofitted.

Citation? I've seen math that all LED bulbs provide a better return in saved energy costs over the S&P500.

Better return compared to incandescent, but a worse return compared to CFL.

Comparing to incandescent is quite disingenuous. The bulbs just cost too much today, and the heat problems (i.e. much lower lifetime) are not fully solved, they work in some fixtures and not in others.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#230

Post by simplexion »

coldtea wrote: post #187
curun1r wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complaining about overpriced/limited storage options in the iPad/iPhone is like complaining about overpriced/limited food options at a sporting event, airport or any other venue where you've got no other option than to buy from an approved vendor. With lock-in comes higher prices.

There's no lock-in what's at play here for most people. You can get a tablet/smartphone from several vendors, including Samsung, Google and Microsoft and people switch from iOs to Android and back all the time. It's not like apps are a huge investment or that it's hard to move your data across. These people WANT to buy the iPad/iPhone, instead of something else. So a more accurate response would be "with desirability…

We have students who WANT to buy Apple products like crazy at the school I work at. The majority of responses for why they want them is, "They look pretty."
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