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SSD Prices in a Free Fall

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Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#271

Post by Tepix »

brownbat wrote: post #121
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.

Great point, although we should also talk about the way storage use has shifted. 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. When I ran an HDD, I wanted a TB. Now that I'm running SSDs, 80 GB seems to meet all…

No Star Citizen for you (it's estimated to be 100GB in size - and yes, you want to store it on SSD because the load times are quite high even with SSD).

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#272

Post by tehbeard »

kalleboo wrote: post #236
rodgerd wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GTA V made more money that most successful movies. Gaming is not an obscure niche, and AAAs are the blockbuster movies of the genre.

Only 5% of GTA V sales were for PC, the rest were on consoles

Perhaps the fact that the PC port was 2 years late compared to console releases should be taken into account.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#273

Post by ionised »

ghshephard wrote: post #258
samch wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be curious to know why you would prefer a metered approach when, as you say, for that same price you get uncapped. It seems to me that most people, in the US anyway, would rather not have caps. I can honestly say this is the first time I've heard anybody say they would, for the same price, prefer a cap. For the record, 20Mbps for £20 is roughly similar to what our local cable monopoly offers in NC.

I absolutely prefer capped service far, far more than uncapped services. In Singapore, I can get a LTE SIM for $35, and then pay $25 for 7 days of data @14 Gigabytes, with roll over of the amounts I don't use. In general, I get 50 megabits down/20 megabits up. And, because this is a capped service, I have a reasonably good chance of actually seeing that performance. If it was, "Uncapped" or "Unlimited" - then people…

I think they're talking about home internet connections, as in fibre or ADSL broadband.

I have an uncapped service (Virgin Media) in the UK which I wouldn't trade for anything. So much so that if I were to move house their service availability would be a factor to consider.

I get 152Mbps down/15Mbps up and I have never dropped below that level but more than a few Mbps for a short time.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#274

Post by ionised »

andybak wrote: post #194
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…

> most national ISPs Which nation are you talking about? I suppose I'd guess US but it would help if you said. I'm still getting uncapped broadband (albeit with vague TOS provisions) in the UK. I think the rest of Europe is probably similar. For the record - I'd like to move towards metered billing - but with a realistically low price per GB - not a punitive one based on profiting from people that don't have the know…

Man, I'm in the UK and there would be no way I would like this arrangement. Im on Virgin Media fibre (152Mbps for £34 per month) right now and I would never go back to an Open-Reach infrastructure service.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#275

Post by _khau »

onli wrote: post #270
madez wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You are right, it is a pity that you are downvoted. Right now, you maybe put your favorite game on the SSD, not the whole steam library - and that is what gamers often recommend themselves. FPS don't get influenced by the HDD, only loading times, and those are normally not too high. Many new games have only two loading times: loading the game and then loading the save. Afterwards, everything is streamed, and a proper…

Why is it a waste?

If you have the monty and the means why wouldn't you do it?

You're comment is very 'matter if fact' and baseless.

Improved loading times and better texture loading in games where it is heavy (think Fallout 3 or Skyrim) is a great reason to wack an SSD in your system.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#276

Post by belorn »

zanny wrote: post #217
madez wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They are literally the most data intensive software you have in terms of UX. Your movies, music, documents, and even non-served databases are all browsable on low bandwidth low IOPS devices just fine with sophisticated algorithms. Your load times for a level of Call of Duty are always reflective of how long it takes to get texture data off the disk and into vram, and that is constantly being hammered. It sometimes ev…

Not only is load time reflected by the time it takes for texture data to be copied into vram, but what constitute reasonable load time is to a degree based on developer platforms and those have a tendency to use above average hardware. If in the past 10s load time was maximum, that number will now be more likely based on SSD speeds rather than HDD.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#277

Post by onli »

_khau wrote: post #275
onli wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, it is a pity that you are downvoted. Right now, you maybe put your favorite game on the SSD, not the whole steam library - and that is what gamers often recommend themselves. FPS don't get influenced by the HDD, only loading times, and those are normally not too high. Many new games have only two loading times: loading the game and then loading the save. Afterwards, everything is streamed, and a proper…

Why is it a waste? If you have the monty and the means why wouldn't you do it? You're comment is very 'matter if fact' and baseless. Improved loading times and better texture loading in games where it is heavy (think Fallout 3 or Skyrim) is a great reason to wack an SSD in your system.

Skyrim and Fallout 3 are in my eyes counter-examples for using an SSD, since you basically have only the two loading times and afterwards it's streaming. Maybe if the Quicktravel takes too long on the HDD.

> If you have the monty and the means why wouldn't you do it?

Oh, sure then :) It is only a waste in the relation of price per gigabyte vs. the possible performance improvement ingame.

> You're comment is very 'matter if fact' and baseless.

See http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/12/10/hdd_vs_ssd_real_wo... if you want another source.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#278

Post by Amezarak »

flashman wrote: post #197
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…

Here in Australia, where data caps have been the norm for, oh, forever, it's pretty sustainable (for now). Music streaming is notionally the same cost as reading an image-heavy website: negligible, in the scheme of things. Video streaming is again not that bad, because I can only watch so many videos... they take real time to consume. YMMV depending on your chosen resolution. Games are the main problem. When one of t…

> Video streaming is again not that bad, because I can only watch so many videos... they take real time to consume. YMMV depending on your chosen resolution.

I use Netflix as a replacement for OTA and cable TV. So my girlfriend, who likes to watch a lot of TV, has used 221GB 7 days into the billing cycle.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#279

Post by mcv »

brownbat wrote: post #121
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.

Great point, although we should also talk about the way storage use has shifted. 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. When I ran an HDD, I wanted a TB. Now that I'm running SSDs, 80 GB seems to meet all…

I still prefer to have stuff locally when I can. My Macbook currently has a 120 GB SSD, and I'd love to replace it with a TB.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#280

Post by vidarh »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #237
teraflop wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you've got a good point as far as #3 goes; the analysis is actually more interesting than I thought it was. Both Google's nearline storage and Glacier scale your retrieval capabilities proportionally to how much data you have stored with them. You can express it as a tradeoff between cost/GB and the time taken to retrieve your entire dataset Google throttles your downloads to a fixed rate, so they're effectiv…

Honestly it's hard for me to imagine a total emergency restore-EVERYTHING situation that needs the data in under a day. If it's not that much data you should have a local copy anyway. If it's massive amounts of data is your connection even that fast? And how did you wipe 50 servers at once?

> And how did you wipe 50 servers at once?

Fire does that quite easily...

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