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SSD Prices in a Free Fall

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Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#281

Post by Amezarak »

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…

> 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 would abuse the crap out of it, and all of a sudden that 50 megabits/sec down would quickly drop, making the system far, far less useful.

Using the service I have paid for is not abusing it, anymore than watching too much cable TV or making too many local calls is abuse of those services. If it causes degradation for other users, that's the fault of the ISP that has over-overprovisioned us. And the top ISPs all have profits in the billion dollar range, so it's not like they're hurting for money and just can't fix the infrastructure. Caps are just a way to squeeze out higher profits by reducing the necessity of upgrading infrastructure.

That said, not once have I ever seen my speeds drop below what they're rated to be.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#282

Post by coldtea »

simplexion wrote: post #230
coldtea wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Well, they do. But as a seasoned IT pro who cut his teeth on Sun OS and HP-UX back in the day, having a high end machine, with a great screen, great battery life and quite light to carry around that also has a friendly UI and runs a full blown UNIX underneath but also gets all major proprietary programs is nothing to sneer at either, pretty or not.

There's a reason even Linus Torvalds carried a MacBook Air (though I think he found something even lighter now).

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#283

Post by coldtea »

jobjh797878 wrote: post #227
coldtea wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually there are tons of reasons.

You don't want to bring around extra drives and cables when you perform.

You don't want vibrations, bad handling etc while performing / touring etc, to crap your HDD.

You get much much faster random reads, which is what playing large sample libraries is all about.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#284

Post by mcv »

abandonliberty wrote: post #120

I wonder how reliability is doing; Unlike HDDs SSDs have a very unpredictable failure pattern, including sudden death rather than slow degradation. If you want to ensure data is safe you need to run a raid 1 or online backup service.

Are you saying HDDs can't suffer a sudden death? HD crashes aren't exactly unheard of.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#285

Post by rsynnott »

samch wrote: post #233
andybak wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Metered service at reasonable prices would probably actually be better for a lot of consumers, but most people aren't _comfortable_ with metered services.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#286

Post by rsynnott »

rodgerd wrote: post #176
brownbat wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

The majority of computer users don't play modern AAA games. Steam claims 125 million active users (active defined we know not how, but probably generously). Some of them will be people like me; the only Steam games I currently have installed are Papers Please and FTL. It's estimated that there are ~2bn PCs in use worldwide.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#287

Post by rsynnott »

kayoone wrote: post #259
kalleboo wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Recently "The Witcher 3" sold 4M copies in a short amount of time whereas 1.3M are attributed to PC sales [1]. Even Indie games like Cities: Skylines which is PC/Mac only recently sold more than 1M copies in a short amount of time. [2] I don't really play much but i follow PC Gaming and it has been on the rise for years. Free to play MOBA games like League of Legends have over 8M concurrent players in peak hours with…

However, it's _nothing_ compared to the installed base of PCs. That's probably on the order of 2 billion. Most people don't use their computers to play AAA games, and likely not games at all (Steam only has 125m active users, say).

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#288

Post by _khau »

onli wrote: post #277
_khau wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 'mat…

Are you serious?

That HardOCP article (and HarcOCP are not really known for their quality articles anyway) is testing for framerate imrpovements.

An SSD will not improve your framerate much at all (That's not what you use an SSD for).

You cited main loading times like loading a game and loading a save, which are enough reason themselves to want an SSD in there. Some games are painfully long in these areas (take any Total War game as an example) and an SSD will help.

I gave Fallout 3 and Skyrim as an example of texture loading where an SSD would matter. You claimed it didn't, as this is contrary to all avaialble information.

These games (like many open world games) stutter when new cells/areas are loaded (I'm not talking about regular texture streaming). Again, this is where SSD's will make a difference.

An SSD becomes even more useful when you start installing high-resolution texture mods to games like these. My own Skyrim installation uses nearly 4Gb of video memory when wandering around the wilderness. That would cause some pretty heavy thrashing on an HDD.

There is nothing about SSD's being used to store games that is a 'waste' if those things are important to you.

I have two SSD's in my personal machine, one 128Gb for the OS and one 500Gb for Steam and some games. They didn't cost me much, so why wouldn't I do it? There is literally no reason for me to not do this in a high-end system meant for playing games.

Other games will go on my regular HDD's because you are right at least in saying that not all games will benefit from it, but some will.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#289

Post by Retric »

onli wrote: post #277
_khau wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 'mat…

I have a 500gb SSD which cost ~200$. Sure 5 years ago I would agreed with you, but now days it's really not that expencive and in game load times feel much longer. IMO, Skyrim is load happy, sure the open world is fine, but go to town, get into your house, get out of your house get out of ton is 4 load screens in ~1Min of gameplay.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#290

Post by onli »

_khau wrote: post #288
onli wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 'mat…

Are you serious? That HardOCP article (and HarcOCP are not really known for their quality articles anyway) is testing for framerate imrpovements. An SSD will not improve your framerate much at all (That's not what you use an SSD for). You cited main loading times like loading a game and loading a save, which are enough reason themselves to want an SSD in there. Some games are painfully long in these areas (take any T…

Are you serious?

That HardOCP article (and HarcOCP are not really known for their quality articles anyway) is testing for framerate imrpovements.

I don't like your tone. If texture streaming would profit much from an SSD, you would see that in the FPS.

Fallout 3 was played by me on a very old machine, of course without an SSD, and I remember no noticeable cell loading outside. The streaming of those engines is just too good. Fallout: New Vegas I played for more hours I'm comfortable admitting, heavily modded, on a better machine, same story there.

> My own Skyrim installation uses nearly 4Gb of video memory when wandering around the wilderness. That would cause some pretty heavy thrashing on an HDD.

Ingame, in the widlerness? Try it out. I doubt it. Initial loading times will be better of course, and loading times when switching locations, but not performance otherwise. You underestimate the performance of a regular HDD that is not a shitty 2.5 model cooked to death in an overheating laptop.

> They didn't cost me much, so why wouldn't I do it?

Like I said: No reason not to, if you have the SSD anyway. But normally, SSDs are a lot more expensive than a HDD, see above.

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