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SSD Prices in a Free Fall

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Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#311
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False. http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim...

True, and I've done it! I accidentally used a consumer grade (Crucial M500) in an application where endurance would be reached in less than a month. In fairness to Micron/Crucial, the drives did not lose any data.... but the write bandwidth degraded down to 10MB/s which counts as a failure for most apps. That's the catch in the report you cite: the bandwidth of a used-up drive is so poor that it's hard to actually wr…

Can you please elaborate on what application would basically kill an SSD in a month? It is my understanding that the Crucial M500 drives support something like 72TB of writes.

Please don't take any offense, I'm just interested in how you were using the drive.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#312

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.

A friend of mine is looking to upgrade from a 256GB MBA to a 512GB or 1TB MBP because he needs to view medical imagery offline (the Retina display also helps). <= 128GB storage is not really adequate for people who work with photos or music. 256GB is better but many people do need more.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's one theory: https://storagemojo.com/2014/04/25/amazons-glacier-secret-bd... and here's the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7647571 Facebook uses Blu-ray discs with a robotic storage system for its cold storage: http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/it-networks/robot-digs-thr...

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

Yev from Backblaze here -> Yea, we always kind of hope that others will jump in and start sharing data as well. We'll see!

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#314
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt the 50% figure. Just as a test: I looked at the price history for a random 256GB SSD (from Crucial). The highest price in the last year? $115. The current price? $99. Not nearly a 50% drop. Link: http://camelcamelcamel.com/Crucial-MX100-2-5-Inch-Internal-C...

In late 2013 I bought an 840 Pro 256GB for around $190. Today, I'd be looking at a 512GB 850 Pro for $140, probably $120 on a good sale (like when I bought the 840 Pro). Its about 40% in a little over a year and a half. Significant, at least. Its at the point where you cannot recommend to anyone to use a mechanical hard drive as an OS volume anymore, at least, at any price.

Samsung 512GB 850 Pro is $260 on Amazon[0], not $140. Am I missing something?

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-512GB-2-5-Inch-Internal-MZ-7KE...

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#315
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also try throwing them in an imgur album. Not sure if there is a data limit per account, but I don't think there is. I have several dozen GB of photo on there already.

Problem with imgur is that it compresses the image too much, and the degradation is noticeable. I don't recommend imgur for archival purpose.

I've had a paid imgur account since the day they announced them. In addition to the compression, mass upload and album mgmt is very clunky at best. I stopped attempting to archive many images there years ago...

I should give it a test again though to see if it is better.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cal…

So - let's take those one at a time, because they are interesting. "Watching too much cable TV" - Cable TV is a broadcast Medium, and watching it, like listening to broadcast radio, has no marginal cost or impact. You can leave your TV off for an entire month, or tuned to a channel for 24x7x365 - zero difference in cost to the provider, or impact to other people on the service. "Making too many local calls" - More th…

> That's why those types of deployments require some type of per minute charges to avoid that scenario.

It sounds like those deployments required infrastructure upgrades, not more creative billing to stop people from utilizing it.

> We disagree here. ISPs should provide Caps to their customers, and clearly communicate what they are - and then compete to provide higher caps while ensuring they maintain the line rate they've committed to their customers.

Even this isn't the reality. It's rare for landline Internet to be advertised with the actual data caps in effect. In my case, the data cap is defined nowhere except the Acceptable Use Policy (a long document that nobody is going to read) and in a My Usage part of your account (which you obviously won't see until you're already hooked up.)

At the same time, who are they going to be competing with? How many people are going to lay down fiber side-by-side with someone else's fiber? What incentive is for them to compete based on the data cap instead of following current practices which ae basically "100 MBPS BLAZING FAST SUPER-SPEED INTERNET!!!"*

(fine print)

* Limited to 200GB/month. Users going over this limit will be automatically upgraded to the next highest tier after three offenses.

I'm not sure why you disagree with the statement "caps are just a way to squeeze out higher profits by reducing the necessity of upgrading the infrastructure." You're basically making the argument that yes, caps do have that effect, but are put in place as a necessary network management strategy, despite the fact that most of these networks worked quite well before data caps and don't work any better with them. While some or most of them are continuing to invest in upgrading infrastructure, most of them are also rolling around in billions of dollars of profit that they aren't investing...because there is no real market incentive to do what you're saying they "should" do.

> "You get a 1 Gigabit connection for $75/month, with a 10 Terabyte/month Limit during Peak hours, and Unlimited Terabyte limit in Off peak hours,

What a world that would be. In reality data caps are usually 300GB in networks that can obviously support much more than this. I could blow through my former data cap in 12 hours. Heck even in your scenario, I would only be able to use my rated 1 gigabits for 2-3 hours at max utilization. It seems misleading to advertise Internet as 1 gbps if you can actually only get 1 gbps for 3/720 (0.4%) hours of the month.

EDIT: I misread that as 1 TB instead of 10TB, but I don't think 4% of the month is much better.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#317
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.

Because at the moment s/he is bearing the cost of abusive users.

> Because at the moment s/he is bearing the cost of abusive users.

There is nothing abusive about using that which you paid for. If you sell me a 100mpbs pipe, I should be able to use that pipe 24/7.

Of course, the reality is that it would be expensive to make sure everyone could use their 100mbps pipe 24/7, so ISPs sensibly over-provision to save money.

But ISPs miscalculating their provisioning requirements (or as it appears in most cases, simply grubbing for money), is not the end-users fault and not the end-users problem and it does not mean that they are doing anything abusive.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#318
post #270
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…

    You are right, it is a pity that you are downvoted.
It is a pity unconditionally. I expressed a subjective impression related to the topic at hand and asked constructively for explanation. There was simply no reason to downvote.

The downvotes and the first-generation replies to my comment show that this is not the place for a discussion about the worthiness of SSD's for games.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#319
post #289
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…

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.

Oh man, all the endless loading screens when going home. A simple trip to drop some stuff off and go took four loading screens.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#320
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm probably explaining something most everyone here already knows, but: I don't know what Glacier uses, but the "offline" storage is much the same how mainframes use tape - disk based files (datasets in mainframe speak) are migrated to tape after a given amount of time to decrease storage costs. These datasets needs to be recalled back to disk to be used again. This is nearly identical to how Glacier operates with S…

You're referring to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_storage_managem... . AFAIK, most systems work at the file level, but if you address space is large enough, you could implement this as a virtual memory system that swaps RAM to disk, disk to slower disk, slower disk to tape, tapes to tapes stored offline, etc. I don't know what Amazon uses, either, but I expect Glacier data to be pushed out to some laye…

True.

Back in the day, before automated tape readers, tapes were stored in silos, like a library, and employees would find the cataloged tapes and manually retrieve and load them into tape readers. My company use to hire co-ops to do this back in the 70s or so.

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