Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SSD Prices in a Free Fall

networkcomputing.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 336 posts

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#321

Post by rbanffy »

Kurtz79 wrote: post #310
rbanffy wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got myself a cheap Acer with 32 gigs of eMMC storage. I removed Windows 8, its restore partition (that took 10 gigs all by itself) and installed Ubuntu. It's not as fast as the "serious" laptop, but it's light, silent, has decent battery life and I won't be devastated if a truck rolls over my backpack. I mean, if I don't have it on my back, that is. For Python/Django/Twisted development in a couple LXD containers,…

eMMC is not the same as SSD, in general it is slower and less reliable (and it's one of the reason the laptop is cheap). I agree with the sentiment, though, carrying around a lightweight laptop without having to worry about theft/accidental damage is priceless.

It's not SSD, but it's flash memory nevertheless, so, the same price predictions valid for SSDs apply to it.

And yes. Carrying a worry-free laptop is priceless.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#322

Post by Dylan16807 »

vidarh wrote: post #280
Dylan16807 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's destruction, not wiping. If you are buying new servers as part of rebuilding you don't exactly need all the data downloaded in a 10 hour window.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#323

Post by rodgerd »

throwaway7767 wrote: post #301
rodgerd wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been using Samsung Don't upgrade the firmware.

Why? I have a 1TB Samsung 840 EVO and I updated the firmware earlier this year as the previous version apparently had some performance problems with data written long ago. Should I be worried?

The last couple of upgrades have surfaced some problematic behaviours around TRIMs, to the point it's recommended you disable TRIM on Linux.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#324

Post by simplexion »

deeviant wrote: post #257
simplexion wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you do? mirror every drive?

OBR10

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#325

Post by moogly »

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.

I put all my sample libraries on SSDs to cut down on project load times. It helps immensely.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#326

Post by ycken »

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.

Quick search says the Cheapest 1 TB SSD on Amazon: $99

http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Notebook-2-5-Inch-Internal-PH2...

Expecting 60% drop is not that crazy.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#327

Post by ghshephard »

Amezarak wrote: post #316
ghshephard wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I think to some degree we agree. Caps are put in place to both ensure a profit to the carrier, as well as ensure availability to the users. If the Carrier did not need to make a profit, they could upgrade their infrastructure to be totally non blocking. Alternatively, if the Carrier needed to make a profit, but was okay providing degraded service, they could avoid upgrading infrastructure.

But, if they want to do both - Profit + good service, then caps are needed.

The competition, btw, is definitely fiber (See what happens to Comcast Service when a fiber competitor comes to town - it gets much better) and wireless (I haven't used a wireline carrier in singapore for 2+ months. All LTE, all the time.)

Regarding my limits - the nice things about Tier-1 ISPs (which Comcast is) - is that they don't pay for data use, as they engage in what is called "Settlement Free Peering" - what they do pay for is (roughly) Trenches + Vaults + Data Center Real Estate + Power + cooling + security + Chassis + Fiber + Interconnect Ports + Line-Cards. These are all a function of peak usage, not total usage. So - outside of peak-usage, which has reliable patterns of behavior, there is no costs to the ISP, or fellow users of the same resources, to your usage. Peak Usage may be as few as 4 hours/day, or 120 hours/month * 1 gigabit = 54 Terabytes. In a month, 1 gigabit could theoretically draw 324 Terabytes, so - that's 270 Terabytes off Peak + 10 Terabytes on Peak allowance = 280 Terabytes/month.

By doing just a bit of scheduling, you don't have to pay any extra, the ISPs network isn't overloaded, and you have a reasonable allowance of data to work with.

Of course, if they start selling 1 Gigabit Service, that's a lot of switch ports/chassis/routers/interconnects/etc/etc... they are going to have to upgrade to handle the new peaks.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#328

Post by zanny »

otterpro wrote: post #307
zanny wrote: 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.

Theres a setting somewhere not to compress large images when you upload them. Is it still compressing?

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#329

Post by onli »

_khau wrote: post #297
onli wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I did just say this was on my own Skyrim installation, so I already have tried it out. Area/Cell transitions are MUCH faster on an SSD. I'm playing through the game again currently.

You did not say that you played Skyrim first on a HDD and then on a SSD…

> Area/Cell transitions are MUCH faster on an SSD.

I think we were not talking about the same thing (anymore?). Like I wrote below, explicit area transitions - entering a city, loading a save game - will of course benefit from an SSD, a lot. That is loading though. But you also have cell transitions that are streamed – you talked about texture streaming above - when travelling on foot through the game world. If I remember the engine from my morrowind mod days correctly, that is a special case in those games with its explicit cell system, but it probably basically applies to all 3D-games that include moving through big areas, since they all have to load textures at the time they come in reach. It would be quite interesting if an SSD would have a real effect here, and to my knowledge it so far does not. It would be interesting because those transitions can stutter if the streaming system does not work properly, or if the HDD is really too slow, which is a likely cause of bad minimal fps (and depending on the benchmark, could lower average fps) or rather explicit stuttering, measured in fps or not.

I'm not saying SSDs do not help with loading stuff, I say that to my knowledge, they do not help with streaming - which are two different things.

I never felt those explicit transitions were too bothersome when I played Fallout/Oblivion/Morrowind, that together with the streaming system outdoors is why I see an SSD as not necessary for those games. But of course, if it bothers you - and maybe loading really takes longer in Skyrim? - an SSD is a good load time minimizer.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#330

Post by deeviant »

simplexion wrote: post #324
deeviant wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do? mirror every drive?

OBR10

Thanks, it was an honest question. I'll look into OBR10.

Currently I'm at a small-ish startup and I have ~150 TB of data on a synology nas. It's in 2 raid groups, both raid 6. Seemed safe enough.

edit Ah, right. From some reason I didn't make the connection that raid 10 was raid 0+1, it doesn't work for us simple because of the sheer amount of data we need to store. Also, although it would be a real bitch if we lost everything(like set us back a week+), most of the data is derived data, and we have all the raw data in cold storage, so we could eventually rebuild the array from scratch.

Post reply on HN