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SSD Prices in a Free Fall

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Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#211

Post by teraflop »

discodave wrote: post #173
teraflop wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big sticking point with Glacier is that the cost model for retrievals is complicated and unintuitive. There's a two-step process where you have to first retrieve data and then download it, and you're billed based on the peak retrieval rate in a month, not the total amount downloaded. It's not so bad now that they let you set a retrieval policy to limit your throughput, but before that, you had to carefully schedu…

You're not wrong, but if you look at the problem that Glacier is trying to solve then it doesn't look so bad: 1. Glacier is competing with tape. So for potential customers, if it's easier to acquire and maintain than your own tape library then that's a win. 2. In the words of James Hamilton the use case for Glacier is referred "jokingly to as Write Only Storage". If you're using Glacier for disaster recovery then pay…

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 effectively forcing you to one point in that space: (3 days, $0.01/GB). With Glacier, you get a curve depending on how fast you want it. It's much more expensive at the same speed (3 days, $0.10/GB) but you can go to one extreme of getting all your data for free over the course of 20 months, or getting it all within 4 hours for about $1.80/GB.

So I guess it's fair to say that Glacier gives you more flexibility, but Google's offering is a much better value at the particular point that it optimizes for.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#212

Post by mirimir »

Consumer SDDs are now inexpensive enough for desktop RAID. On Amazon, decent consumer 240GB-1TB SDDs are available at $0.32-$0.40 per GB. And in my experience, SSDs are so fast that even RAID6 arrays rebuild very quickly after replacing a member. I use Linux software RAID.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#213

Post by zaphoyd »

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?

Same reason as you'd want an SSD for anything else? Fast loading times of lots of data? Also, some operating systems make having programs installed to volumes other than the boot volume hard.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#214

Post by pmalynin »

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?

Insane load speeds

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#215

Post by bjd2385 »

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?

I used to have roommates that were intense gamers (blew thousands of dollars on new GPUs and other desktop gaming parts per semester) and all they talked about were SSDs. SSDs are pretty big in gaming.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#216

Post by bjd2385 »

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.

I bought a $50 1TB HDD from Newegg for my gaming desktop (which I of course do not use for gaming) about 6 months ago. I've looked again and they're the same price. It appears SSDs are still hundreds of dollars for the same capacity. I won't be buying an SSD until they're under $100/Tb.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#217

Post by zanny »

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?

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 even causes texture popping on crappy notebook hard drives.

I have 256GB SSDs in my desktop and notebook (with intents to find a nice 1TB drive next year, since we are at the tail end of SATA3) and my Steam library on my desktop is 176GB by itself.

My OS on its own (Arch) discounting pacman provided games (0ad, doom3bfg, darkplaces, doom, etc) is around 6GB, and most of that is Qt doc, Python2 site packages, 300MB of wallpapers, and 600MB of locale.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#218

Post by zanny »

samstave wrote: post #106
white-flame wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's look at the sweet spots, because that's really what many people will buy: Best $/GB HDD on pricewatch.com: $0.024/GB for 2TB at $48.95 Best $/GB SSD on pricewatch.com: $0.387/GB for 240GB at $92.95 That's a 16x price increase, not 10x.

Yeah, 240SSD for The fact that it can take two internal drives (both SSD) is awesome - so having dual 240GB drives allows for plenty of space. I have a 1TB external that I glacerize my other stuff to. Also, get a Flickr account which can host your 1TB of pics for free (money for nothin')... and you wont consume space on your local box with pics.

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.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#219

Post by zanny »

discardorama wrote: post #63
philjohn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author commented that they've seen a 50% drop in price over the last 8 months (from 20x HDD to 10x HDD), so it's not outside the realms of probability with the increased yields of 3D NAND.

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.

Re: SSD Prices in a Free Fall

#220

Post by kijin »

dragontamer wrote: post #139
pyrocat wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree to a large extent but I think 80GB is an extreme on the low end. Many modern games (especially MMOs) are 20GB+. Windows 7 alone requires a huge amount of storage. I have a 120GB partition at home (just for OS+programs, not data) and I'm constantly uninstalling steam games in order to install others. If you want a modicum of breathing room, I'd say minimum 200GB.

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.

256GB is indeed the sweet spot for typical users. 512GB if you play large games.

Windows on its own is quite capable of filling up a 128GB drive with restore points, update backups, and all sort of other junk when left in the hands of a typical user for a couple of years. I recently wiped nearly 60GB of pure OS-level junk (i.e. not caused by applications) from a family member's Windows 8.1 PC.

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