just in time for GTA6 to come out and be 3TB in size
I wouldn't even mind tbh.
Except it would take 3 literal months to download it (stupid home internet with a 1.25TB data cap)
Goodness, do you live in Australia or something? Are there any better options, or can you not afford them? My spoiled and priveleged self has trouble comprehending a data cap on my internet plan.
It’s Comcastic!
United States. They have data caps because their backbone isn't powerful enough for 2gbps home internet they prefer to offer more value to customers
You forgot "and they're greedy fuck pigs"
well, that's a given
Do they also pull the "fair use" bullshit out their asses like our ISPs?
And if you go to the store and buy it in person, it'll be a empty cd case with a serial key to download.
or with a CD that installs a downloader, that is actually a background service always starting with the OS, and a few other bloatware to not waste CD space
except that almost nobody has a CD drive anymore. so it must be a pendrive instead that was forced to read-only access
Can I ask what country so I can avoid it like the plague?
Ah yes, good ol' US of A. Why am I not surprised?
My ISP recently introduced data caps on unlimited (they throttle you to 4Mbit if you go past ~300GB or 500, not sure). I already wanted to leave but that's really lighting a fire under me to move the fuck out of here.
? I've never had a data cap and I'm in the US. Many areas now have alternatives to cable/DSL. I have fiber-backed Ethernet at the wall, and my city is rolling out muni-fiber, and we're honestly kind of late to the game compared to my local area.
Shop around, maybe you have more options now.
Ah shit. That would suck. Personally I could start the download and have the game the next day. Which is roughly what it took to torrent a 4 GiB game back in the day if there weren't enough seeds.
250GB tops or it will be bs.
GTA5 already had about 90-110GB of raw gamedata. I think right now it's 150GB.
And Apple will finally sell the iPhone starting with 256GB
Technically the Pro Max already starts at 256 GB (starting with the 15 series iirc). But they simply removed the 128 GB option from the price stack.
What do you need 256gb for? You don’t seriously store photos and videos on your phone… as the only place?
My 100GB music library leaves less space than I'd like on a 128GB phone.
You really listen to that much music that often? I assume that's compressed as well, because I don't think there's a point to high-bitrate media when you're going to play it through phone speakers or Bluetooth.
Personally I just use plain old FM radio in my car, a couple dozen songs on my workout playlist for the gym, and YouTube streams for work.
Personally I just use plain old FM radio in my car
Great if you only want to listen to music half the time.
that's what expandable storage (i.e. sd card) is for.
oh your phone does not know what that is?
that's what expandable storage (i.e. sd card) is for.
oh your phone does not know what that is?
My girlfriend learned that lesson the hard way. We now have a nas and off-site storage.
Fuck yeah! I NAS swap with a friend. I have my house NAS which syncs to my other one at his place and he does the same. (4 total)
Yeah, I don’t get this. I still haven’t used more than ~115GB in years that I’ve been on iPhone. All my photos are in RAW (since supported) and I’ve got a huge lossless (or better) music library.
Granted I don’t have 100% of everything on my phone all the time, but even my iCloud storage is pretty low.
I guess since I have Apple Music I don’t have very much on my phone at any one time.
Most of my heavy usage are my Virtual Machines. But really, those don’t all have to be on at once. Am I really using windows that often?
I use YouTube Music and the only time I download music for offline is if I'm going to fly somewhere.
Oh shit, I have a flight later this month. Thank you for reminding me to download the music!!
The prices will stay the same. Manufacturers will just make more profit.
Is that what has happened to the storage market historically?
Not at all. The price of storage has plummeted so much that most video games comfortably use ~100GB for large games and don’t care because even SSD storage is extremely cheap.
If you don’t believe me, here’s a post on Reddit that shows it off pretty well.
There's two ways to take that statement. The price of a hard drive will remain the same, or the price per memory unit will remain the same. Price per hard drive remains largely the same. Price per unit of memory drops.
The only exception here is SSDs are slowly dropping in price to meet magnetic disk drives.
Interpreted the other way, I don’t think that makes sense because on the whole storage has always gotten cheaper with time. Hard drives may cost the same, but they’re larger capacity so really this would only work as an argument if hard drive storage space stayed the same and prices remained the same for consumers but went down for manufacturers.
Also there’s a lot of competition in the space similar to other chips so I don’t see how a company making NAND or platters can afford to sit on their hands like that. The whole point of drive innovation right now is to drive the price per GB down for B2B sales. And that usually translates well to consumer sales too.
That's business logic. Consumer logic is that when things get cheaper they should actually be cheaper.
The actual shells and manufacturing costs aren't going down meaningfully. Giving you more for the same price is how consumers benefit the most. Especially because consumer demands for storage (among people willing to buy any, at least) keep going up and there isn't a big market for HDDs that are half the price but 1/4 of the storage.
They do get cheaper but the cheaper ones don’t get made because they aren’t worth anything anymore. Like sure you can get a 500GB HDD which used to be a moderately priced option and is now basically trash or free. The prices go down, but the key is that consumers no longer want the old thing either.
Actually those are still available. And I will admit if anyone tried to get me to pay 100 dollars for one now I would probably laugh them out of the room.
I'm not exactly sure what that chart is using for data sources. Historically every couple of years I've bought whatever goes on sale for around $200 and added it to my unraid.
I was able to pick up exos 14s a couple of years ago. And they're still not back down to $200.
It looks like it depends on the drive size but also I think the pandemic has leveled this out in recent years. Some additional data I found by BackBlaze shows a bit more of the story though they have changed their drive sizes which leads to a more interesting graph.
That looks like I expected it to. Inflation probably doesn't help.
Honestly, nowadays a 100Gb game is small. Games are easily 200+ for the AAA section.
Yeah, but modern consoles come with as little as 512 gigs of storage.
I'm optimistic. I'm making numbers out of my butt because I literally can't remember.
But I think My 20GB SSD from 2010 was about $100. I used to dualboot.
Today, I can get a 512GB SSD for $50.
SSDs were relatively new in 2010, and priced accordingly. Now it's just about increasing sizes and (hopefully) reliability. I just don't think that all of a sudden we'll have huge cheap SSDs - people are used to a certain price point and manufacturers will take advantage of that.
Same SSDs are about 40% more expensive today than they were this time last year.
I got a 1TB SSD for 55€, so about 60 something dollars. Prices are certainly dropping
Regarding your 2nd link:
I would only consider storge by known manufacturers like Intel, Samsung, Crucial/Micron, WD/SanDisk, Kioxia and maybe Kingston.
No experience with brands like Sabrent.
Same reason why I wouldnt shop for them on AliExpress. No confidence in those NAND.
Yup.
For SSDs this has historically not been the case, there's no way in hell you could buy a 1TB SSD within $200 a decade ago.
A decade ago 1TB SSDs were rare and, like all new things in tech, expensive.
Yet apple will still charge $200 for 128gb
It's almost as if oligopolies can manipulate prices regardless of availability
32 level "PLC" cells, OMG. How about staying at levels with some durability.
Amazing news!
Unfortunately, if this comes to Brazil and 8tb SSD would be the price of a car
That makes cars very cheap or technology very expensive
Or both extremely expensive.
What do they cost you now?
R$ 5.460,00 (Brazilian Reais), the first comment is just exaggerating and having a 'mongrel complex' take. It is nowhere near the price of a car even today.
In freedom units, that looks to be ~$1k for 8TB SSD. Same device here is $600-700.
So, not that much more expensive, i bet west european countries get near or equal that price, it's electronics in the US that are cheaper than others (including rich countries). and it's more that we are poor.
That's decently more expensive! $300-700 difference is pretty significant imo. Like I couldn't swing that I don't think, pushes it too expensive
It could also be a difference in how sales tax or whatever is presented. I know in the EU, VAT is included in online pricing, whereas sales tax in the US is not. I don't know how Brazil runs things, but that could explain a chunk of the difference. The US also likely has higher volume for these kinds of things, so prices will likely be lower in the US than Brazil.
But yeah, it looks to be about 40-50% more expensive, which is substantial. If you're looking to spend $600-700 on storage, there's a good chance you can afford another $300-400, you just don't want to spend that much.
Brazilian system is the most simple: It is already the final price (not counting shipping, which might be many options), with EVERY tax included. Period. What i see is what i pay. Even Aliexpress shows numbers with all taxes included in the final total price now.
The Yankee system is honestly both insane and fraudulent, nothing is ever the price that the webpages or stickers show, i always have to guess it's somewhere between 10% and 20% more. The european system is also more honest, unless they also have other taxes besides VAT that they don't show.
In the US, sales tax varies by jurisdiction, even within a state. If I buy something in my city, it could be 0.10-0.25% difference than the city next door, because our cities will have different tax needs. In my state, sales tax ranges from 7.5-8.5%, depending on where the purchase is made, and the city portion is generally around 1% (state portion is fixed).
It's incredibly dumb, and I wish physical stores were required to display price after factoring in taxes. However, for websites, I don't expect that, simply due to the variability between jurisdictions (makes advertising prices ridiculous), and because it's trivial to see the final figure in the cart after I input shipping information.
So if Brazil includes taxes in online quotes like the EU, the gaps is even narrower. My local tax rate is around 8%, so for me, that $600-700 item would be $650-750, which is still cheaper than Brazil, but Brazil may very well have higher sales tax than here. Ideally, we'd compare w/ pre-tax values for a more apples-to-apples figure.
They already exist. $dayjob bought some 64GB ssds. They were about $7500USD per drive.
For 64gb? Did you mean tb or is there something unique about these drives?
More density means less longevity, less write cycles before the blocks wear out, also decreases the time before Nand leakage can end up corrupting the data. Doesn't seem like a good thing to me.
Oh yeah, also more storage space causes complacency with developers who will terribly optimize their games because they don't have to worry about games not fitting on people's disks. Think 100GB games is bad it'll get much worse when they got more free space at their disposal, and worse, the perception that their customers have tons of free space as well.
I don't disagree with you, but on the other hand, this will be a huge boon for people who do things like sail the high seas and wish to keep what they acquire long term. You're not constantly rewriting in those cases. You're just slowly (or perhaps not so slowly) filling up the drive. Eventually, it's essentially read only.
Considering how much I spent on 6 TB of regular hard drive storage for this reason a few years ago, I'd be all for affordable 8 TB SSDs.
sail the high seas
You don't need solid state storage for Linux ISOs
I recently bought a 5TB hard drive. It's funny how that sounds like a lot of space until you fill it up and find yourself eyeing another.
Yep, I can't afford any more storage. I've had to start curating and weeding, which is a shame because I know there are things I'd probably eventually revisit. Oh well. So long, Duckman.
if I may ask, what kinds of things are you storing? my computer has only 500gb, my phone has 128gb, and I pay a small fee for 100gb of cloud storage for photos. sometimes I feel like I'm running out of space but it's never a real problem for me. so I'm just curious because I'm having trouble imagining what I'd even fill up 5tb with.
Movies at good quality are like 15GB each. Games frequently blow past 100.
I'm the person in the thread before the person who asked, but I'm in the same boat. In my case: videos, radio shows and comics.
A 4-season TV series in 1080p can easily take up 50-100 gb.
ah that makes sense. thanks
My iCloud Photos is 1.2TB
Admittedly I should prune junk out, but RAW photos from real cameras are big and I'm not giving them up. Same with videos from my DJI.
I mean, you're not wrong but I eventually bought all that shit I torrented in college on gog or steam when I got a job
I'm talking about things like movies and TV shows, not games. In fact, if you aren't careful (or just have a game that doesn't allow you to choose where it saves its data), you could have the write cycle issue with games.
There are plenty of games that you can't buy on Gog or Steam even today (like any emulation ISO from console games), and sharing is caring for others that can not afford it.
Thinking about it, it would be nice if when formatting a partition on mlc based drives, you could specify the number of bits per cell used. So an 8tb QLC drive could be formatted as a 2tb SLC for those who want the resilience, without having to commit to it permanently.
I'm sure there are technical reasons that would be difficult, but everything started out difficult until we figured it out.
For the first part, as long as it isn't too bad and it gets detected, and has methods for mitigating damage from losses, that's fine. If you get a lot more capacity but lose some over time, you still have more capacity.
For the latter, yeah it does but do they even care now? Personally, I don't play any games that large really anyway, so it doesn't effect me. Let them lose you as a customer too if that's an issue and they surpass how much you'll put up with.
The first part also applies to cold storage, like if you leave it off for a while and data will degrade without power as electrons leak out. Something that might be a concern for data archival on these drives.
I don't think they do care now, I'm not super worried about it but I might be if I wanted to get a PC port of a game that isn't on PC now, where the old one is well optimized but the new one isn't. Was the story when I got Okami HD on PC, it's insane how they went from a game which came on an 8GB disc for PS3 and it's 34GB on PC, I know they included 4K in the PC one but the fact it's so much insanely larger makes me think a lot of it was wasted space by not compressing what could be compressed.
Large game file size is an optimization
Good news but it'll be a while before I can replace the 20TB drives in my NAS with these.
It's looking like 2029 will be the turning point. Right now, we are on the verge of having 16tb m.2s on the market, and by 2029 SSDs will be around $10-15/TB like HDDs are now.
In 2029, if semiconductor trends continue, it is likely that we will have 16TB SSDs for ~$200 and 32TB SSDs for ~$500; Cheaper than the $320 we're paying for 20TB HDDs right now.
The HDD industry doesn't seem like it will improve at the same rate. It is likely that the SSD market will have better $/TB than the HDD market in 2029, unless hard drives make some massive breakthrough before then. The survival of the HDD industry past the next 5 years is basically riding on Seagate's ability to successfully release HAMR technology.
While I fully agree with the SSD side, you seem to ignore that HDDs are also getting cheaper per TB (always have, and usually quite noticeably). Also the reliability of large to huge SSDs remains to be seen as well. Obviously a breakthrough in HDD technology would have an influence as well, as you mentioned.
I'm not saying SSDs aren't here to take over, they surely will eventually (preferably sooner), but I think it'll be a few more years until we got actual price parity per TB. Even when ignoring other aspects like reliability.
You can’t really reliably use consumer SSDs in a server/NAS situation though, unless you more prepared to replace them every 12-24 months and suffer poor read/write speeds under load
SSDs last longer than hard drives in most situations.
Im not super experienced with NAS and only started home networking like three years ago. but I read SSDs would die quicker than traditional disks.
I’m not sure although it’s mostly used for media storage so there aren’t a lot of write operations. Having said that I do have solid state M2 drives in there for caching with no issues so far.
Excellent, I needed more space for cookies, malware and games that suddenly require 500GB of free space. I'll have that thing full in no time.
Just don't play the AAA slop and the file sizes are a lot better.
Not sure which ones are AAA slop. I play online every Monday with a friend in the UK. Here are some of the games we've played:
Grim Dawn,
Diablo 4,
Borderlands,
Borderlands 2,
Borderlands 3,
Borderlands the presequel,
Tiny Tina's Wonderland,
and currently we're playing Aliens Elite something.
But I have played other games with a different group of friends online.
Man, the formatting sucks. There was a carriage return after every game. Why is it there for the paragraphs and gone for the lists?
Most of those are in the 30-60GB range IIRC. So if you keep 5 installed, you're looking at 200GB or so.
What OP is referring to is things like COD that are 300GB or so.
Why is it there for the paragraphs and gone for the lists?
You need a blank line between paragraphs, so:
First paragraph.
Second paragraph.
If you want a list, add a hyphen or asterisk, like so, and you won't need the blank line:
- item one
- item two
Renders as:
item one
item two
Thank you very much kind sir or madame or whatever you identify as. Very helpful.
Not sure which ones are AAA slop. I play online every Monday with a friend in the UK. Here are some of the games we've played:
Grim Dawn
Diablo 4,
Borderlands,
Borderlands 2,
Borderlands 3,
Borderlands the presequel,
Tiny Tina's Wonderland,
and currently we're playing Aliens Elite something.
But I have played other games with a different group of friends online.
Man, the formatting sucks. There was a carriage return after every game.
And soon enough we'll see 1tb games once storage is plenty.
Soon the new COD will weigh 5TB
COD will ship as a 5TB HDD cartridge :D
We will go back to the cartridge bay days.
A 3.5" cartridge slot with a hard drive reader in it sounds kinda awesome, not gonna lie.
You can get those. I had a 4x2.5" bay for a while.
Yup, it's the norm in NAS and server units.
I'll believe it when I see it. 4TB SSDs are still not affordable.
"Could"
I'm all for it, and it's just the usual "moores law" trend, I just wonder if we won't hit a wall where (most!) users just won't need it?
most users already dont use what theyve got. its more about reducing physical size for the masses... these new techs will allow for even smaller storage for thinner, more efficient devices.
i think only some power users (im a data horader) and commercial interests care about bulk storage
I'm slightly surprised that loss of faith in corporations being good stewards of our cultural content - wantonly deleting cherished shows, namely - has not driven a larger move towards personal ownership of media. In a world where anything that fails to be profitable faces destruction, owning your stuff has never been a better idea.
People, in general, don’t care. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, more that they just don’t notice until she show they searched for isn’t available and then they shrug it off and move on to another one they can watch. Most people I know don’t want to keep large catalogs around if things they like because they only watch a single movie a few times in their lives. They watch it and then they’re good for years or more. There’s so much content out there that there’s no way they’re going to rewatch things and there’s no way they’re going to miss it because they’re having enough trouble keeping up with all the new stuff. On top of that, the convenience of just turning on the tube and hitting play vs trying to find the disc, and store and organize it is huge. And ripping it and then keeping a large amount of storage locally, online and healthy for the purpose is out of their technical wheel house. (And budget at times)
Honestly, I’m a big proponent for buying physical media… but I’ve greatly reduced what I rip/buy/keep, just knowing there’s only so much time left on my personal hourglass and I’ve got better things to do than worrying about all that up keep. When I kick the bucket, no one is going to care about it all. Maybe they’ll keep a few interesting ones but they’ll likely just sit on someone else’s shelf. In the mean time, how many times am I really going to watch some of these things?
Emphasis on "slightly"
I can't believe how much mileage I've gotten out of my 512GB SSDs on my laptops. And my "big" backup disks are hand me down 1TB HDs my friend didn't need. I don't do video, though.
my collection is small compared to some, but ive got about 22 4tb drives in use in various arrays.. but its mostly video.
I remember it being a big space sink when I was editing video. Now all I have is DVD rips of my collection and those are nice and compact.
Thermal is a wall to contend with as well. At the moment SSDs get the density from 3D stacking the planes of substrate that make up the memory cells. Each layer contributes some heat and at some point the layer in the middle gets too hot from the layers below and not being close enough to the top to dissipate the heat upwards fast enough.
One way to address this was the multi-level cell (MLC) where instead of on/off, the voltage within the cell could represent multiple bits. So 0-1.5v = 00, 1.6-3v = 01, 3.1-4.5v = 10, 4.6-5v = 11. But that requires sense amplifiers that can handle that, which aren't difficult outright to etch, they just add complexity to ensure that the amplifier read the correct value. We've since moved to eight-level cells, where each cell holds an entire byte, and the error correction circuits are wild for the sense amplifiers. But all NAND FGMOS leak, so if you pack eight levels into a single cell, even small leaks can be the difference between sensing one level from another level. So at some point packing more levels into the cell will just lead to a cell that leaks too quickly for the word "storage" to be applied to the device. It's not really storage any longer if powering the device off for half a year puts all the data at risk.
So once going upwards and packing hits a wall, the next direction is moving out. But the more you move outward, the further one is placing the physical memory cells from the controller. It's a non-zero amount of distance and the speed of light is only so fast. One light-nanosecond is about 300 millimetres, so a device operating at 1GHz frequency clock has that distance to cover in a single tick of the clock in an ideal situation, which heat, quantum effects, and so on all conspire to make it less than ideal. So you can only go so far out before you begin to require cache in the in-between steps and scheduling of block access that make the entire thing more complex and potentially slow it down.
And there are ways to get around that as well, but all of them begin to really increase the cost, like having multi-port chips that are accessed on multi-channel buses, basically creating a small network inside your SSD of chips. Sort of how like a lot of CPUs are starting to swap over to chiplet designs. We can absolutely keep going, but there's going to be cost associated with that "keep going" that's going to be hard to bring down. So there will be a point where that "cost to utility" equation for end-users will start playing a much larger role long before we hit some physical wall.
That said, the 200 domain of layers was thought to be the wall for stacking due to heat, there was some creative work done and the number of layers got past 300, but the chips do indeed generate a lot more heat these days. And maybe heat sinks and fans for your SSD aren't too far off in the future, I know passive cooling with a heat sink is already becoming vogue with SSDs. The article indicated that Samsung and SK hynix predict being able to hit 1000+ layers, which that's crazy to think about, because even with the tricks being employed today to help get heat out of the middle layers faster, I don't see how we use those same tricks to hit past 500+ layers without a major change in production of the cells, which usually there's a lot of R&D that goes behind such a thing. So maybe they've been working on something nobody else knows about, or maybe they're going to have active cooling for SSDs? Who knows, but 1000+ layers is wild to think about, but I'm pretty sure that such chips are not going to come down in prices as quickly as some consumers might hope. As it gets more complex, that length of time before prices start to go down starts to increase. And that slows overall demand for more density as only the ones who see the higher cost being worth their specific need gets more limited to very niche applications.
We hit that point in spinning disk drives a while ago for me
The issue is, every time we make a great leap in storage medium, we tend to use that new storage for BIGGER files. Higher quality media and all that. Back in the day, the average movie file was measured in the MB. Now it's GB. Think about an old floppy with 1.4 MB of data and how many text files you stored on it. You couldn't ever imagine needing more space. Then came pictures and music files. Video files. Then higher resolution picture and video files. Suddenly even your text documents aren't just raw .txt files, but Word documents and interactive PDFs.
As storage improves, what we expect to be able to carry around with us or have in our home computer changes. I'm currently running a home server with 18TB of storage. An amount that I would have never dreamed of possessing 20 years ago, and yet here I am debating when I grab that 24TB drive because I can already see me running out of space in a few months.
This is all to say that I really don't think there will ever be a maximum amount a user could need. Give them that maximum and in a week they'll have figured out a way to use it to capacity. I think video games and cartridge/disk size limitations and then the transition to digital games and balloning game size shows my point.
This demand is also dictated by what companies see as a default setup, now it's 0,5Tb+ SSDs as syst drives. W10\11 doesn't work on HDDs because their update and security services can overwhelm your disk's speed and make the system unresponsive. If you are given an older hardware by your employer, good luck, as your OS and other programs assume they don't need to limit either speed or size, and the only way to keep using the same features is to upgrade.
Exactly. Eventually what we see now as cutting edge will become "bare minimum" or even "obsolete" hardware one day. Eventually the camera on your cell phone will by default be taking such high resolution pictures that anything less that a TB of onboard storage will seem quaint.
Our family’s first proper PC back in around ‘93 had a 1gb HDD. I remember strutting about at school like I was the top shit because of how great my computer was.
These days I have a modded iPod mini with 128gb that I’m getting close to needing to increase because of my love of 320kbps MP4 files.
Its already been 6 years since the first 100TB SSD released and I still don't think anyone has bothered to dethrone it last I checked. Density and number of layers possible have both increased since then. I imagine part of it is just a performance issue though; 10 10TB SSDs are gonna be faster than 1 100TB SSD.
At the consumer level, the usage of smaller form factors will probably mean more density will still be useful. Things like the steamdeck drives will benefit for a while.
64TB ssds are fairly common in the enterprise market now, I don't think they were 6 years ago. It's possible we'll see 128TB SSDs become fairly common on servers in a few years.
They'll be useful for gamers, at least. With the increasing trend of companies caring less about properly optimizing the size of game installs and expecting gamers to have SSDs for texture loading on the fly, these drives will definitely see use. I currently have a 4TB HDD that has over 2.3TB of Steam games installed on it right now (roughly 100 games from tiny indie games to big AAA releases that are 40-80 gigs in size), and several newer games have an SSD listed as one of their minimum requirements.
Ya, didn't say it will instantly be useless 😁, I'd pick up a 4TB or more because why not?
My first SSD was a 256GB (I really splurged on that one) now I have a 2TB for cheaper, soon it will be 20TB and then 200TB etc. Will video games grow that fast? My thought is it won't and that's all I guess 😊
NAND density is always useful for the ultra portable end, be it used in applications like phones, portable gaming devices, microcontroller boards and such, where space or pci-e lanes is often the limiting factor. when the capacity of nand grows, options become better, as nand usually doubles in capacity per chip.
We've already hit a perceived user experience limit. The perception of responsiveness in blind tests between SATA and NVMe SSDs isn't always apparent--people sometimes say the SATA drive is faster--even though the speed difference on paper is substantial.
IMO, programmers haven't exploited the possibilities of extremely fast mass storage yet. The orders of magnitude difference in speed isn't fully realized. It's not just faster, it's faster in a way that requires new approaches. Unlike multicore CPUs over a decade ago, this change in thinking has gone relatively unnoticed by programmers.
Well maybe, it's just storage like HD or RAM.
But to do what (outside scientific software)?
Make everything faster. Space that isn't used for caching data is space that's wasted.
This isn't necessarily about apps that run on your desktop or phone. Most code in the world runs on servers, and the use cases are different.
I'm already avoiding buying newer SSDs because the durability is dropping off a cliff.
I'm really scared of them cramming more and more bits in the same cell. Every time they double that number it's got to be cutting the write longevity in half. Unless they've got some other thing they can do to increase that.
TLC or bust for me.
I'd only consider QLC for low write high read situations like a NAS that serves as media storage.
Yeah, density isn't really an issue IMO, I want reliable, cheap, and fast, in that order, yet SSDs seem to be going for dense, fast, and cheap, with little thought for long-term reliability.
I'm sure we will get some "random" fire at some factory to drive prices up again.
That's likely the point where spinning platters die in the marketplace.
Right now, spinning platters are around $12/tb. SSDs are around $75. Exact numbers fluctuate with features and market changes, but those are the ballpark. Cut in half, SSDs will be $38/tb, and then $19 in the next halving. Spinning platters aren't likely to see the same level of reduction in that time period; they're a mature technology.
I think once they reach double the price per tb, we'll see a major collapse of the hard drive market. My thinking is that there's a lot of four drive RAID 10 systems out there. With SSDs, those can be two drive RAID 1, and will still be faster. With half the drives, they can be twice the price and work out the same.
Spinning platters are already dead in many ways because even though they've increased in capacity, they haven't meanigfully changed read/write speeds in decades, which makes moving the ever increasing data a huge pain.
Most hardrives live in servers, as part of storage volumes where
IO can be optimised well beyond the capability of a single disk.
For the boot disk on my workstation I am absolutely using an SSD, but for the hundreds of terabytes of largely static data that I need to keep archived? Spinning disks all the way. Not only to SSDs need to match on price, but they also have a long way to come in terms of longevity.
The R/W cycles are infinite. At least until the head error out.
This is it. Yes, spinning HDDs may be cheaper, but replacing mine with an SSD made my PC faster and quieter, especially on boot.
Not really relevant, but I just moved 150ish GB between SSDs in a few minutes, less than 5 for sure. As a teenager such an operation (moving 3 games between drives) would have taken an hour. As a kid I'd be furiously changing floppy drives all day.
I just thought that was an interesting thought.
are HDDs finally dying?
Not yet, unless the higher capacity comes at a much lower price. HDDs are fine for the price currently
it'll be interesting to see what happens, but i've been hoping that at some point SSDs will simply hit a cost point that is lower, whereas HDDs won't be able to go below that (due to physical tolerancing and complicated manufacturing) whereas with an SSD it's literally just chips on a board. You put more of them on the board it has more storage, simple as that.
Although i think before that, HDDs would likely become extremely competitive since they would actually be forced to lower cost some substantial amount.
Although i think before that, HDDs would likely become extremely competitive since they would actually be forced to lower cost some substantial amount.
I think you have it backwards. The SSD manufacturers are always going to see their product as better than HDD performance wise so they'll likely always have a higher price per capacity.
that's possible, but idk. I don't really see why i would want an 8TB ssd that can run at 4GB/s unless im literally a data center, so i think at some point the higher capacity ones are just going to have to be cheaper and more affordable. I.E. probably slower.
Yup, I use HDDs for my NAS and SSDs for my desktop and laptop. HDD for cheap storage, SSD for fast storage.
Not when 20TB drives are becoming cheaper :)
oh shit, you might be right, this might actually make HDDs more affordable as flash starts to catch up.
I doubt it will be this much. But at least it could lower the price, assuming it's not already a thin margin for the manufacturers, and they will instead resort to using SMR instead of CMR
High capacity SMR drives are already a special hell, those wont get much market share for the average HDD use case outside of archival usage, which might be the intent to begin with lol. I believe SMR drives are already cheaper anyway, not sure how much that is due to R&D and production or just existing in a special market space right now, but it's one of them.
nar. HDDs don't require power to maintain their state. So that's an advantage they'll always have over SSDs, which means there will be use-cases where HDDs are the better choice.
SSDs can reliably hold charge states for years, and there are storage media that are more reliable than HDD.
HDD's would still find a niche, probably, as a balanced option, but said niche will likely get smaller and smaller over many years.
It will probably be a choice of quieter, faster, expensive vs loud, high capacity, pretty cheap.
Unless we start with 3.5" SSDs (pls), HDDs will always be storage kings.
Imagine 3.5" SSDs with 3-4 layer sandwiched PCBs...And inexpensive NAND...
Why is 3.5" preferable? You can always use a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter, and even 2.5" casing is mostly empty anyway
More volume for more NAND-PCBs
and even 2.5" casing is mostly empty anyway
Does this count for the higher capacity drives (e.g. >2TB)? Preferably TLC?
Proud owner of 1TB Samsung 860 Evo.
Pretty much yes, it counts :D
Moreover, iirc, there are 64TB 2,5" SSDs and 100TB 3,5" available for enterprise users, and 8TB M.2 SSDs on consumer market. Space is really not a constraint.
I believe the 100TB SSD is the one LTT showcased a few years ago?
My problem with M.2 and high capacity is them vharging an arm and a leg for it. The cheapest I can find on the quick side is a WD black 8TB for 698,99€ with tax.
You know how much storage space I can buy from 700€ in spinning rust? Quadruple the space of the single stick of nand.
Surprisingly a SATA TLC SSD is even more expensive at 814,93€ (Kingston DC600M). But SAS will cost you your whole arm.
The constraint may not be the size but the cost certainly is.
And if they put lower capacity NAND on the PCBs we could reduce costs
HDDs will probably always be useful for media storage, where quick access time isn't required and it isn't being used constantly. They should die for PCs though.
Exactly. I haven't used a HDD in my PC for years, yet I bought HDDs for my homelab NAS. Unless SSDs get a lot cheaper, I'll keep buying HDDs for on-prem bulk storage.
doubt it would matter much, if you need long term storage you're using LSO tapes anyway.
HDD might be nice for a bulk backup or just mass storage, but i think the primary driving factor for them is going to be cost.
HDDs don’t require power to maintain their state. So that’s an advantage they’ll always have over SSDs
SSDs are not flash memory.
might wanna make sure they have sufficient emf shielding
daamn 1 TB in 2029 now ay
This is per chip. A given NVMe drive usually contains multiple chips.
Probably being paranoid, but it seems to me like one of the few untapped utilities of this much cheap storage is just increased surveillance. Hi resolution recording of everything, all the time.
Not really? Storage isn't really much of a limiter, tape drives are huge. High res is more about the camera AFAIK, high res but low refresh rate(frame rate?) probably doesn't have much of a transfer speed issue to necessitate SSD speeds.
If you want to search and index it, you don't want to do that on tapes. It's doable, but difficult. And what benefits tapes gain in reliability/long term storage, a RAID system would negate. Cheaper large SSDs make these kinds of systems more economical to the average person.
Right! Forgot about that aspect of Tape drives. Haven't messed with them before personally, so TIL 😁
I dunno. It's all about lowering the barriers of accessibility. Tape drives are not widely adopted. Cloud camera monitoring is already common. Windows is pushing this recall feature, cameras are on everything, AI video analysis is taking off, and the populous is completely numb on privacy issues. My tech paranoia sense is usually right on track. We'll see
GP was wrong about tapes, but plenty of these systems use hard drives already. They can use specialized drives that are cheap and have slow write speeds, because streaming video is a constant rate per second. They also don't record unless there's movement. The network is also a limiting factor.
I don't think SSDs solve any problem, here.
That will be helpful. Unless I want to prune my node, I should probably consider upgrading my storage space for my Monero node in the near future anyway.
just in time for GTA6 to come out and be 3TB in size
I wouldn't even mind tbh.
Except it would take 3 literal months to download it (stupid home internet with a 1.25TB data cap)
Goodness, do you live in Australia or something? Are there any better options, or can you not afford them? My spoiled and priveleged self has trouble comprehending a data cap on my internet plan.
It’s Comcastic!
United States. They have data caps because
their backbone isn't powerful enough for 2gbps home internetthey prefer to offer more value to customersYou forgot "and they're greedy fuck pigs"
well, that's a given
Do they also pull the "fair use" bullshit out their asses like our ISPs?
And if you go to the store and buy it in person, it'll be a empty cd case with a serial key to download.
or with a CD that installs a downloader, that is actually a background service always starting with the OS, and a few other bloatware to not waste CD space
except that almost nobody has a CD drive anymore. so it must be a pendrive instead that was forced to read-only access
Can I ask what country so I can avoid it like the plague?Ah yes, good ol' US of A. Why am I not surprised?
My ISP recently introduced data caps on unlimited (they throttle you to 4Mbit if you go past ~300GB or 500, not sure). I already wanted to leave but that's really lighting a fire under me to move the fuck out of here.
? I've never had a data cap and I'm in the US. Many areas now have alternatives to cable/DSL. I have fiber-backed Ethernet at the wall, and my city is rolling out muni-fiber, and we're honestly kind of late to the game compared to my local area.
Shop around, maybe you have more options now.
Ah shit. That would suck. Personally I could start the download and have the game the next day. Which is roughly what it took to torrent a 4 GiB game back in the day if there weren't enough seeds.
250GB tops or it will be bs.
GTA5 already had about 90-110GB of raw gamedata. I think right now it's 150GB.
And Apple will finally sell the iPhone starting with 256GB
Technically the Pro Max already starts at 256 GB (starting with the 15 series iirc). But they simply removed the 128 GB option from the price stack.
What do you need 256gb for? You don’t seriously store photos and videos on your phone… as the only place?
My 100GB music library leaves less space than I'd like on a 128GB phone.
You really listen to that much music that often? I assume that's compressed as well, because I don't think there's a point to high-bitrate media when you're going to play it through phone speakers or Bluetooth.
Personally I just use plain old FM radio in my car, a couple dozen songs on my workout playlist for the gym, and YouTube streams for work.
Great if you only want to listen to music half the time.
that's what expandable storage (i.e. sd card) is for.
oh your phone does not know what that is?
that's what expandable storage (i.e. sd card) is for.
oh your phone does not know what that is?
My girlfriend learned that lesson the hard way. We now have a nas and off-site storage.
Fuck yeah! I NAS swap with a friend. I have my house NAS which syncs to my other one at his place and he does the same. (4 total)
Yeah, I don’t get this. I still haven’t used more than ~115GB in years that I’ve been on iPhone. All my photos are in RAW (since supported) and I’ve got a huge lossless (or better) music library.
Granted I don’t have 100% of everything on my phone all the time, but even my iCloud storage is pretty low.
I guess since I have Apple Music I don’t have very much on my phone at any one time.
Most of my heavy usage are my Virtual Machines. But really, those don’t all have to be on at once. Am I really using windows that often?
I use YouTube Music and the only time I download music for offline is if I'm going to fly somewhere.
Oh shit, I have a flight later this month. Thank you for reminding me to download the music!!
The prices will stay the same. Manufacturers will just make more profit.
Is that what has happened to the storage market historically?
Not at all. The price of storage has plummeted so much that most video games comfortably use ~100GB for large games and don’t care because even SSD storage is extremely cheap.
If you don’t believe me, here’s a post on Reddit that shows it off pretty well.
There's two ways to take that statement. The price of a hard drive will remain the same, or the price per memory unit will remain the same. Price per hard drive remains largely the same. Price per unit of memory drops.
The only exception here is SSDs are slowly dropping in price to meet magnetic disk drives.
Interpreted the other way, I don’t think that makes sense because on the whole storage has always gotten cheaper with time. Hard drives may cost the same, but they’re larger capacity so really this would only work as an argument if hard drive storage space stayed the same and prices remained the same for consumers but went down for manufacturers.
Also there’s a lot of competition in the space similar to other chips so I don’t see how a company making NAND or platters can afford to sit on their hands like that. The whole point of drive innovation right now is to drive the price per GB down for B2B sales. And that usually translates well to consumer sales too.
That's business logic. Consumer logic is that when things get cheaper they should actually be cheaper.
The actual shells and manufacturing costs aren't going down meaningfully. Giving you more for the same price is how consumers benefit the most. Especially because consumer demands for storage (among people willing to buy any, at least) keep going up and there isn't a big market for HDDs that are half the price but 1/4 of the storage.
They do get cheaper but the cheaper ones don’t get made because they aren’t worth anything anymore. Like sure you can get a 500GB HDD which used to be a moderately priced option and is now basically trash or free. The prices go down, but the key is that consumers no longer want the old thing either.
Actually those are still available. And I will admit if anyone tried to get me to pay 100 dollars for one now I would probably laugh them out of the room.
I'm not exactly sure what that chart is using for data sources. Historically every couple of years I've bought whatever goes on sale for around $200 and added it to my unraid.
I was able to pick up exos 14s a couple of years ago. And they're still not back down to $200.
It looks like it depends on the drive size but also I think the pandemic has leveled this out in recent years. Some additional data I found by BackBlaze shows a bit more of the story though they have changed their drive sizes which leads to a more interesting graph.
That looks like I expected it to. Inflation probably doesn't help.
Honestly, nowadays a 100Gb game is small. Games are easily 200+ for the AAA section.
Yeah, but modern consoles come with as little as 512 gigs of storage.
I'm optimistic. I'm making numbers out of my butt because I literally can't remember.
But I think My 20GB SSD from 2010 was about $100. I used to dualboot.
Today, I can get a 512GB SSD for $50.
SSDs were relatively new in 2010, and priced accordingly. Now it's just about increasing sizes and (hopefully) reliability. I just don't think that all of a sudden we'll have huge cheap SSDs - people are used to a certain price point and manufacturers will take advantage of that.
Same SSDs are about 40% more expensive today than they were this time last year.
I got a 1TB SSD for 55€, so about 60 something dollars. Prices are certainly dropping
Maybe 2.5" but not 2280
Just have a look
Regarding your 1st link: Receiving a geo block :|
Regarding your 2nd link:
I would only consider storge by known manufacturers like Intel, Samsung, Crucial/Micron, WD/SanDisk, Kioxia and maybe Kingston.
No experience with brands like Sabrent.
Same reason why I wouldnt shop for them on AliExpress. No confidence in those NAND.
Yup.
For SSDs this has historically not been the case, there's no way in hell you could buy a 1TB SSD within $200 a decade ago.
A decade ago 1TB SSDs were rare and, like all new things in tech, expensive.
Yet apple will still charge $200 for 128gb
It's almost as if oligopolies can manipulate prices regardless of availability
32 level "PLC" cells, OMG. How about staying at levels with some durability.
Amazing news! Unfortunately, if this comes to Brazil and 8tb SSD would be the price of a car
That makes cars very cheap or technology very expensive
Or both extremely expensive.
What do they cost you now?
R$ 5.460,00 (Brazilian Reais), the first comment is just exaggerating and having a 'mongrel complex' take. It is nowhere near the price of a car even today.
In freedom units, that looks to be ~$1k for 8TB SSD. Same device here is $600-700.
So, not that much more expensive, i bet west european countries get near or equal that price, it's electronics in the US that are cheaper than others (including rich countries). and it's more that we are poor.
That's decently more expensive! $300-700 difference is pretty significant imo. Like I couldn't swing that I don't think, pushes it too expensive
It could also be a difference in how sales tax or whatever is presented. I know in the EU, VAT is included in online pricing, whereas sales tax in the US is not. I don't know how Brazil runs things, but that could explain a chunk of the difference. The US also likely has higher volume for these kinds of things, so prices will likely be lower in the US than Brazil.
But yeah, it looks to be about 40-50% more expensive, which is substantial. If you're looking to spend $600-700 on storage, there's a good chance you can afford another $300-400, you just don't want to spend that much.
Brazilian system is the most simple: It is already the final price (not counting shipping, which might be many options), with EVERY tax included. Period. What i see is what i pay. Even Aliexpress shows numbers with all taxes included in the final total price now.
The Yankee system is honestly both insane and fraudulent, nothing is ever the price that the webpages or stickers show, i always have to guess it's somewhere between 10% and 20% more. The european system is also more honest, unless they also have other taxes besides VAT that they don't show.
In the US, sales tax varies by jurisdiction, even within a state. If I buy something in my city, it could be 0.10-0.25% difference than the city next door, because our cities will have different tax needs. In my state, sales tax ranges from 7.5-8.5%, depending on where the purchase is made, and the city portion is generally around 1% (state portion is fixed).
It's incredibly dumb, and I wish physical stores were required to display price after factoring in taxes. However, for websites, I don't expect that, simply due to the variability between jurisdictions (makes advertising prices ridiculous), and because it's trivial to see the final figure in the cart after I input shipping information.
So if Brazil includes taxes in online quotes like the EU, the gaps is even narrower. My local tax rate is around 8%, so for me, that $600-700 item would be $650-750, which is still cheaper than Brazil, but Brazil may very well have higher sales tax than here. Ideally, we'd compare w/ pre-tax values for a more apples-to-apples figure.
They already exist. $dayjob bought some 64GB ssds. They were about $7500USD per drive.
For 64gb? Did you mean tb or is there something unique about these drives?
More density means less longevity, less write cycles before the blocks wear out, also decreases the time before Nand leakage can end up corrupting the data. Doesn't seem like a good thing to me.
Oh yeah, also more storage space causes complacency with developers who will terribly optimize their games because they don't have to worry about games not fitting on people's disks. Think 100GB games is bad it'll get much worse when they got more free space at their disposal, and worse, the perception that their customers have tons of free space as well.
I don't disagree with you, but on the other hand, this will be a huge boon for people who do things like sail the high seas and wish to keep what they acquire long term. You're not constantly rewriting in those cases. You're just slowly (or perhaps not so slowly) filling up the drive. Eventually, it's essentially read only.
Considering how much I spent on 6 TB of regular hard drive storage for this reason a few years ago, I'd be all for affordable 8 TB SSDs.
You don't need solid state storage for Linux ISOs
I recently bought a 5TB hard drive. It's funny how that sounds like a lot of space until you fill it up and find yourself eyeing another.
Yep, I can't afford any more storage. I've had to start curating and weeding, which is a shame because I know there are things I'd probably eventually revisit. Oh well. So long, Duckman.
if I may ask, what kinds of things are you storing? my computer has only 500gb, my phone has 128gb, and I pay a small fee for 100gb of cloud storage for photos. sometimes I feel like I'm running out of space but it's never a real problem for me. so I'm just curious because I'm having trouble imagining what I'd even fill up 5tb with.
Movies at good quality are like 15GB each. Games frequently blow past 100.
I'm the person in the thread before the person who asked, but I'm in the same boat. In my case: videos, radio shows and comics.
A 4-season TV series in 1080p can easily take up 50-100 gb.
ah that makes sense. thanks
My iCloud Photos is 1.2TB
Admittedly I should prune junk out, but RAW photos from real cameras are big and I'm not giving them up. Same with videos from my DJI.
I mean, you're not wrong but I eventually bought all that shit I torrented in college on gog or steam when I got a job
I'm talking about things like movies and TV shows, not games. In fact, if you aren't careful (or just have a game that doesn't allow you to choose where it saves its data), you could have the write cycle issue with games.
There are plenty of games that you can't buy on Gog or Steam even today (like any emulation ISO from console games), and sharing is caring for others that can not afford it.
Thinking about it, it would be nice if when formatting a partition on mlc based drives, you could specify the number of bits per cell used. So an 8tb QLC drive could be formatted as a 2tb SLC for those who want the resilience, without having to commit to it permanently.
I'm sure there are technical reasons that would be difficult, but everything started out difficult until we figured it out.
For the first part, as long as it isn't too bad and it gets detected, and has methods for mitigating damage from losses, that's fine. If you get a lot more capacity but lose some over time, you still have more capacity.
For the latter, yeah it does but do they even care now? Personally, I don't play any games that large really anyway, so it doesn't effect me. Let them lose you as a customer too if that's an issue and they surpass how much you'll put up with.
The first part also applies to cold storage, like if you leave it off for a while and data will degrade without power as electrons leak out. Something that might be a concern for data archival on these drives.
I don't think they do care now, I'm not super worried about it but I might be if I wanted to get a PC port of a game that isn't on PC now, where the old one is well optimized but the new one isn't. Was the story when I got Okami HD on PC, it's insane how they went from a game which came on an 8GB disc for PS3 and it's 34GB on PC, I know they included 4K in the PC one but the fact it's so much insanely larger makes me think a lot of it was wasted space by not compressing what could be compressed.
Large game file size is an optimization
Good news but it'll be a while before I can replace the 20TB drives in my NAS with these.
It's looking like 2029 will be the turning point. Right now, we are on the verge of having 16tb m.2s on the market, and by 2029 SSDs will be around $10-15/TB like HDDs are now.
In 2029, if semiconductor trends continue, it is likely that we will have 16TB SSDs for ~$200 and 32TB SSDs for ~$500; Cheaper than the $320 we're paying for 20TB HDDs right now.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/16tb-m2-ssds-will-soon-grace-the-market
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disk_drives#/media/File:Historical_cost_of_computer_memory_and_storage.svg
The HDD industry doesn't seem like it will improve at the same rate. It is likely that the SSD market will have better $/TB than the HDD market in 2029, unless hard drives make some massive breakthrough before then. The survival of the HDD industry past the next 5 years is basically riding on Seagate's ability to successfully release HAMR technology.
While I fully agree with the SSD side, you seem to ignore that HDDs are also getting cheaper per TB (always have, and usually quite noticeably). Also the reliability of large to huge SSDs remains to be seen as well. Obviously a breakthrough in HDD technology would have an influence as well, as you mentioned.
I'm not saying SSDs aren't here to take over, they surely will eventually (preferably sooner), but I think it'll be a few more years until we got actual price parity per TB. Even when ignoring other aspects like reliability.
You can’t really reliably use consumer SSDs in a server/NAS situation though, unless you more prepared to replace them every 12-24 months and suffer poor read/write speeds under load
SSDs last longer than hard drives in most situations.
https://youtu.be/D39kk1mMDUU
What do you mean poor speeds under load?
You would replace your NAS drives with SSDs?
Im not super experienced with NAS and only started home networking like three years ago. but I read SSDs would die quicker than traditional disks.
I’m not sure although it’s mostly used for media storage so there aren’t a lot of write operations. Having said that I do have solid state M2 drives in there for caching with no issues so far.
Excellent, I needed more space for cookies, malware and games that suddenly require 500GB of free space. I'll have that thing full in no time.
Just don't play the AAA slop and the file sizes are a lot better.
Not sure which ones are AAA slop. I play online every Monday with a friend in the UK. Here are some of the games we've played:
Grim Dawn, Diablo 4, Borderlands, Borderlands 2, Borderlands 3, Borderlands the presequel, Tiny Tina's Wonderland, and currently we're playing Aliens Elite something.
But I have played other games with a different group of friends online.
Man, the formatting sucks. There was a carriage return after every game. Why is it there for the paragraphs and gone for the lists?
Most of those are in the 30-60GB range IIRC. So if you keep 5 installed, you're looking at 200GB or so.
What OP is referring to is things like COD that are 300GB or so.
You need a blank line between paragraphs, so:
If you want a list, add a hyphen or asterisk, like so, and you won't need the blank line:
Renders as:
Thank you very much kind sir or madame or whatever you identify as. Very helpful.
Not sure which ones are AAA slop. I play online every Monday with a friend in the UK. Here are some of the games we've played:
Grim Dawn
Diablo 4,
Borderlands,
Borderlands 2,
Borderlands 3,
Borderlands the presequel,
Tiny Tina's Wonderland,
and currently we're playing Aliens Elite something.
But I have played other games with a different group of friends online.
Man, the formatting sucks. There was a carriage return after every game.
And soon enough we'll see 1tb games once storage is plenty.
Soon the new COD will weigh 5TB
COD will ship as a 5TB HDD cartridge :D
We will go back to the cartridge bay days.
A 3.5" cartridge slot with a hard drive reader in it sounds kinda awesome, not gonna lie.
You can get those. I had a 4x2.5" bay for a while.
Yup, it's the norm in NAS and server units.
I'll believe it when I see it. 4TB SSDs are still not affordable.
"Could"
I'm all for it, and it's just the usual "moores law" trend, I just wonder if we won't hit a wall where (most!) users just won't need it?
most users already dont use what theyve got. its more about reducing physical size for the masses... these new techs will allow for even smaller storage for thinner, more efficient devices.
i think only some power users (im a data horader) and commercial interests care about bulk storage
I'm slightly surprised that loss of faith in corporations being good stewards of our cultural content - wantonly deleting cherished shows, namely - has not driven a larger move towards personal ownership of media. In a world where anything that fails to be profitable faces destruction, owning your stuff has never been a better idea.
People, in general, don’t care. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, more that they just don’t notice until she show they searched for isn’t available and then they shrug it off and move on to another one they can watch. Most people I know don’t want to keep large catalogs around if things they like because they only watch a single movie a few times in their lives. They watch it and then they’re good for years or more. There’s so much content out there that there’s no way they’re going to rewatch things and there’s no way they’re going to miss it because they’re having enough trouble keeping up with all the new stuff. On top of that, the convenience of just turning on the tube and hitting play vs trying to find the disc, and store and organize it is huge. And ripping it and then keeping a large amount of storage locally, online and healthy for the purpose is out of their technical wheel house. (And budget at times)
Honestly, I’m a big proponent for buying physical media… but I’ve greatly reduced what I rip/buy/keep, just knowing there’s only so much time left on my personal hourglass and I’ve got better things to do than worrying about all that up keep. When I kick the bucket, no one is going to care about it all. Maybe they’ll keep a few interesting ones but they’ll likely just sit on someone else’s shelf. In the mean time, how many times am I really going to watch some of these things?
Emphasis on "slightly"
I can't believe how much mileage I've gotten out of my 512GB SSDs on my laptops. And my "big" backup disks are hand me down 1TB HDs my friend didn't need. I don't do video, though.
my collection is small compared to some, but ive got about 22 4tb drives in use in various arrays.. but its mostly video.
I remember it being a big space sink when I was editing video. Now all I have is DVD rips of my collection and those are nice and compact.
Thermal is a wall to contend with as well. At the moment SSDs get the density from 3D stacking the planes of substrate that make up the memory cells. Each layer contributes some heat and at some point the layer in the middle gets too hot from the layers below and not being close enough to the top to dissipate the heat upwards fast enough.
One way to address this was the multi-level cell (MLC) where instead of on/off, the voltage within the cell could represent multiple bits. So 0-1.5v = 00, 1.6-3v = 01, 3.1-4.5v = 10, 4.6-5v = 11. But that requires sense amplifiers that can handle that, which aren't difficult outright to etch, they just add complexity to ensure that the amplifier read the correct value. We've since moved to eight-level cells, where each cell holds an entire byte, and the error correction circuits are wild for the sense amplifiers. But all NAND FGMOS leak, so if you pack eight levels into a single cell, even small leaks can be the difference between sensing one level from another level. So at some point packing more levels into the cell will just lead to a cell that leaks too quickly for the word "storage" to be applied to the device. It's not really storage any longer if powering the device off for half a year puts all the data at risk.
So once going upwards and packing hits a wall, the next direction is moving out. But the more you move outward, the further one is placing the physical memory cells from the controller. It's a non-zero amount of distance and the speed of light is only so fast. One light-nanosecond is about 300 millimetres, so a device operating at 1GHz frequency clock has that distance to cover in a single tick of the clock in an ideal situation, which heat, quantum effects, and so on all conspire to make it less than ideal. So you can only go so far out before you begin to require cache in the in-between steps and scheduling of block access that make the entire thing more complex and potentially slow it down.
And there are ways to get around that as well, but all of them begin to really increase the cost, like having multi-port chips that are accessed on multi-channel buses, basically creating a small network inside your SSD of chips. Sort of how like a lot of CPUs are starting to swap over to chiplet designs. We can absolutely keep going, but there's going to be cost associated with that "keep going" that's going to be hard to bring down. So there will be a point where that "cost to utility" equation for end-users will start playing a much larger role long before we hit some physical wall.
That said, the 200 domain of layers was thought to be the wall for stacking due to heat, there was some creative work done and the number of layers got past 300, but the chips do indeed generate a lot more heat these days. And maybe heat sinks and fans for your SSD aren't too far off in the future, I know passive cooling with a heat sink is already becoming vogue with SSDs. The article indicated that Samsung and SK hynix predict being able to hit 1000+ layers, which that's crazy to think about, because even with the tricks being employed today to help get heat out of the middle layers faster, I don't see how we use those same tricks to hit past 500+ layers without a major change in production of the cells, which usually there's a lot of R&D that goes behind such a thing. So maybe they've been working on something nobody else knows about, or maybe they're going to have active cooling for SSDs? Who knows, but 1000+ layers is wild to think about, but I'm pretty sure that such chips are not going to come down in prices as quickly as some consumers might hope. As it gets more complex, that length of time before prices start to go down starts to increase. And that slows overall demand for more density as only the ones who see the higher cost being worth their specific need gets more limited to very niche applications.
We hit that point in spinning disk drives a while ago for me
The issue is, every time we make a great leap in storage medium, we tend to use that new storage for BIGGER files. Higher quality media and all that. Back in the day, the average movie file was measured in the MB. Now it's GB. Think about an old floppy with 1.4 MB of data and how many text files you stored on it. You couldn't ever imagine needing more space. Then came pictures and music files. Video files. Then higher resolution picture and video files. Suddenly even your text documents aren't just raw .txt files, but Word documents and interactive PDFs.
As storage improves, what we expect to be able to carry around with us or have in our home computer changes. I'm currently running a home server with 18TB of storage. An amount that I would have never dreamed of possessing 20 years ago, and yet here I am debating when I grab that 24TB drive because I can already see me running out of space in a few months.
This is all to say that I really don't think there will ever be a maximum amount a user could need. Give them that maximum and in a week they'll have figured out a way to use it to capacity. I think video games and cartridge/disk size limitations and then the transition to digital games and balloning game size shows my point.
This demand is also dictated by what companies see as a default setup, now it's 0,5Tb+ SSDs as syst drives. W10\11 doesn't work on HDDs because their update and security services can overwhelm your disk's speed and make the system unresponsive. If you are given an older hardware by your employer, good luck, as your OS and other programs assume they don't need to limit either speed or size, and the only way to keep using the same features is to upgrade.
Exactly. Eventually what we see now as cutting edge will become "bare minimum" or even "obsolete" hardware one day. Eventually the camera on your cell phone will by default be taking such high resolution pictures that anything less that a TB of onboard storage will seem quaint.
Our family’s first proper PC back in around ‘93 had a 1gb HDD. I remember strutting about at school like I was the top shit because of how great my computer was.
These days I have a modded iPod mini with 128gb that I’m getting close to needing to increase because of my love of 320kbps MP4 files.
Its already been 6 years since the first 100TB SSD released and I still don't think anyone has bothered to dethrone it last I checked. Density and number of layers possible have both increased since then. I imagine part of it is just a performance issue though; 10 10TB SSDs are gonna be faster than 1 100TB SSD.
At the consumer level, the usage of smaller form factors will probably mean more density will still be useful. Things like the steamdeck drives will benefit for a while.
64TB ssds are fairly common in the enterprise market now, I don't think they were 6 years ago. It's possible we'll see 128TB SSDs become fairly common on servers in a few years.
They'll be useful for gamers, at least. With the increasing trend of companies caring less about properly optimizing the size of game installs and expecting gamers to have SSDs for texture loading on the fly, these drives will definitely see use. I currently have a 4TB HDD that has over 2.3TB of Steam games installed on it right now (roughly 100 games from tiny indie games to big AAA releases that are 40-80 gigs in size), and several newer games have an SSD listed as one of their minimum requirements.
Ya, didn't say it will instantly be useless 😁, I'd pick up a 4TB or more because why not?
My first SSD was a 256GB (I really splurged on that one) now I have a 2TB for cheaper, soon it will be 20TB and then 200TB etc. Will video games grow that fast? My thought is it won't and that's all I guess 😊
NAND density is always useful for the ultra portable end, be it used in applications like phones, portable gaming devices, microcontroller boards and such, where space or pci-e lanes is often the limiting factor. when the capacity of nand grows, options become better, as nand usually doubles in capacity per chip.
We've already hit a perceived user experience limit. The perception of responsiveness in blind tests between SATA and NVMe SSDs isn't always apparent--people sometimes say the SATA drive is faster--even though the speed difference on paper is substantial.
IMO, programmers haven't exploited the possibilities of extremely fast mass storage yet. The orders of magnitude difference in speed isn't fully realized. It's not just faster, it's faster in a way that requires new approaches. Unlike multicore CPUs over a decade ago, this change in thinking has gone relatively unnoticed by programmers.
Well maybe, it's just storage like HD or RAM.
But to do what (outside scientific software)?
Make everything faster. Space that isn't used for caching data is space that's wasted.
This isn't necessarily about apps that run on your desktop or phone. Most code in the world runs on servers, and the use cases are different.
I'm already avoiding buying newer SSDs because the durability is dropping off a cliff.
I'm really scared of them cramming more and more bits in the same cell. Every time they double that number it's got to be cutting the write longevity in half. Unless they've got some other thing they can do to increase that.
TLC or bust for me.
I'd only consider QLC for low write high read situations like a NAS that serves as media storage.
Yeah, density isn't really an issue IMO, I want reliable, cheap, and fast, in that order, yet SSDs seem to be going for dense, fast, and cheap, with little thought for long-term reliability.
I'm sure we will get some "random" fire at some factory to drive prices up again.
That's likely the point where spinning platters die in the marketplace.
Right now, spinning platters are around $12/tb. SSDs are around $75. Exact numbers fluctuate with features and market changes, but those are the ballpark. Cut in half, SSDs will be $38/tb, and then $19 in the next halving. Spinning platters aren't likely to see the same level of reduction in that time period; they're a mature technology.
I think once they reach double the price per tb, we'll see a major collapse of the hard drive market. My thinking is that there's a lot of four drive RAID 10 systems out there. With SSDs, those can be two drive RAID 1, and will still be faster. With half the drives, they can be twice the price and work out the same.
Spinning platters are already dead in many ways because even though they've increased in capacity, they haven't meanigfully changed read/write speeds in decades, which makes moving the ever increasing data a huge pain.
Most hardrives live in servers, as part of storage volumes where IO can be optimised well beyond the capability of a single disk.
For the boot disk on my workstation I am absolutely using an SSD, but for the hundreds of terabytes of largely static data that I need to keep archived? Spinning disks all the way. Not only to SSDs need to match on price, but they also have a long way to come in terms of longevity.
This is it. Yes, spinning HDDs may be cheaper, but replacing mine with an SSD made my PC faster and quieter, especially on boot.
Not really relevant, but I just moved 150ish GB between SSDs in a few minutes, less than 5 for sure. As a teenager such an operation (moving 3 games between drives) would have taken an hour. As a kid I'd be furiously changing floppy drives all day.
I just thought that was an interesting thought.
are HDDs finally dying?
Not yet, unless the higher capacity comes at a much lower price. HDDs are fine for the price currently
it'll be interesting to see what happens, but i've been hoping that at some point SSDs will simply hit a cost point that is lower, whereas HDDs won't be able to go below that (due to physical tolerancing and complicated manufacturing) whereas with an SSD it's literally just chips on a board. You put more of them on the board it has more storage, simple as that.
Although i think before that, HDDs would likely become extremely competitive since they would actually be forced to lower cost some substantial amount.
I think you have it backwards. The SSD manufacturers are always going to see their product as better than HDD performance wise so they'll likely always have a higher price per capacity.
that's possible, but idk. I don't really see why i would want an 8TB ssd that can run at 4GB/s unless im literally a data center, so i think at some point the higher capacity ones are just going to have to be cheaper and more affordable. I.E. probably slower.
Yup, I use HDDs for my NAS and SSDs for my desktop and laptop. HDD for cheap storage, SSD for fast storage.
Not when 20TB drives are becoming cheaper :)
oh shit, you might be right, this might actually make HDDs more affordable as flash starts to catch up.
I doubt it will be this much. But at least it could lower the price, assuming it's not already a thin margin for the manufacturers, and they will instead resort to using SMR instead of CMR
High capacity SMR drives are already a special hell, those wont get much market share for the average HDD use case outside of archival usage, which might be the intent to begin with lol. I believe SMR drives are already cheaper anyway, not sure how much that is due to R&D and production or just existing in a special market space right now, but it's one of them.
nar. HDDs don't require power to maintain their state. So that's an advantage they'll always have over SSDs, which means there will be use-cases where HDDs are the better choice.
SSDs can reliably hold charge states for years, and there are storage media that are more reliable than HDD.
HDD's would still find a niche, probably, as a balanced option, but said niche will likely get smaller and smaller over many years.
It will probably be a choice of quieter, faster, expensive vs loud, high capacity, pretty cheap.
Unless we start with 3.5" SSDs (pls), HDDs will always be storage kings.
Imagine 3.5" SSDs with 3-4 layer sandwiched PCBs...And inexpensive NAND...
Why is 3.5" preferable? You can always use a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter, and even 2.5" casing is mostly empty anyway
More volume for more NAND-PCBs
Does this count for the higher capacity drives (e.g. >2TB)? Preferably TLC?
Proud owner of 1TB Samsung 860 Evo.
Pretty much yes, it counts :D
Moreover, iirc, there are 64TB 2,5" SSDs and 100TB 3,5" available for enterprise users, and 8TB M.2 SSDs on consumer market. Space is really not a constraint.
I believe the 100TB SSD is the one LTT showcased a few years ago?
My problem with M.2 and high capacity is them vharging an arm and a leg for it. The cheapest I can find on the quick side is a WD black 8TB for 698,99€ with tax.
You know how much storage space I can buy from 700€ in spinning rust? Quadruple the space of the single stick of nand.
Surprisingly a SATA TLC SSD is even more expensive at 814,93€ (Kingston DC600M). But SAS will cost you your whole arm.
The constraint may not be the size but the cost certainly is.
And if they put lower capacity NAND on the PCBs we could reduce costs
HDDs will probably always be useful for media storage, where quick access time isn't required and it isn't being used constantly. They should die for PCs though.
Exactly. I haven't used a HDD in my PC for years, yet I bought HDDs for my homelab NAS. Unless SSDs get a lot cheaper, I'll keep buying HDDs for on-prem bulk storage.
doubt it would matter much, if you need long term storage you're using LSO tapes anyway.
HDD might be nice for a bulk backup or just mass storage, but i think the primary driving factor for them is going to be cost.
SSDs are not flash memory.
might wanna make sure they have sufficient emf shielding
daamn 1 TB in 2029 now ay
This is per chip. A given NVMe drive usually contains multiple chips.
Probably being paranoid, but it seems to me like one of the few untapped utilities of this much cheap storage is just increased surveillance. Hi resolution recording of everything, all the time.
Not really? Storage isn't really much of a limiter, tape drives are huge. High res is more about the camera AFAIK, high res but low refresh rate(frame rate?) probably doesn't have much of a transfer speed issue to necessitate SSD speeds.
If you want to search and index it, you don't want to do that on tapes. It's doable, but difficult. And what benefits tapes gain in reliability/long term storage, a RAID system would negate. Cheaper large SSDs make these kinds of systems more economical to the average person.
Right! Forgot about that aspect of Tape drives. Haven't messed with them before personally, so TIL 😁
I dunno. It's all about lowering the barriers of accessibility. Tape drives are not widely adopted. Cloud camera monitoring is already common. Windows is pushing this recall feature, cameras are on everything, AI video analysis is taking off, and the populous is completely numb on privacy issues. My tech paranoia sense is usually right on track. We'll see
GP was wrong about tapes, but plenty of these systems use hard drives already. They can use specialized drives that are cheap and have slow write speeds, because streaming video is a constant rate per second. They also don't record unless there's movement. The network is also a limiting factor.
I don't think SSDs solve any problem, here.
That will be helpful. Unless I want to prune my node, I should probably consider upgrading my storage space for my Monero node in the near future anyway.