5 ms·

And SSD costs still 10x per GB... Hoping that comes down.

by slyrus 9y ago

tombrossman 9y ago
Agreed, I'm having to constantly manage space and move media files to external drives to keep using a SSD for my primary drive. I bought 30GB, 128GB, and 256GB drives as prices came down and I had hoped 1TB drives would be under $200 by now. Not even close. What is worse, I built a new desktop and planned to use a M.2 SSD for even higher speeds. That's a long way off now and will probably have to wait for the next build. Truly a first-world problem but damn, where are my cheap SSD's?
- tertius 9y ago
  They're here. Samsung 960 EVO 500GB at $250. That's insane my friend. I guess it depends how long you've been in the game. I remember my 40MB drive being huge after we upgraded from a 12MB drive. It was truly hard to find enough to fill it up with.
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    Once tiny tiny sad thing, they shifted the entry models since. I used to find 40$ average but good brand (intel) ssd; now it's impossible.
    - mark-r 9y ago
      That's exactly the opposite of the way I expected things to turn out. Hard drives with their moving parts have a floor on the price, just because you can't get all those parts any cheaper; the only way to get the $/TB lower is to keep making them bigger. SSDs have no such problem, so I expected on the low end we'd see SSDs undercutting hard drives by a lot. Where are the $20 SSDs?
      - tertius 9y ago
        Here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010Q588D4?tag=slicinc-20&ascsubtag=4fa774ec666211e7886b0e774cf9d6690INT https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010Q588D4?tag=slicinc-20&...
        agumonkey 9y ago
        I often run from usb flash drives, never tried a recent micro sd; I wonder how different they are in terms of everything.
      - pixl97 9y ago
        There is no reason to produce $20 SSD's at this time. There is more demand than production so it makes more sense to produce large, high profit drives.
  - tombrossman 9y ago
    I'm now using the 256GB drive (a 850 EVO Pro) as primary with the old 128GB holding my music collection and it's a pain to manage. Ubuntu FDE with multiple drives under /home isn't as simple or reliable as I would like, and I want to move everything back to one single fast drive. I should probably take the time to reformat & reinstall across both as a ZFS partition, then wait another year for 1TB prices to come down. 1TB SSDs just aren't cheap enough yet for me to justify buying one. 500GB will fill up again very quickly once everything is on one drive. I'll frequently shoot a few hundred camera raw photos, then export many as 16-bit TIFF to be stitched into large panoramas or fused together (using exposure bracketed photos). This uses huge amounts of disk space and I want a minimum of 100GB free space as a buffer.
- Retric 9y ago
  1TB SSD's are 250$ which is close to 200 if you don't need crazy performance. IMO, more importantly 500GB SSD's are 150$ which are much bigger than 256GB drives as you OS takes up a lot of space.
  - bluedino 9y ago
    >> 1TB SSD's are 250$ which is close to 200 On one hand, some people pay $200 for an entire computer. On the other, $200 is what an ordinary hard drive used to cost.
    - camiller 9y ago
      Bought my laptop new for $299 in 2012 as Windows 8 was coming out and discounts on machines with Windows 7 pre-loaded we common. A couple years ago having upgraded to Windows 10 I grew exasperated with it and replaced the HDD with a ~500GB SSD, maxed out the memory, and switched to Linux (Ubuntu Mate). It now runs Android Studio or Eclipse better than it ever did.
- topspin 9y ago
  >> I'm having to constantly manage space and move media files to external drives to keep using a SSD for my primary drive. SSDs have added a storage tier. You're doing the natural thing; just get better at it. Intel has created a hybrid solution with 3D XPoint. You can plug a relatively inexpensive Optane module (32GB/~$80) into an X299 chipset motherboard and you'll get most of the IOPS benefit of solid state using a traditional disk in a transparent manner; the Optane module provides a huge cache with lower latency than flash.
- thirdsun 9y ago
  Tell me about it. It's even worse as a Mac user. I'm currently in the process of replacing my aging iMac with a new one and since I need about 1 TB of storage and won't allow any spinning drives, Apples wants me to pay about 840 € for upgrading the default fusion drive to their 1 TB SSD, which is of course very fast storage, but painfully expensive. I'm actually considering opting for the smaller 512 GB SSD and getting an external 1 TB SSD from Samsung later.
dis-sys 9y ago
interestingly, to keep the profit margin, they are also pushing for SSDs that have even higher per GB cost, e.g. Optane.
bluedino 9y ago
They also perform 10x better...
- mmt 9y ago
  Sort of. For sequential I/O, you'd only see 10x if you use an interface faster than SATA for the SSD. Otherwise, you're limited to 600MB/s, which is only 3x a modern Barracuda. For 4K random I/Os, you might actually get better than 10x out of an SSD. Though, does anyone have real-world experience with sustained random I/O this much smaller than the underlying native block size? Do the published IOPS numbers last 24x7 or does performance start falling off after some number of hours/days?
digi_owl 9y ago
My impression is that it really can't. Not unless we move away from flash and onto something like mram or memristors that allows tighter feature packing (if i understood things right). The major SSD vendors seems to have decided that their niche is not bulk storage, but fast RW.

And SSD costs still 10x per GB... Hoping that comes down.

by slyrus 9y ago

And SSD costs still 10x per GB... Hoping that comes down.

Agreed, I'm having to constantly manage space and move media files to external drives to keep using a SSD for my primary drive. I bought 30GB, 128GB, and 256GB drives as prices came down and I had hoped 1TB drives would be under $200 by now. Not even close. What is worse, I built a new desktop and planned to use a M.2 SSD for even higher speeds. That's a long way off now and will probably have to wait for the next build. Truly a first-world problem but damn, where are my cheap SSD's?

tertius 9y ago
They're here. Samsung 960 EVO 500GB at $250. That's insane my friend. I guess it depends how long you've been in the game. I remember my 40MB drive being huge after we upgraded from a 12MB drive. It was truly hard to find enough to fill it up with.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  Once tiny tiny sad thing, they shifted the entry models since. I used to find 40$ average but good brand (intel) ssd; now it's impossible.
  - mark-r 9y ago
    That's exactly the opposite of the way I expected things to turn out. Hard drives with their moving parts have a floor on the price, just because you can't get all those parts any cheaper; the only way to get the $/TB lower is to keep making them bigger. SSDs have no such problem, so I expected on the low end we'd see SSDs undercutting hard drives by a lot. Where are the $20 SSDs?
    - tertius 9y ago
      Here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010Q588D4?tag=slicinc-20&ascsubtag=4fa774ec666211e7886b0e774cf9d6690INT https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010Q588D4?tag=slicinc-20&...
      - agumonkey 9y ago
        I often run from usb flash drives, never tried a recent micro sd; I wonder how different they are in terms of everything.
    - pixl97 9y ago
      There is no reason to produce $20 SSD's at this time. There is more demand than production so it makes more sense to produce large, high profit drives.
- tombrossman 9y ago
  I'm now using the 256GB drive (a 850 EVO Pro) as primary with the old 128GB holding my music collection and it's a pain to manage. Ubuntu FDE with multiple drives under /home isn't as simple or reliable as I would like, and I want to move everything back to one single fast drive. I should probably take the time to reformat & reinstall across both as a ZFS partition, then wait another year for 1TB prices to come down. 1TB SSDs just aren't cheap enough yet for me to justify buying one. 500GB will fill up again very quickly once everything is on one drive. I'll frequently shoot a few hundred camera raw photos, then export many as 16-bit TIFF to be stitched into large panoramas or fused together (using exposure bracketed photos). This uses huge amounts of disk space and I want a minimum of 100GB free space as a buffer.
Retric 9y ago
1TB SSD's are 250$ which is close to 200 if you don't need crazy performance. IMO, more importantly 500GB SSD's are 150$ which are much bigger than 256GB drives as you OS takes up a lot of space.
- bluedino 9y ago
  >> 1TB SSD's are 250$ which is close to 200 On one hand, some people pay $200 for an entire computer. On the other, $200 is what an ordinary hard drive used to cost.
  - camiller 9y ago
    Bought my laptop new for $299 in 2012 as Windows 8 was coming out and discounts on machines with Windows 7 pre-loaded we common. A couple years ago having upgraded to Windows 10 I grew exasperated with it and replaced the HDD with a ~500GB SSD, maxed out the memory, and switched to Linux (Ubuntu Mate). It now runs Android Studio or Eclipse better than it ever did.
topspin 9y ago
>> I'm having to constantly manage space and move media files to external drives to keep using a SSD for my primary drive. SSDs have added a storage tier. You're doing the natural thing; just get better at it. Intel has created a hybrid solution with 3D XPoint. You can plug a relatively inexpensive Optane module (32GB/~$80) into an X299 chipset motherboard and you'll get most of the IOPS benefit of solid state using a traditional disk in a transparent manner; the Optane module provides a huge cache with lower latency than flash.
thirdsun 9y ago
Tell me about it. It's even worse as a Mac user. I'm currently in the process of replacing my aging iMac with a new one and since I need about 1 TB of storage and won't allow any spinning drives, Apples wants me to pay about 840 € for upgrading the default fusion drive to their 1 TB SSD, which is of course very fast storage, but painfully expensive. I'm actually considering opting for the smaller 512 GB SSD and getting an external 1 TB SSD from Samsung later.

dis-sys 9y ago

interestingly, to keep the profit margin, they are also pushing for SSDs that have even higher per GB cost, e.g. Optane.

bluedino 9y ago

They also perform 10x better...

mmt 9y ago
Sort of. For sequential I/O, you'd only see 10x if you use an interface faster than SATA for the SSD. Otherwise, you're limited to 600MB/s, which is only 3x a modern Barracuda. For 4K random I/Os, you might actually get better than 10x out of an SSD. Though, does anyone have real-world experience with sustained random I/O this much smaller than the underlying native block size? Do the published IOPS numbers last 24x7 or does performance start falling off after some number of hours/days?

digi_owl 9y ago

My impression is that it really can't. Not unless we move away from flash and onto something like mram or memristors that allows tighter feature packing (if i understood things right). The major SSD vendors seems to have decided that their niche is not bulk storage, but fast RW.