4 ms·

"Half-terabyte": because "512 gigabyte" just doesn't sound as impressive. Really, though, what I'm interested in is getting enough SSD space at a reasonable pr

by pjscott 16y ago

"Half-terabyte": because "512 gigabyte" just doesn't sound as impressive. Really, though, what I'm interested in is getting enough SSD space at a reasonable price. That might not make quite so eye-catching a headline, though.

jjcm 16y ago
Define enough? Also what's your $/GB ratio threshold? You can already get ssd's for $1-2/GB. That's the same price as platter based storage was around 8 years ago. At this point I'd say that SSD's are reasonable enough for a boot disk or mobile use at least.
- Periodic 16y ago
  I picked up an 80GB disk for my system a few years ago, when the X25-M2 model came out from Intel with a price drop. It was great. Firefox launches in 2 seconds, GRUB to login in < 10s, login to desktop in < 5 seconds. What really hit me hard was gaming. I like to play a few video games from time to time, but they are getting HUGE! For example, World of Warcraft take up about 13GB, and to upgrade to the 4.0 patch it required an additional 20GB (it didn't say this, but that's how much space I had to free before it was able to complete). That's about 35GB for one game, and that's half the space on my SSD. I installed StarCraft II recently and that required 6GB for the download and 14GB for installation. Of course, when I moved the games to an older disk I suddenly had over 50GB free. It's my observation that disk will tend to fill up. First it was with programs, then it was with audio, now it is with video and video games. As soon as we get more space, we will increase the resolution/fidelity until the average person can't tell the difference from a live event.
ericd 16y ago
Good point. This is approaching the "enough space to be the only drive" threshold for me, so this is pretty exciting.
windsurfer 16y ago
Actually, according to HD manufacturers, 0.5 TiB is roughly equal to 465.66 GB. That's a difference of almost 50GB.
- alanh 16y ago
  I could be wrong but I think SSDs tend to come in actual powers of two, or genuine 500GB
  - moe 16y ago
    SSDs have their own ways to shrink the physical capacity. For example the new SandForce chipsets needed 20%(!) of the flash-capacity for their scratch space when they were initially released. I think they have that down to around 6% now. However, regardless of the figures, the harddrive vendors have a user-base that was trained for decades that harddrives are supposed to be smaller than advertised. I doubt they will stop taking advantage of that.
    - icegreentea 16y ago
      It's not just scratch. It's also spare capacity and stuff to deal with level wearing. They also advertise the actual usable space as opposed to the 'max' space. A SSD might actually have 256GB of space, but it'll be advertised as 240GB. They're actually fairly honest. Remember, most of the major SSD manufacturers -aren't- harddrive manufacturers. They're chip and memory manufacturers (which makes sense).
  - Bud 16y ago
    "Actual powers of two" would imply 512 GB.
- ghshephard 16y ago
  According to everyone _except_ memory manufacturers, 1/2 Terabyte = 500 Gigabytes = 5*10^11 Bytes. See: http://www.tarsnap.com/GB-why.html http://www.tarsnap.com/GB-why.html I can't find a single other example, other than Memory where "Giga" isn't 10^9. The question is - SSDs - Memory or Disk? :-) See: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/06/25/sandforce-ssd-test/2 http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/06/25/sandforc... In addition to the GB vs GiB, the use of NAND disk over-provisioning and partition formatting further complicates issues - the punchline: "The 100GB SandForce-based drives use a massive 28 per cent of over provisioning, leaving just 93.16GB of formatted capacity despite their 128GiB of NAND storage"

by pjscott 16y ago

jjcm 16y ago

Define enough? Also what's your $/GB ratio threshold? You can already get ssd's for $1-2/GB. That's the same price as platter based storage was around 8 years ago. At this point I'd say that SSD's are reasonable enough for a boot disk or mobile use at least.

Periodic 16y ago
I picked up an 80GB disk for my system a few years ago, when the X25-M2 model came out from Intel with a price drop. It was great. Firefox launches in 2 seconds, GRUB to login in < 10s, login to desktop in < 5 seconds. What really hit me hard was gaming. I like to play a few video games from time to time, but they are getting HUGE! For example, World of Warcraft take up about 13GB, and to upgrade to the 4.0 patch it required an additional 20GB (it didn't say this, but that's how much space I had to free before it was able to complete). That's about 35GB for one game, and that's half the space on my SSD. I installed StarCraft II recently and that required 6GB for the download and 14GB for installation. Of course, when I moved the games to an older disk I suddenly had over 50GB free. It's my observation that disk will tend to fill up. First it was with programs, then it was with audio, now it is with video and video games. As soon as we get more space, we will increase the resolution/fidelity until the average person can't tell the difference from a live event.

ericd 16y ago

Good point. This is approaching the "enough space to be the only drive" threshold for me, so this is pretty exciting.

windsurfer 16y ago

Actually, according to HD manufacturers, 0.5 TiB is roughly equal to 465.66 GB. That's a difference of almost 50GB.

alanh 16y ago
I could be wrong but I think SSDs tend to come in actual powers of two, or genuine 500GB
- moe 16y ago
  SSDs have their own ways to shrink the physical capacity. For example the new SandForce chipsets needed 20%(!) of the flash-capacity for their scratch space when they were initially released. I think they have that down to around 6% now. However, regardless of the figures, the harddrive vendors have a user-base that was trained for decades that harddrives are supposed to be smaller than advertised. I doubt they will stop taking advantage of that.
  - icegreentea 16y ago
    It's not just scratch. It's also spare capacity and stuff to deal with level wearing. They also advertise the actual usable space as opposed to the 'max' space. A SSD might actually have 256GB of space, but it'll be advertised as 240GB. They're actually fairly honest. Remember, most of the major SSD manufacturers -aren't- harddrive manufacturers. They're chip and memory manufacturers (which makes sense).
- Bud 16y ago
  "Actual powers of two" would imply 512 GB.
ghshephard 16y ago
According to everyone _except_ memory manufacturers, 1/2 Terabyte = 500 Gigabytes = 5*10^11 Bytes. See: http://www.tarsnap.com/GB-why.html http://www.tarsnap.com/GB-why.html I can't find a single other example, other than Memory where "Giga" isn't 10^9. The question is - SSDs - Memory or Disk? :-) See: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/06/25/sandforce-ssd-test/2 http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/06/25/sandforc... In addition to the GB vs GiB, the use of NAND disk over-provisioning and partition formatting further complicates issues - the punchline: "The 100GB SandForce-based drives use a massive 28 per cent of over provisioning, leaving just 93.16GB of formatted capacity despite their 128GiB of NAND storage"