4 ms·

I'm always amazed by how hard drives manage to survive by becoming so much cheaper in spite of the much slower speeds compared to ssd's

ChrisRR 6y ago
Everything has its place. It's going to be a long time before we see SSDs become as cheap per TB as HDDs
Synaesthesia 6y ago
They've kind of stayed the same price for a long time, but capacities have evolved somewhat. SSDs have steadily decreased in price in the meantime.
someperson 6y ago
It all comes down to dollars per terabyte. Also some workloads perform poorly on SSDs (due to their limited read/write cycles). But mostly dollars per terabyte.
speeder 6y ago
When you compare for price, they are not that slower. I have 3 1TB WD Blacks that reach 300 mb/s, when I was shopping for my drives, similar SSDs were either crazy expensive (10 times are much for example) or they were tiny, or the ones with "use-able" size and reasonable price, were SLOWER than the WD Blacks in sequential writes and reads (they were still faster in random access, for obvious physics reasons). To be honest I am perfectly happy with my WD Blacks and never felt the need to switch to SSD, usually my speed bottlenecks are somewhere else (often network speed! it is surprinsingly hard to find good network hardware, all I find is random cables, adapters and routers, that shops don't even know what their speed limits are, asking if a cable supports gigabit ethernet just get me confused looks) EDIT: This post score is fluctuating, suggesting to me people are sometimes downvoting it. I wonder why... I mean, I posted some anedacta, but why the downvote? There is not even anything to disagree with on my post, unless I wrote something very wrong, but nobody replied to say what is wrong...
- sbierwagen 6y ago
  Were you looking at the ratings on SATA SSDs? The WD SN850 NVMe flash drive does 7000mb/s reads. (Close to maxing out a PCIe 4.0 4x slot) That's 23 times faster than the hard drive speed you quoted. SATA SSDs have been obsolete for a decade now. Edit: Just checked some prices on Newegg. Looks like the XPG GAMMIX S50 goes for $139, and does 3900 MB/s reads, while SAMSUNG 860 Pro does 560 MB/s reads... and costs $179. It is unfortunate that the invisible hand does not seem to care about drive speeds. Absent price signals, online retailers do not do a terribly good job signposting the enormous gulf in performance between SATA and PCIe. Newegg lists 999+ 2.5" SATA SSDs, and there is no reason at all to buy any of them when building a new computer.
  - effie 6y ago
    And because large part of price-sensitive market (consumer/small business) does not care for NVMe speeds, SATA SSD aren't really obsolete. They are just older, slower tech.
    - sbierwagen 6y ago
      What? Price-sensitive customers should... pay more for worse performance?
      - effie 6y ago
        SATA SSDs deployments are cheaper than NVMe deployments and ofter fast enough. EDIT: you can't directly compare Samsung Pro with gaming products such as XPG GAMMIX. They are different classes of product. You wouldn't put ADATA XPG in a 24/7 server for important services.

ChrisRR 6y ago

Everything has its place. It's going to be a long time before we see SSDs become as cheap per TB as HDDs

Synaesthesia 6y ago

They've kind of stayed the same price for a long time, but capacities have evolved somewhat. SSDs have steadily decreased in price in the meantime.

someperson 6y ago

It all comes down to dollars per terabyte. Also some workloads perform poorly on SSDs (due to their limited read/write cycles). But mostly dollars per terabyte.

speeder 6y ago

When you compare for price, they are not that slower. I have 3 1TB WD Blacks that reach 300 mb/s, when I was shopping for my drives, similar SSDs were either crazy expensive (10 times are much for example) or they were tiny, or the ones with "use-able" size and reasonable price, were SLOWER than the WD Blacks in sequential writes and reads (they were still faster in random access, for obvious physics reasons). To be honest I am perfectly happy with my WD Blacks and never felt the need to switch to SSD, usually my speed bottlenecks are somewhere else (often network speed! it is surprinsingly hard to find good network hardware, all I find is random cables, adapters and routers, that shops don't even know what their speed limits are, asking if a cable supports gigabit ethernet just get me confused looks) EDIT: This post score is fluctuating, suggesting to me people are sometimes downvoting it. I wonder why... I mean, I posted some anedacta, but why the downvote? There is not even anything to disagree with on my post, unless I wrote something very wrong, but nobody replied to say what is wrong...

sbierwagen 6y ago
Were you looking at the ratings on SATA SSDs? The WD SN850 NVMe flash drive does 7000mb/s reads. (Close to maxing out a PCIe 4.0 4x slot) That's 23 times faster than the hard drive speed you quoted. SATA SSDs have been obsolete for a decade now. Edit: Just checked some prices on Newegg. Looks like the XPG GAMMIX S50 goes for $139, and does 3900 MB/s reads, while SAMSUNG 860 Pro does 560 MB/s reads... and costs $179. It is unfortunate that the invisible hand does not seem to care about drive speeds. Absent price signals, online retailers do not do a terribly good job signposting the enormous gulf in performance between SATA and PCIe. Newegg lists 999+ 2.5" SATA SSDs, and there is no reason at all to buy any of them when building a new computer.
- effie 6y ago
  And because large part of price-sensitive market (consumer/small business) does not care for NVMe speeds, SATA SSD aren't really obsolete. They are just older, slower tech.
  - sbierwagen 6y ago
    What? Price-sensitive customers should... pay more for worse performance?
    - effie 6y ago
      SATA SSDs deployments are cheaper than NVMe deployments and ofter fast enough. EDIT: you can't directly compare Samsung Pro with gaming products such as XPG GAMMIX. They are different classes of product. You wouldn't put ADATA XPG in a 24/7 server for important services.