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I will say, SSD pricing is pretty frustrating. There's a lot of focus on faster and faster nvme that's barely noticeable while actual capacity has really stagna
by cglan 4y ago
I will say, SSD pricing is pretty frustrating. There's a lot of focus on faster and faster nvme that's barely noticeable while actual capacity has really stagnated at around 2-4tb. As someone who is very into photography, it takes not very long to fill 2tb of space. If I could buy a cheap 16tb ssd with fast reads and slow writes I'd be a happy camper but it doesn't exist unless I want to buy spinning disks (I don't)
- 00deadbeef 4y agoI had big hopes for Samsung’s QVO line but they’ve barely done anything with it. They’re often not much cheaper than EVO. And the 8TB drive is almost £200 more expensive than 20TB of spinning rust. I could get 30TB+ storage for the same money.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y agoHave you looked at something like Intel 660p? They're pretty crappy as SSDs go, but they're quite cheap (by about 40% compared to what I would put into my desktop, at least where I live).
- layer8 4y agoLargest size is only 2 TB, and they aren’t cheaper than e.g. Samsung QVO, as far as I can see.
- wtallis 4y agoThe Intel 660p is a higher-tier product than Samsung QVO drives. Both use QLC, but the Intel drives are NVMe and thus have much higher peak performance (when operating out of the SLC cache). But Intel wasn't interested in pursuing the niche of users who wanted more than 2TB in a consumer drive.
- layer8 4y agoYes, but the topic was about QVO drives still being too expensive in terms of $/TB. The Intel drives don’t really help in that respect.
- rasz 4y agoI wouldnt touch Intel SSD. They ship documentation stating read-only failure mode in case of reaching end of life/defects. In a big endurance test some time ago Intel drive simply died and vanished from the system on reboot, followed up by Intel mouthpiece claiming _this is by design_. https://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte/ https://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experi... "After a reboot, the SSD disappeared completely from the Intel software. It was still detected by the storage driver, but only as an inaccessible, 0GB SATA device. According to Intel, this end-of-life behavior generally matches what’s supposed to happen. The write errors suggest the 335 Series had entered read-only mode. When the power is cycled in this state, a sort of self-destruct mechanism is triggered, rendering the drive unresponsive. "
- ac29 4y agoThat article is nearly 10 years old.
- rasz 4y agoIntel bribe scandal was 20 years ago, and they still do it after tweaking (clients receive free hardware instead of straight $) to not be so blatantly illegal. "Cripple AMD" ICC/MKL was 13 years ago yet "Arc 380 drivers do not support ReBar on AMD's Ryzen CPUs, the functionality only works with this technology on Intel's own processors."
- 7speter 4y agoThey were going for around 70 dollars for a tb on newegg before prime day. You might want to be on the lookout.
- bluedino 4y agoOnce the SLC cache is exhausted on a drive like the 660p, sustained writes drop to below 100MBs
- gruez 4y agoThat makes sense considering that QLC (2^4 charge levels) only stores 33% more data per cell than TLC (2^3 charge levels). Therefore at best it can only be 33% cheaper/bigger.
- ac29 4y agoQLC is 2x TLC (16/8=2).
- thulle 4y agoQuad bits to triple bits is 4/3=1.33. Taking your way of counting to the extreme: if I have a cell that can handle 1 million bits, I can't just add an extra bit of storage for another 1 million bits of storage. I have to actually add the full megabit of storage.
- ac29 4y agoYes, you are right. I mixed it up with the change from SLC to MLC where 1 extra bit was double the density.
- whyoh 4y agoYeah, I'd gladly take a cheap large capacity SSD that can only do 500MB/s for storing data. It's still gonna be much faster, quieter and cooler than a HDD. Looking at the prices, they have barely gone down at all in the last 3 years (for the same specs). And the best price per capacity is still at 1TB.
- Kye 4y agoSome of that is probably covid supply shortages. SSDs have controllers, and controllers have chips.
- 7speter 4y agoThe prices kinda look like they are going down a tiny bit, and thats because companies keep introducing ssd’s without dram cache. One those are halfway full their writes are maybe 3/4 fast as a hdd and they might last for 2-3 years
- andbberger 4y agowhy don't you want to buy spinning disks
- whyoh 4y agoWell, for me it's noise, power/heat and shock resistance (in laptops). And these have also indirect negative consequences. For example, an external 3.5" HDD needs an additional power supply and cable in addition to the data cable, which is cumbersome and reduces portability.
- NikolaNovak 4y agoNot the op, but I've just switched away from spinning disks recently. Kinda. I have a NAS of 4x 8TB WD Red Pro; and a a desktop with 4x1 TB of nvME and 1TB of (grandfathered) SATA SSD. For batch photo processing (i.e. lightroom) spinning disk is really sub-optimal. I'd rather have a 256GB or 512GB nvme and process batch by batch (and then offload to NAS), then a 8TB 7200 RPM HDD with all my photos. To OPs point - depending on shooting style, you might easily do 300GB+ over a single wedding (primary + secondary shooter, 2 cameras each, 46MP, 14-bit uncompressed, spray-and-pray style).
- postalrat 4y agoI've heard but don't know if its true that SSD storage can constantly suffer data corruption if its not powered. It needs power to keep refreshing stored data. Something that maybe spinning disks don't suffer from.
- NikolaNovak 4y agoI don't believe SSD loses data over arbitrarily short periods of time such as days/weeks. On the other hand, I would not trust either medium over extended period of time (years) personally - either dump to tape/optical, or keep making copies :). Either way, I currently do not have a use case where either my SSDs or HDDs would be off for year or more. (I do have a set of "off site" HDDs with my family which do stay unpowered for months before being exchanged)
- 4y ago
- abracadaniel 4y agoI suspect the reason is due to high base costs. Throwing on more dram chips and a better controller probably don’t cost much, but drastically effect performance. So, the cost savings of a simplified drive may only be a few dollars.
- Dylan16807 4y agoThere's a good chunk of price to performance tradeoff. Taking samsung as an example, currently their lower end is $95/TB and their higher end is $125/TB. WD currently has a cheap QLC for $75/TB and a gen4 drive for $140/TB. This is looking mostly around the 2TB range, and mostly M.2 It's hard to physically fit large amounts onto an M.2, but a 2.5 inch SATA drive would hold a big pile of QLC flash just fine. I suppose the SATA bottleneck just looks bad. Maybe if we had better consumer support for 2.5 inch drives with NVMe then companies would be more willing to make that size.
- muhammadusman 4y agoI'm curious, do you not buy spinning disks due to the risk of failure?
- hef19898 4y agoNot OP, but for me the main reason would be travel. A SSD is much easier to carry as an external drive together with a laptop.
- LionTamer 4y agoSilly question - what makes you dislike buying four 4tb SSDs compared to buying one 16tb SSD? I could see it being less portable to have multiple drives, but I would presume that 16 TB isn’t really something that needs to be brought around portably unless you’re going somewhere for extended period of time without internet (preventing the use of a NAS/cloud storage). Multiple SSDs also allows the use of RAID for increasing speed and/or susceptibility of failure.
- Beached 4y agoif you are moving that data around, nas/cloud storage can be super frustrating. copying 16tb of data over usb3/c is much faster than 100mbps or 200mbps internet.
- LionTamer 4y agoThat’s definitely valid for cloud on the public internet, but how fast can you pull local data on LAN?
- prirun 4y agoIf one SSD has a failure rate of 5%, 4 SSDs will have a failure rate of 18.6%. If the 4 devices are in a RAID0 for convenience (don't have to figure out where to put files), there is an 18.6% chance of losing all data vs 5% with a 16TB drive. You can use RAID5/6 to mitigate the risk but then lose capacity. IMO, higher SSD speeds are not a target for improvement by manufacturers, but a side-effect of using higher-density chips, which is more cost-effective. They probably can't make a slow, high-capacity SSD economically.
- melony 4y ago> If one SSD has a failure rate of 5%, 4 SSDs will have a failure rate of 18.6% That doesn't make sense, the probability that all 4 SSDs will simultaneously fail at any given moment, assuming a uniform distribution, is p(0.05)^4.
- 4y ago
- siscia 4y agoWhy you need SSD for photography? An HD seems a better solution to be honest, isn't? Opening a single picture is a sequential operation, as well as dumping pictures from camera to disk. Am I missing something obvious?
- nix23 4y ago>Opening a single picture is a sequential operation Exactly what i was thinking!
- Kye 4y agoNot the person you replied to, but bulk exports from something like Lightroom or Capture One benefit from faster speeds. If you have a fast enough CPU and enough memory, the main bottleneck is I/O. It doesn't matter for a few photos, but when you want to (for example) convert a whole trip worth of processed raws to JPG, every MB/sec counts.
- devwastaken 4y agoRaw photos are 30-100MB in size. Going through your shots on an HDD is excruciatingly slow.
- Dwedit 4y agoLaptops tend to not have HDD slots anymore.
- mseidl 4y agoI have a Canon R5, and i ended up with almost 800gb of storage in 8k raw, for a concert I did. I didn't even take that many videos as the camera overheated. But a 4:20 video was 77gb. I have a 8bay(5 disks in raid 5) nas, but the performance isn't so good. Not good enough to edit, I use the 1tb nvme I have, but lots of swapping when I need to edit.
- Fnoord 4y agoAFAICT this has been documented quite well. Use a SSD as cache. Easy to do with ZFS. The one I use on my NAS is one TB, it cost 200 EUR. It has the benefit of not causing data loss at power loss.
- cyanydeez 4y agoMost technology seems to chase weird benchmark numbers as it seems the market decides as such. It was mhz to ghz through 2010, then it was cores, then these SSD numbers, or the refresh rates. Most of it seems absurd to the majority of users, even if you could subtract the placebo effect.