5 ms·

It's crazy to me how many people will buy a computer with 250 GB of total storage and then end up with a series of rube-goldberg'd in slow/fragile external hard

It's crazy to me how many people will buy a computer with 250 GB of total storage and then end up with a series of rube-goldberg'd in slow/fragile external hard drives just to get close to the performance of a "normal" computer. SSD only pre-built commercial computer offerings have set back the average computer's ability to do useful work by 15 years. SSD are just too expensive for most people to use for useful amounts of storage (say, family photos+system backups). And even if it's a pre-built desktop the emergence of SSDs has made it somehow acceptable to sell a 1TB HDD in a modern computer. It's scammy.

kitsunesoba 4y ago
I wouldn't say things were all that much better before, with low end machines shipping with 5400RPM (or even 4200RPM) laptop drives. Those things were so slow that even if their capacities were far more voluminous than the SSDs that ship in modern low end machines, their usefulness was questionable because e.g. sifting through a massive photo collection was miserable even then and would've only gotten worse as average photo filesizes increased. Base configs should absolutely come at least double the SSD capacity they currently do, though, in everything but maybe bargain bin Chromebooks.
wtallis 4y ago
WTF are you going on about? Adding external drives has nothing to do with "performance of a 'normal' computer". Many people genuinely don't need more than 250GB in their computer; many more will never need more than 1TB. If you're having trouble believing that such users exist, you need a serious reality check about how normal people use their computers. Most people who buy a pre-built computer with 1TB or less of storage are not being meaningfully constrained in their ability to do useful work with that computer. And regardless of how much storage is in your computer, you need storage that's not in the computer to hold backups. Are you basing your expectations for how much storage a computer should come equipped with on the needs for primary storage and backup/archival storage done in defiance of all common sense and recommendations about where and how to store backups?
- kcplate 4y ago
  In 1990 I thought that I would never ever fill up my brand new 20mb hard drive
  - wtallis 4y ago
    In 1990, Moore's Law was still in full swing and every year brought drastic changes to the personal computing landscape. These days, we aren't seeing a lot of entirely new classes of applications driving local data storage needs. We've long since passed the point where text and audio data could add up to enough disk usage to worry about. Video data volume is largely stagnant, because optical discs are basically dead and local storage lost to streaming (in spite of the lower bit rates for streaming). Photos can add up to something on the order of a terabyte if you're prolific and don't use cloud storage for that. But video games are by far the most common and easy way to burn through hundreds of GB of storage in a consumer PC. Except not every PC user is in to AAA gaming, and all of that storage capacity usage can be freed up quickly and easily when free space starts running low—again aided by cloud storage and fast internet speeds, because games can be re-downloaded with relatively little inconvenience. Probably the biggest new class of computer applications with heavy data storage needs to crop up in recent years is generative AI. But models like Stable Diffusion are relatively small compared to mainstream consumer storage capacities, and bigger models like GPT-3 and newer are exceed local compute and memory capacity by a far wider margin than they exceed local storage capacity, so they're stuck in the cloud for now. There are real reasons to expect consumer storage capacity needs to grow more slowly than they did in the 1990s, and there's real evidence that they have been growing more slowly in recent years. Just pointing at a trend from several decades ago without even trying to think through whether it's still relevant is not a useful observation or insight.
    - kcplate 4y ago
      I have 35x that original 20mb just in photos stored on my phone. I have 40x that original 20mb in collected health metrics on my phone. While the cloud and automatic data transfer perhaps slow the growth of local consumer device storage, that is more a solution to needing additional storage, but size limitations at the local mobile device form factor creating boundaries. I pointed out the trend because not three years ago, you could buy the latest model iPhone with 64gb of storage. Today that number is 128gb. So while we have got better at moving transient data off to the cloud, I am not really sure that our data creation or consumption is nearing any peaks.
moffkalast 4y ago
It absolutely amazes me how many people spent good money on a 128 GB NVMe boot drive that speeds up their initial OS loading a tiny bit... which represents probably a fraction of a percent of the total time spent waiting for disk operations in total, and then spend the entire time working from a slow HDD instead. Like congrats for spending all your budget on your garage door instead of your car.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  doesn't surprise me much, boot/resume are part of context switching and it's psychologically very important; you often want the cost of getting in and out as cheap as possible
- xigency 4y ago
  I don’t know about you but when I switched over from HDD to SSD years back I did some crude measurements and found the time it took to boot into a usable environment went from >= 90 seconds to < 25 seconds. And it’s not just booting the system that was noticeable. Everything became more responsive. It was like night and day. I have no problem separating my OS drive from my games/photos/backups. It’s actually what I prefer to do. And I like to see that the operating system isn’t so bloated it can’t fit in 100 GB.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    That's not what he's saying. He's saying that the difference between a bog standard SSD (like just a decent USB3 external or whatever vs NVME) is really not that noticeable.
    - wtallis 4y ago
      NVMe has been the predominant standard for SSDs for several years now. Even USB "portable SSDs" are almost exclusively using NVMe drives internally now rather than being built around SATA SSDs or SSD controllers that natively speak USB (which is the low-end solution used for thumb drives).
sbierwagen 4y ago
Your information is out of date. Here is a 2 TB NVMe drive for US$69: https://www.microcenter.com/product/651303/inland-qn322-2tb-ssd-nvme-pcie-gen-30-x4-m2-2280-3d-nand-qlc-internal-solid-state-drive https://www.microcenter.com/product/651303/inland-qn322-2tb-...
- tbyehl 4y ago
  The QN322 is a garbage-tier drive, equivalent to the QLC-refreshed Crucial P2 that "averaged USB 2.0-like speeds of just 40 MBps after the SLC cache was full."[1] Lots of value drives out there for $10-$30 more than won't perform worse than a mechanical hard drive after exhausting SLC. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/features/crucial-p2-ssd-qlc-flash-swap-downgrade/2 https://www.tomshardware.com/features/crucial-p2-ssd-qlc-fla...
  - wtallis 4y ago
    That "40 MBps after the SLC cache was full" was measured on a 500GB drive. A 2TB drive would have an SLC cache at least 4x larger and post-cache write speeds around 4x higher—bringing it up to roughly the level of mechanical hard drives and beyond the speed of Gigabit Ethernet. In short, the problem you're complaining about wouldn't matter for the drive in question.
    - ksec 4y ago
      That seems like a perfect SSD for NAS. Do we still need things like Data Scrubbing on SSD?
      - wtallis 4y ago
        Yes, data scrubbing (read only) is still a good idea for SSDs. If data in a marginal memory cell is starting to degrade, reading that data will cause the SSD to notice a correctable error and write a fresh copy of the data. Simply leaving the drive on the shelf would put you at more risk of degradation leading to an error that the drive was not able to correct (though a RAID layer above the individual drives may still be able to recover the data). Many drives will do some amount of background reading on their own to scan for degraded data. But this isn't visible to the host system and not guaranteed, so it shouldn't be relied upon and doing some extra reads (eg. once a month) is harmless. I strongly believe QLC SSDs are a great choice for NAS usage, unless it's very frequently modified data. It's still more expensive than hard drives, but the noise, power and performance benefits can be worth it.
rektide 4y ago
Phones being 64 or 128GB and no SD card is same level absurdity. What a shitty act. Given how cheap SD cards are it's just such a misservice. It's indeed getting harder because some phones are literally now eSIM only. Before, there was near no excuse. My last phone's sim caddy had a SSD caddy on the other side, which just takes up so little extra volume & requires so little extra design/features.

kitsunesoba 4y ago

I wouldn't say things were all that much better before, with low end machines shipping with 5400RPM (or even 4200RPM) laptop drives. Those things were so slow that even if their capacities were far more voluminous than the SSDs that ship in modern low end machines, their usefulness was questionable because e.g. sifting through a massive photo collection was miserable even then and would've only gotten worse as average photo filesizes increased. Base configs should absolutely come at least double the SSD capacity they currently do, though, in everything but maybe bargain bin Chromebooks.

wtallis 4y ago

WTF are you going on about? Adding external drives has nothing to do with "performance of a 'normal' computer". Many people genuinely don't need more than 250GB in their computer; many more will never need more than 1TB. If you're having trouble believing that such users exist, you need a serious reality check about how normal people use their computers. Most people who buy a pre-built computer with 1TB or less of storage are not being meaningfully constrained in their ability to do useful work with that computer. And regardless of how much storage is in your computer, you need storage that's not in the computer to hold backups. Are you basing your expectations for how much storage a computer should come equipped with on the needs for primary storage and backup/archival storage done in defiance of all common sense and recommendations about where and how to store backups?

kcplate 4y ago
In 1990 I thought that I would never ever fill up my brand new 20mb hard drive
- wtallis 4y ago
  In 1990, Moore's Law was still in full swing and every year brought drastic changes to the personal computing landscape. These days, we aren't seeing a lot of entirely new classes of applications driving local data storage needs. We've long since passed the point where text and audio data could add up to enough disk usage to worry about. Video data volume is largely stagnant, because optical discs are basically dead and local storage lost to streaming (in spite of the lower bit rates for streaming). Photos can add up to something on the order of a terabyte if you're prolific and don't use cloud storage for that. But video games are by far the most common and easy way to burn through hundreds of GB of storage in a consumer PC. Except not every PC user is in to AAA gaming, and all of that storage capacity usage can be freed up quickly and easily when free space starts running low—again aided by cloud storage and fast internet speeds, because games can be re-downloaded with relatively little inconvenience. Probably the biggest new class of computer applications with heavy data storage needs to crop up in recent years is generative AI. But models like Stable Diffusion are relatively small compared to mainstream consumer storage capacities, and bigger models like GPT-3 and newer are exceed local compute and memory capacity by a far wider margin than they exceed local storage capacity, so they're stuck in the cloud for now. There are real reasons to expect consumer storage capacity needs to grow more slowly than they did in the 1990s, and there's real evidence that they have been growing more slowly in recent years. Just pointing at a trend from several decades ago without even trying to think through whether it's still relevant is not a useful observation or insight.
  - kcplate 4y ago
    I have 35x that original 20mb just in photos stored on my phone. I have 40x that original 20mb in collected health metrics on my phone. While the cloud and automatic data transfer perhaps slow the growth of local consumer device storage, that is more a solution to needing additional storage, but size limitations at the local mobile device form factor creating boundaries. I pointed out the trend because not three years ago, you could buy the latest model iPhone with 64gb of storage. Today that number is 128gb. So while we have got better at moving transient data off to the cloud, I am not really sure that our data creation or consumption is nearing any peaks.

moffkalast 4y ago

It absolutely amazes me how many people spent good money on a 128 GB NVMe boot drive that speeds up their initial OS loading a tiny bit... which represents probably a fraction of a percent of the total time spent waiting for disk operations in total, and then spend the entire time working from a slow HDD instead. Like congrats for spending all your budget on your garage door instead of your car.

agumonkey 4y ago
doesn't surprise me much, boot/resume are part of context switching and it's psychologically very important; you often want the cost of getting in and out as cheap as possible
xigency 4y ago
I don’t know about you but when I switched over from HDD to SSD years back I did some crude measurements and found the time it took to boot into a usable environment went from >= 90 seconds to < 25 seconds. And it’s not just booting the system that was noticeable. Everything became more responsive. It was like night and day. I have no problem separating my OS drive from my games/photos/backups. It’s actually what I prefer to do. And I like to see that the operating system isn’t so bloated it can’t fit in 100 GB.
- TylerE 4y ago
  That's not what he's saying. He's saying that the difference between a bog standard SSD (like just a decent USB3 external or whatever vs NVME) is really not that noticeable.
  - wtallis 4y ago
    NVMe has been the predominant standard for SSDs for several years now. Even USB "portable SSDs" are almost exclusively using NVMe drives internally now rather than being built around SATA SSDs or SSD controllers that natively speak USB (which is the low-end solution used for thumb drives).

sbierwagen 4y ago

Your information is out of date. Here is a 2 TB NVMe drive for US$69: https://www.microcenter.com/product/651303/inland-qn322-2tb-ssd-nvme-pcie-gen-30-x4-m2-2280-3d-nand-qlc-internal-solid-state-drive https://www.microcenter.com/product/651303/inland-qn322-2tb-...

tbyehl 4y ago
The QN322 is a garbage-tier drive, equivalent to the QLC-refreshed Crucial P2 that "averaged USB 2.0-like speeds of just 40 MBps after the SLC cache was full."[1] Lots of value drives out there for $10-$30 more than won't perform worse than a mechanical hard drive after exhausting SLC. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/features/crucial-p2-ssd-qlc-flash-swap-downgrade/2 https://www.tomshardware.com/features/crucial-p2-ssd-qlc-fla...
- wtallis 4y ago
  That "40 MBps after the SLC cache was full" was measured on a 500GB drive. A 2TB drive would have an SLC cache at least 4x larger and post-cache write speeds around 4x higher—bringing it up to roughly the level of mechanical hard drives and beyond the speed of Gigabit Ethernet. In short, the problem you're complaining about wouldn't matter for the drive in question.
  - ksec 4y ago
    That seems like a perfect SSD for NAS. Do we still need things like Data Scrubbing on SSD?
    - wtallis 4y ago
      Yes, data scrubbing (read only) is still a good idea for SSDs. If data in a marginal memory cell is starting to degrade, reading that data will cause the SSD to notice a correctable error and write a fresh copy of the data. Simply leaving the drive on the shelf would put you at more risk of degradation leading to an error that the drive was not able to correct (though a RAID layer above the individual drives may still be able to recover the data). Many drives will do some amount of background reading on their own to scan for degraded data. But this isn't visible to the host system and not guaranteed, so it shouldn't be relied upon and doing some extra reads (eg. once a month) is harmless. I strongly believe QLC SSDs are a great choice for NAS usage, unless it's very frequently modified data. It's still more expensive than hard drives, but the noise, power and performance benefits can be worth it.

rektide 4y ago

Phones being 64 or 128GB and no SD card is same level absurdity. What a shitty act. Given how cheap SD cards are it's just such a misservice. It's indeed getting harder because some phones are literally now eSIM only. Before, there was near no excuse. My last phone's sim caddy had a SSD caddy on the other side, which just takes up so little extra volume & requires so little extra design/features.