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Great point, although we should also talk about the way storage use has shifted.
I used to have some massive programs installed, a lot of digital media and vid
Great point, although we should also talk about the way storage use has shifted.
I used to have some massive programs installed, a lot of digital media and video games at one point. Now Steam / GOG / Blizzard "stores" my games when not in use. Google / Apple / Pandora / Spotify "stores" my music. Amazon or Netflix "stores" my movies.
When I ran an HDD, I wanted a TB. Now that I'm running SSDs, 80 GB seems to meet all my needs (thanks to changes in internet services).
Sure, it won't be true for everyone. (Editing TIFFs for GIS anyone?) I don't run a Chromebook, but its philosophy is not completely insane for a reason...
It's like storage has differentiated into at least two separate purposes. Main system drive for consumer PCs, formerly an HDD only component, is feasibly replaced by SSDs. At the sizes needed for that, the difference in price per GB is already under a factor of two.[1]
[1] Caviar Blue 80GB @ $0.375/GB; MyDigitalSSD 64GB @ $0.578; Kingston 90GB @ $0.658/GB...
https://pcpartpicker.com/parts/internal-hard-drive/#sort=a7&page=1&X=0,25540&S=8000,100000 https://pcpartpicker.com/parts/internal-hard-drive/#sort=a7&...
I agree to a large extent but I think 80GB is an extreme on the low end. Many modern games (especially MMOs) are 20GB+. Windows 7 alone requires a huge amount of storage. I have a 120GB partition at home (just for OS+programs, not data) and I'm constantly uninstalling steam games in order to install others. If you want a modicum of breathing room, I'd say minimum 200GB.
I've Eve-Online and StarCraft 2 installed, which use about 30GB in total. Add another 6-8GB for the OS, and you've still got about 50GB left (which I actually fill up with even more games).
IMHO, 120GB is way more than enough.
IIRC, Assassin Creed Unity required 50GB by itself.
If Windows takes up 30GB, you pretty much need to wipe out everything just to play Unity on 80GB. I think 256GB to 512GB is the best bet for the standard consumer.
I recently discovered a large portion of my windows 7 partition was due to space set aside for system restore. Then there is the swap space and hibernation image which if you have a lot of ram is enormous.
I use a chromebook with 16gb, I also have linux on it. I do fine and have had it for 2 years. :)
> I used to have some massive programs installed, a lot of digital media and video games at one point. Now Steam / GOG / Blizzard "stores" my games when not in use. Google / Apple / Pandora / Spotify "stores" my music. Amazon or Netflix "stores" my movies.
How sustainable is this for the average consumer with most national ISPs moving towards bandwidth caps?
I had to switch to business service because Netflix alone was blowing through the data cap - in fact it was blowing through even the data cap they had for their top tier consumer service.
Keep in mind that SSD performance tends to degrade as the drive approaches full utilization - even if the actual internal capacity includes margin, you're probably best off avoiding approaching the available capacity. Heck, for the 250GB SSD I put in my primary laptop this past spring I intentionally formatted it to ~80% of the available capacity - that gives me plenty of space (~100GB free after all software & data) but even if I end up with things chewing that capacity I should keep good performance due to the available space for the drive's own data shuffling.
Perhaps 8.1 and Windows 10 are better about what they save, but going with anything less than 128 for Windows + apps + data seems risky to me.
Does the SSD actually use this unformatted space? I know that SSDs from the factory have a lower available space than their nominal space, to account for the eventual dimishing quanitty of functional floating gate transistors (ie 240GB is made available in a 256GB drive), and that OSes usually recommend keeping about 10% of the formatted drive free (for paging iirc). Didn't know that about unformatted space.
All clean pages (from overprovisioning, unformatted space, and trimmed space) should be treated the same by SSDs. In particular, Intel documents that leaving unformatted space will increase performance on their SSDs.
I may be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that on SSDs the wear leveling is done over the entire flash capacity. the details of where data is stored are an abstraction layer on top of that unlike on a spinning metal hard disk where specific regions of the drive are allocated to particular partitions
Wear leveling is done in the layer that translates between LBAs and actual physical chip numbers and addresses. Drive partitions are well above all of that in the abstraction stack, and partition tables are totally beyond the scope of a drive's concern (even for spinning rust drives). These days it is even common for a drive to have two different partition tables in two different formats with different partitions listed. Bootloaders and operating systems are the only things that should care about partitions.
> When I ran an HDD, I wanted a TB. Now that I'm running SSDs, 80 GB seems to meet all my needs (thanks to changes in internet services).
You seem like a very atypical use case. You can't be playing any of the modern AAA games, for example.
I think you should have put "my games" and "my music".
No Star Citizen for you (it's estimated to be 100GB in size - and yes, you want to store it on SSD because the load times are quite high even with SSD).
I still prefer to have stuff locally when I can. My Macbook currently has a 120 GB SSD, and I'd love to replace it with a TB.
I got myself a cheap Acer with 32 gigs of eMMC storage. I removed Windows 8, its restore partition (that took 10 gigs all by itself) and installed Ubuntu. It's not as fast as the "serious" laptop, but it's light, silent, has decent battery life and I won't be devastated if a truck rolls over my backpack. I mean, if I don't have it on my back, that is.
For Python/Django/Twisted development in a couple LXD containers, it's the just right amount of computing power at an incredibly low price.
eMMC is not the same as SSD, in general it is slower and less reliable (and it's one of the reason the laptop is cheap).
I agree with the sentiment, though, carrying around a lightweight laptop without having to worry about theft/accidental damage is priceless.
It's not SSD, but it's flash memory nevertheless, so, the same price predictions valid for SSDs apply to it.
And yes. Carrying a worry-free laptop is priceless.
You are right, it is a pity that you are downvoted.
Right now, you maybe put your favorite game on the SSD, not the whole steam library - and that is what gamers often recommend themselves. FPS don't get influenced by the HDD, only loading times, and those are normally not too high. Many new games have only two loading times: loading the game and then loading the save. Afterwards, everything is streamed, and a proper HDD is fast enough for that. And that is what the people responding to your comment here miss completely.
Using a SSD is for many games a waste.
Why is it a waste?
If you have the monty and the means why wouldn't you do it?
You're comment is very 'matter if fact' and baseless.
Improved loading times and better texture loading in games where it is heavy (think Fallout 3 or Skyrim) is a great reason to wack an SSD in your system.
Skyrim and Fallout 3 are in my eyes counter-examples for using an SSD, since you basically have only the two loading times and afterwards it's streaming. Maybe if the Quicktravel takes too long on the HDD.
> If you have the monty and the means why wouldn't you do it?
Oh, sure then :) It is only a waste in the relation of price per gigabyte vs. the possible performance improvement ingame.
> You're comment is very 'matter if fact' and baseless.
See http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/12/10/hdd_vs_ssd_real_world_gaming_performance/3 http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/12/10/hdd_vs_ssd_real_wo... if you want another source.
Are you serious?
That HardOCP article (and HarcOCP are not really known for their quality articles anyway) is testing for framerate imrpovements.
An SSD will not improve your framerate much at all (That's not what you use an SSD for).
You cited main loading times like loading a game and loading a save, which are enough reason themselves to want an SSD in there. Some games are painfully long in these areas (take any Total War game as an example) and an SSD will help.
I gave Fallout 3 and Skyrim as an example of texture loading where an SSD would matter. You claimed it didn't, as this is contrary to all avaialble information.
These games (like many open world games) stutter when new cells/areas are loaded (I'm not talking about regular texture streaming). Again, this is where SSD's will make a difference.
An SSD becomes even more useful when you start installing high-resolution texture mods to games like these. My own Skyrim installation uses nearly 4Gb of video memory when wandering around the wilderness. That would cause some pretty heavy thrashing on an HDD.
There is nothing about SSD's being used to store games that is a 'waste' if those things are important to you.
I have two SSD's in my personal machine, one 128Gb for the OS and one 500Gb for Steam and some games. They didn't cost me much, so why wouldn't I do it? There is literally no reason for me to not do this in a high-end system meant for playing games.
Other games will go on my regular HDD's because you are right at least in saying that not all games will benefit from it, but some will.
Are you serious?
That HardOCP article (and HarcOCP are not really known for their quality articles anyway) is testing for framerate imrpovements.
I don't like your tone. If texture streaming would profit much from an SSD, you would see that in the FPS.
Fallout 3 was played by me on a very old machine, of course without an SSD, and I remember no noticeable cell loading outside. The streaming of those engines is just too good. Fallout: New Vegas I played for more hours I'm comfortable admitting, heavily modded, on a better machine, same story there.
> My own Skyrim installation uses nearly 4Gb of video memory when wandering around the wilderness. That would cause some pretty heavy thrashing on an HDD.
Ingame, in the widlerness? Try it out. I doubt it. Initial loading times will be better of course, and loading times when switching locations, but not performance otherwise. You underestimate the performance of a regular HDD that is not a shitty 2.5 model cooked to death in an overheating laptop.
> They didn't cost me much, so why wouldn't I do it?
Like I said: No reason not to, if you have the SSD anyway. But normally, SSDs are a lot more expensive than a HDD, see above.
I have a 500gb SSD which cost ~200$. Sure 5 years ago I would agreed with you, but now days it's really not that expencive and in game load times feel much longer. IMO, Skyrim is load happy, sure the open world is fine, but go to town, get into your house, get out of your house get out of ton is 4 load screens in ~1Min of gameplay.
You see, that reasoning is perfectly valid, and when putting it like that I agree :) Well, kind of, 200$ still feels to expensive for me for that.
I just won't let me be told that the texture streaming outside in the open world needs that.
Oh man, all the endless loading screens when going home. A simple trip to drop some stuff off and go took four loading screens.
You are right, it is a pity that you are downvoted.
It is a pity unconditionally. I expressed a subjective impression related to the topic at hand and asked constructively for explanation. There was simply no reason to downvote.
The downvotes and the first-generation replies to my comment show that this is not the place for a discussion about the worthiness of SSD's for games.
I suppose my preference would be that providers simply build the capacity required to support the advertised bandwidth at 100% utilization. This is similar to what Google Fiber does. They don't care if you use 20GB or 20TB in a month from what I've heard. That sounds optimal in my mind. Underestimating usage and failure to anticipate demand are real issues that major ISPs have to deal with over the long run (off the top of my head AT&T's network problems after the first iPhone was released). I've always viewed these caps as short-term fixes until they figure how to increase their network capacity to support increased use.
I absolutely prefer capped service far, far more than uncapped services. In Singapore, I can get a LTE SIM for $35, and then pay $25 for 7 days of data @14 Gigabytes, with roll over of the amounts I don't use.
In general, I get 50 megabits down/20 megabits up. And, because this is a capped service, I have a reasonably good chance of actually seeing that performance. If it was, "Uncapped" or "Unlimited" - then people would abuse the crap out of it, and all of a sudden that 50 megabits/sec down would quickly drop, making the system far, far less useful.
I've never been a fan of unlimited/uncapped services, they quickly degrade into poor experiences for everyone in a very short period of time.
I think they're talking about home internet connections, as in fibre or ADSL broadband.
I have an uncapped service (Virgin Media) in the UK which I wouldn't trade for anything. So much so that if I were to move house their service availability would be a factor to consider.
I get 152Mbps down/15Mbps up and I have never dropped below that level but more than a few Mbps for a short time.
> And, because this is a capped service, I have a reasonably good chance of actually seeing that performance. If it was, "Uncapped" or "Unlimited" - then people would abuse the crap out of it, and all of a sudden that 50 megabits/sec down would quickly drop, making the system far, far less useful.
Using the service I have paid for is not abusing it, anymore than watching too much cable TV or making too many local calls is abuse of those services. If it causes degradation for other users, that's the fault of the ISP that has over-overprovisioned us. And the top ISPs all have profits in the billion dollar range, so it's not like they're hurting for money and just can't fix the infrastructure. Caps are just a way to squeeze out higher profits by reducing the necessity of upgrading infrastructure.
That said, not once have I ever seen my speeds drop below what they're rated to be.
So - let's take those one at a time, because they are interesting.
"Watching too much cable TV" - Cable TV is a broadcast Medium, and watching it, like listening to broadcast radio, has no marginal cost or impact. You can leave your TV off for an entire month, or tuned to a channel for 24x7x365 - zero difference in cost to the provider, or impact to other people on the service.
"Making too many local calls" - More than one person has been required to purchase a business line when they overused their local calling privileges. Indeed, on some CO to CO trunks, if enough people (ab)used their local calling privileges, the entire exchange would be blocked and nobody could call in/out. Unlike the case of internet connectivity, there is no graceful fallback - once the trunk reaches capacity, it's dead for anyone else. (Lumby, BC to Vernon, BC - used to happen all the time - 48 people could bring down a town of 1800). That's why those types of deployments require some type of per minute charges to avoid that scenario.
"If it causes degradation for other users, that's the fault of the ISP that has over-overprovisioned us" - We totally agree here. Any ISP selling unlimited service, and not clearly explaining how many gigabytes "Unlimited" equals, is doing everyone a disservice.
"Caps are just a way to squeeze out higher profits by reducing the necessity of upgrading infrastructure." - We disagree here. ISPs should provide Caps to their customers, and clearly communicate what they are - and then compete to provide higher caps while ensuring they maintain the line rate they've committed to their customers.
For example, if I've purchased a 1 Gigabit connection, the ISP darn well better invest in their infrastructure to make sure that none of their ports are blocking. Comcast utterly failed to do that with Netflix recently, and I find that annoying beyond belief. At the same time though, I don't expect Comcast to provision enough capacity to support all of their customers at 1 Gigabit (or whatever a high speed connection is) at the same time - that's cost prohibitive - particularly as it will rarely be happening.
On the Big I internet, this is solved by what's called 95th percentile billing. This is probably too confusing for the average user, so something simpler like, "You get a 1 Gigabit connection for $75/month, with a 10 Terabyte/month Limit during Peak hours, and Unlimited Terabyte limit in Off peak hours, $20/addition Terabyte in Peak, and we make sure that none of our upstream ports our blocked on any of our peering routers" is exactly what I'd be looking for.
> That's why those types of deployments require some type of per minute charges to avoid that scenario.
It sounds like those deployments required infrastructure upgrades, not more creative billing to stop people from utilizing it.
> We disagree here. ISPs should provide Caps to their customers, and clearly communicate what they are - and then compete to provide higher caps while ensuring they maintain the line rate they've committed to their customers.
Even this isn't the reality. It's rare for landline Internet to be advertised with the actual data caps in effect. In my case, the data cap is defined nowhere except the Acceptable Use Policy (a long document that nobody is going to read) and in a My Usage part of your account (which you obviously won't see until you're already hooked up.)
At the same time, who are they going to be competing with? How many people are going to lay down fiber side-by-side with someone else's fiber? What incentive is for them to compete based on the data cap instead of following current practices which ae basically "100 MBPS BLAZING FAST SUPER-SPEED INTERNET!!!"*
(fine print)
* Limited to 200GB/month. Users going over this limit will be automatically upgraded to the next highest tier after three offenses.
I'm not sure why you disagree with the statement "caps are just a way to squeeze out higher profits by reducing the necessity of upgrading the infrastructure." You're basically making the argument that yes, caps do have that effect, but are put in place as a necessary network management strategy, despite the fact that most of these networks worked quite well before data caps and don't work any better with them. While some or most of them are continuing to invest in upgrading infrastructure, most of them are also rolling around in billions of dollars of profit that they aren't investing...because there is no real market incentive to do what you're saying they "should" do.
> "You get a 1 Gigabit connection for $75/month, with a 10 Terabyte/month Limit during Peak hours, and Unlimited Terabyte limit in Off peak hours,
What a world that would be. In reality data caps are usually 300GB in networks that can obviously support much more than this. I could blow through my former data cap in 12 hours. Heck even in your scenario, I would only be able to use my rated 1 gigabits for 2-3 hours at max utilization. It seems misleading to advertise Internet as 1 gbps if you can actually only get 1 gbps for 3/720 (0.4%) hours of the month.
EDIT: I misread that as 1 TB instead of 10TB, but I don't think 4% of the month is much better.
Here in Australia, where data caps have been the norm for, oh, forever, it's pretty sustainable (for now). Music streaming is notionally the same cost as reading an image-heavy website: negligible, in the scheme of things. Video streaming is again not that bad, because I can only watch so many videos... they take real time to consume. YMMV depending on your chosen resolution.
Games are the main problem. When one of those 60GB bastards comes out, that's nearly one third of my monthly bandwidth, so I have to think carefully about scheduling it. But I regularly re-install 4-8GB from the cloud because it's a marginal impact compared to the entertainment it will bring.
Yeah, when GTA V came out, I waiting until 'off-peak' to use the 100G of data there, rather than waste my daytime allocation. Rarely would we hit our max usage though... thanks to appalling internet speeds. :)
> Video streaming is again not that bad, because I can only watch so many videos... they take real time to consume. YMMV depending on your chosen resolution.
I use Netflix as a replacement for OTA and cable TV. So my girlfriend, who likes to watch a lot of TV, has used 221GB 7 days into the billing cycle.
However, it's _nothing_ compared to the installed base of PCs. That's probably on the order of 2 billion. Most people don't use their computers to play AAA games, and likely not games at all (Steam only has 125m active users, say).
I think to some degree we agree. Caps are put in place to both ensure a profit to the carrier, as well as ensure availability to the users. If the Carrier did not need to make a profit, they could upgrade their infrastructure to be totally non blocking. Alternatively, if the Carrier needed to make a profit, but was okay providing degraded service, they could avoid upgrading infrastructure.
But, if they want to do both - Profit + good service, then caps are needed.
The competition, btw, is definitely fiber (See what happens to Comcast Service when a fiber competitor comes to town - it gets much better) and wireless (I haven't used a wireline carrier in singapore for 2+ months. All LTE, all the time.)
Regarding my limits - the nice things about Tier-1 ISPs (which Comcast is) - is that they don't pay for data use, as they engage in what is called "Settlement Free Peering" - what they do pay for is (roughly) Trenches + Vaults + Data Center Real Estate + Power + cooling + security + Chassis + Fiber + Interconnect Ports + Line-Cards. These are all a function of peak usage, not total usage. So - outside of peak-usage, which has reliable patterns of behavior, there is no costs to the ISP, or fellow users of the same resources, to your usage. Peak Usage may be as few as 4 hours/day, or 120 hours/month * 1 gigabit = 54 Terabytes. In a month, 1 gigabit could theoretically draw 324 Terabytes, so - that's 270 Terabytes off Peak + 10 Terabytes on Peak allowance = 280 Terabytes/month.
By doing just a bit of scheduling, you don't have to pay any extra, the ISPs network isn't overloaded, and you have a reasonable allowance of data to work with.
Of course, if they start selling 1 Gigabit Service, that's a lot of switch ports/chassis/routers/interconnects/etc/etc... they are going to have to upgrade to handle the new peaks.