I’m already avoiding buying newer SSDs because the durability is dropping off a cliff.
I’m really scared of them cramming more and more bits in the same cell. Every time they double that number it’s got to be cutting the write longevity in half. Unless they’ve got some other thing they can do to increase that.
TLC or bust for me.
I’d only consider QLC for low write high read situations like a NAS that serves as media storage.
That will be helpful. Unless I want to prune my node, I should probably consider upgrading my storage space for my Monero node in the near future anyway.
might wanna make sure they have sufficient emf shielding
Excellent, I needed more space for cookies, malware and games that suddenly require 500GB of free space. I’ll have that thing full in no time.
And soon enough we’ll see 1tb games once storage is plenty.
Just don’t play the AAA slop and the file sizes are a lot better.
Not sure which ones are AAA slop. I play online every Monday with a friend in the UK. Here are some of the games we’ve played:
Grim Dawn Diablo 4, Borderlands, Borderlands 2, Borderlands 3, Borderlands the presequel, Tiny Tina’s Wonderland, and currently we’re playing Aliens Elite something.
But I have played other games with a different group of friends online.
Man, the formatting sucks. There was a carriage return after every game.
Most of those are in the 30-60GB range IIRC. So if you keep 5 installed, you’re looking at 200GB or so.
What OP is referring to is things like COD that are 300GB or so.
Why is it there for the paragraphs and gone for the lists?
You need a blank line between paragraphs, so:
First paragraph. Second paragraph.If you want a list, add a hyphen or asterisk, like so, and you won’t need the blank line:
- item one - item twoRenders as:
- item one
- item two
Thank you very much kind sir or madame or whatever you identify as. Very helpful.
Not sure which ones are AAA slop. I play online every Monday with a friend in the UK. Here are some of the games we’ve played:
Grim Dawn
Diablo 4,
Borderlands,
Borderlands 2,
Borderlands 3,
Borderlands the presequel,
Tiny Tina’s Wonderland,
and currently we’re playing Aliens Elite something.
But I have played other games with a different group of friends online.
Man, the formatting sucks. There was a carriage return after every game.
“Could”
daamn 1 TB in 2029 now ay
This is per chip. A given NVMe drive usually contains multiple chips.
32 level “PLC” cells, OMG. How about staying at levels with some durability.
That’s likely the point where spinning platters die in the marketplace.
Right now, spinning platters are around $12/tb. SSDs are around $75. Exact numbers fluctuate with features and market changes, but those are the ballpark. Cut in half, SSDs will be $38/tb, and then $19 in the next halving. Spinning platters aren’t likely to see the same level of reduction in that time period; they’re a mature technology.
I think once they reach double the price per tb, we’ll see a major collapse of the hard drive market. My thinking is that there’s a lot of four drive RAID 10 systems out there. With SSDs, those can be two drive RAID 1, and will still be faster. With half the drives, they can be twice the price and work out the same.
Spinning platters are already dead in many ways because even though they’ve increased in capacity, they haven’t meanigfully changed read/write speeds in decades, which makes moving the ever increasing data a huge pain.
Most hardrives live in servers, as part of storage volumes where IO can be optimised well beyond the capability of a single disk.
For the boot disk on my workstation I am absolutely using an SSD, but for the hundreds of terabytes of largely static data that I need to keep archived? Spinning disks all the way. Not only to SSDs need to match on price, but they also have a long way to come in terms of longevity.
- The R/W cycles are infinite. At least until the head error out.
Not really relevant, but I just moved 150ish GB between SSDs in a few minutes, less than 5 for sure. As a teenager such an operation (moving 3 games between drives) would have taken an hour. As a kid I’d be furiously changing floppy drives all day.
I just thought that was an interesting thought.
This is it. Yes, spinning HDDs may be cheaper, but replacing mine with an SSD made my PC faster and quieter, especially on boot.
I’m sure we will get some “random” fire at some factory to drive prices up again.
I’m all for it, and it’s just the usual “moores law” trend, I just wonder if we won’t hit a wall where (most!) users just won’t need it?
We’ve already hit a perceived user experience limit. The perception of responsiveness in blind tests between SATA and NVMe SSDs isn’t always apparent–people sometimes say the SATA drive is faster–even though the speed difference on paper is substantial.
IMO, programmers haven’t exploited the possibilities of extremely fast mass storage yet. The orders of magnitude difference in speed isn’t fully realized. It’s not just faster, it’s faster in a way that requires new approaches. Unlike multicore CPUs over a decade ago, this change in thinking has gone relatively unnoticed by programmers.
Well maybe, it’s just storage like HD or RAM.
But to do what (outside scientific software)?
NAND density is always useful for the ultra portable end, be it used in applications like phones, portable gaming devices, microcontroller boards and such, where space or pci-e lanes is often the limiting factor. when the capacity of nand grows, options become better, as nand usually doubles in capacity per chip.
We hit that point in spinning disk drives a while ago for me
Its already been 6 years since the first 100TB SSD released and I still don’t think anyone has bothered to dethrone it last I checked. Density and number of layers possible have both increased since then. I imagine part of it is just a performance issue though; 10 10TB SSDs are gonna be faster than 1 100TB SSD.
At the consumer level, the usage of smaller form factors will probably mean more density will still be useful. Things like the steamdeck drives will benefit for a while.
64TB ssds are fairly common in the enterprise market now, I don’t think they were 6 years ago. It’s possible we’ll see 128TB SSDs become fairly common on servers in a few years.
Thermal is a wall to contend with as well. At the moment SSDs get the density from 3D stacking the planes of substrate that make up the memory cells. Each layer contributes some heat and at some point the layer in the middle gets too hot from the layers below and not being close enough to the top to dissipate the heat upwards fast enough.
One way to address this was the multi-level cell (MLC) where instead of on/off, the voltage within the cell could represent multiple bits. So 0-1.5v = 00, 1.6-3v = 01, 3.1-4.5v = 10, 4.6-5v = 11. But that requires sense amplifiers that can handle that, which aren’t difficult outright to etch, they just add complexity to ensure that the amplifier read the correct value. We’ve since moved to eight-level cells, where each cell holds an entire byte, and the error correction circuits are wild for the sense amplifiers. But all NAND FGMOS leak, so if you pack eight levels into a single cell, even small leaks can be the difference between sensing one level from another level. So at some point packing more levels into the cell will just lead to a cell that leaks too quickly for the word “storage” to be applied to the device. It’s not really storage any longer if powering the device off for half a year puts all the data at risk.
So once going upwards and packing hits a wall, the next direction is moving out. But the more you move outward, the further one is placing the physical memory cells from the controller. It’s a non-zero amount of distance and the speed of light is only so fast. One light-nanosecond is about 300 millimetres, so a device operating at 1GHz frequency clock has that distance to cover in a single tick of the clock in an ideal situation, which heat, quantum effects, and so on all conspire to make it less than ideal. So you can only go so far out before you begin to require cache in the in-between steps and scheduling of block access that make the entire thing more complex and potentially slow it down.
And there are ways to get around that as well, but all of them begin to really increase the cost, like having multi-port chips that are accessed on multi-channel buses, basically creating a small network inside your SSD of chips. Sort of how like a lot of CPUs are starting to swap over to chiplet designs. We can absolutely keep going, but there’s going to be cost associated with that “keep going” that’s going to be hard to bring down. So there will be a point where that “cost to utility” equation for end-users will start playing a much larger role long before we hit some physical wall.
That said, the 200 domain of layers was thought to be the wall for stacking due to heat, there was some creative work done and the number of layers got past 300, but the chips do indeed generate a lot more heat these days. And maybe heat sinks and fans for your SSD aren’t too far off in the future, I know passive cooling with a heat sink is already becoming vogue with SSDs. The article indicated that Samsung and SK hynix predict being able to hit 1000+ layers, which that’s crazy to think about, because even with the tricks being employed today to help get heat out of the middle layers faster, I don’t see how we use those same tricks to hit past 500+ layers without a major change in production of the cells, which usually there’s a lot of R&D that goes behind such a thing. So maybe they’ve been working on something nobody else knows about, or maybe they’re going to have active cooling for SSDs? Who knows, but 1000+ layers is wild to think about, but I’m pretty sure that such chips are not going to come down in prices as quickly as some consumers might hope. As it gets more complex, that length of time before prices start to go down starts to increase. And that slows overall demand for more density as only the ones who see the higher cost being worth their specific need gets more limited to very niche applications.
They’ll be useful for gamers, at least. With the increasing trend of companies caring less about properly optimizing the size of game installs and expecting gamers to have SSDs for texture loading on the fly, these drives will definitely see use. I currently have a 4TB HDD that has over 2.3TB of Steam games installed on it right now (roughly 100 games from tiny indie games to big AAA releases that are 40-80 gigs in size), and several newer games have an SSD listed as one of their minimum requirements.
Ya, didn’t say it will instantly be useless 😁, I’d pick up a 4TB or more because why not?
My first SSD was a 256GB (I really splurged on that one) now I have a 2TB for cheaper, soon it will be 20TB and then 200TB etc. Will video games grow that fast? My thought is it won’t and that’s all I guess 😊
The issue is, every time we make a great leap in storage medium, we tend to use that new storage for BIGGER files. Higher quality media and all that. Back in the day, the average movie file was measured in the MB. Now it’s GB. Think about an old floppy with 1.4 MB of data and how many text files you stored on it. You couldn’t ever imagine needing more space. Then came pictures and music files. Video files. Then higher resolution picture and video files. Suddenly even your text documents aren’t just raw .txt files, but Word documents and interactive PDFs.
As storage improves, what we expect to be able to carry around with us or have in our home computer changes. I’m currently running a home server with 18TB of storage. An amount that I would have never dreamed of possessing 20 years ago, and yet here I am debating when I grab that 24TB drive because I can already see me running out of space in a few months.
This is all to say that I really don’t think there will ever be a maximum amount a user could need. Give them that maximum and in a week they’ll have figured out a way to use it to capacity. I think video games and cartridge/disk size limitations and then the transition to digital games and balloning game size shows my point.
This demand is also dictated by what companies see as a default setup, now it’s 0,5Tb+ SSDs as syst drives. W10\11 doesn’t work on HDDs because their update and security services can overwhelm your disk’s speed and make the system unresponsive. If you are given an older hardware by your employer, good luck, as your OS and other programs assume they don’t need to limit either speed or size, and the only way to keep using the same features is to upgrade.
Exactly. Eventually what we see now as cutting edge will become “bare minimum” or even “obsolete” hardware one day. Eventually the camera on your cell phone will by default be taking such high resolution pictures that anything less that a TB of onboard storage will seem quaint.
Our family’s first proper PC back in around ‘93 had a 1gb HDD. I remember strutting about at school like I was the top shit because of how great my computer was.
These days I have a modded iPod mini with 128gb that I’m getting close to needing to increase because of my love of 320kbps MP4 files.
most users already dont use what theyve got. its more about reducing physical size for the masses… these new techs will allow for even smaller storage for thinner, more efficient devices.
i think only some power users (im a data horader) and commercial interests care about bulk storage
I can’t believe how much mileage I’ve gotten out of my 512GB SSDs on my laptops. And my “big” backup disks are hand me down 1TB HDs my friend didn’t need. I don’t do video, though.
my collection is small compared to some, but ive got about 22 4tb drives in use in various arrays… but its mostly video.
I remember it being a big space sink when I was editing video. Now all I have is DVD rips of my collection and those are nice and compact.
I’m slightly surprised that loss of faith in corporations being good stewards of our cultural content - wantonly deleting cherished shows, namely - has not driven a larger move towards personal ownership of media. In a world where anything that fails to be profitable faces destruction, owning your stuff has never been a better idea.
People, in general, don’t care. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, more that they just don’t notice until she show they searched for isn’t available and then they shrug it off and move on to another one they can watch. Most people I know don’t want to keep large catalogs around if things they like because they only watch a single movie a few times in their lives. They watch it and then they’re good for years or more. There’s so much content out there that there’s no way they’re going to rewatch things and there’s no way they’re going to miss it because they’re having enough trouble keeping up with all the new stuff. On top of that, the convenience of just turning on the tube and hitting play vs trying to find the disc, and store and organize it is huge. And ripping it and then keeping a large amount of storage locally, online and healthy for the purpose is out of their technical wheel house. (And budget at times)
Honestly, I’m a big proponent for buying physical media… but I’ve greatly reduced what I rip/buy/keep, just knowing there’s only so much time left on my personal hourglass and I’ve got better things to do than worrying about all that up keep. When I kick the bucket, no one is going to care about it all. Maybe they’ll keep a few interesting ones but they’ll likely just sit on someone else’s shelf. In the mean time, how many times am I really going to watch some of these things?
are HDDs finally dying?
Not yet, unless the higher capacity comes at a much lower price. HDDs are fine for the price currently
it’ll be interesting to see what happens, but i’ve been hoping that at some point SSDs will simply hit a cost point that is lower, whereas HDDs won’t be able to go below that (due to physical tolerancing and complicated manufacturing) whereas with an SSD it’s literally just chips on a board. You put more of them on the board it has more storage, simple as that.
Although i think before that, HDDs would likely become extremely competitive since they would actually be forced to lower cost some substantial amount.
Although i think before that, HDDs would likely become extremely competitive since they would actually be forced to lower cost some substantial amount.
I think you have it backwards. The SSD manufacturers are always going to see their product as better than HDD performance wise so they’ll likely always have a higher price per capacity.
Not when 20TB drives are becoming cheaper :)
oh shit, you might be right, this might actually make HDDs more affordable as flash starts to catch up.
I doubt it will be this much. But at least it could lower the price, assuming it’s not already a thin margin for the manufacturers, and they will instead resort to using SMR instead of CMR
nar. HDDs don’t require power to maintain their state. So that’s an advantage they’ll always have over SSDs, which means there will be use-cases where HDDs are the better choice.
SSDs can reliably hold charge states for years, and there are storage media that are more reliable than HDD.
HDD’s would still find a niche, probably, as a balanced option, but said niche will likely get smaller and smaller over many years.
HDDs will probably always be useful for media storage, where quick access time isn’t required and it isn’t being used constantly. They should die for PCs though.
Exactly. I haven’t used a HDD in my PC for years, yet I bought HDDs for my homelab NAS. Unless SSDs get a lot cheaper, I’ll keep buying HDDs for on-prem bulk storage.
It will probably be a choice of quieter, faster, expensive vs loud, high capacity, pretty cheap.
Unless we start with 3.5" SSDs (pls), HDDs will always be storage kings.
Imagine 3.5" SSDs with 3-4 layer sandwiched PCBs…And inexpensive NAND…Why is 3.5" preferable? You can always use a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter, and even 2.5" casing is mostly empty anyway
More volume for more NAND-PCBs
and even 2.5" casing is mostly empty anyway
Does this count for the higher capacity drives (e.g. >2TB)? Preferably TLC?
Proud owner of 1TB Samsung 860 Evo.
Pretty much yes, it counts :D
Moreover, iirc, there are 64TB 2,5" SSDs and 100TB 3,5" available for enterprise users, and 8TB M.2 SSDs on consumer market. Space is really not a constraint.
HDDs don’t require power to maintain their state. So that’s an advantage they’ll always have over SSDs
SSDs are not flash memory.
More density means less longevity, less write cycles before the blocks wear out, also decreases the time before Nand leakage can end up corrupting the data. Doesn’t seem like a good thing to me.
Oh yeah, also more storage space causes complacency with developers who will terribly optimize their games because they don’t have to worry about games not fitting on people’s disks. Think 100GB games is bad it’ll get much worse when they got more free space at their disposal, and worse, the perception that their customers have tons of free space as well.
I don’t disagree with you, but on the other hand, this will be a huge boon for people who do things like sail the high seas and wish to keep what they acquire long term. You’re not constantly rewriting in those cases. You’re just slowly (or perhaps not so slowly) filling up the drive. Eventually, it’s essentially read only.
Considering how much I spent on 6 TB of regular hard drive storage for this reason a few years ago, I’d be all for affordable 8 TB SSDs.
I recently bought a 5TB hard drive. It’s funny how that sounds like a lot of space until you fill it up and find yourself eyeing another.
if I may ask, what kinds of things are you storing? my computer has only 500gb, my phone has 128gb, and I pay a small fee for 100gb of cloud storage for photos. sometimes I feel like I’m running out of space but it’s never a real problem for me. so I’m just curious because I’m having trouble imagining what I’d even fill up 5tb with.
I’m the person in the thread before the person who asked, but I’m in the same boat. In my case: videos, radio shows and comics.
A 4-season TV series in 1080p can easily take up 50-100 gb.
ah that makes sense. thanks
My iCloud Photos is 1.2TB
Admittedly I should prune junk out, but RAW photos from real cameras are big and I’m not giving them up. Same with videos from my DJI.
Movies at good quality are like 15GB each. Games frequently blow past 100.
Yep, I can’t afford any more storage. I’ve had to start curating and weeding, which is a shame because I know there are things I’d probably eventually revisit. Oh well. So long, Duckman.
sail the high seas
You don’t need solid state storage for Linux ISOs
I mean, you’re not wrong but I eventually bought all that shit I torrented in college on gog or steam when I got a job
I’m talking about things like movies and TV shows, not games. In fact, if you aren’t careful (or just have a game that doesn’t allow you to choose where it saves its data), you could have the write cycle issue with games.
There are plenty of games that you can’t buy on Gog or Steam even today (like any emulation ISO from console games), and sharing is caring for others that can not afford it.
Thinking about it, it would be nice if when formatting a partition on mlc based drives, you could specify the number of bits per cell used. So an 8tb QLC drive could be formatted as a 2tb SLC for those who want the resilience, without having to commit to it permanently.
I’m sure there are technical reasons that would be difficult, but everything started out difficult until we figured it out.
Large game file size is an optimization
For the first part, as long as it isn’t too bad and it gets detected, and has methods for mitigating damage from losses, that’s fine. If you get a lot more capacity but lose some over time, you still have more capacity.
For the latter, yeah it does but do they even care now? Personally, I don’t play any games that large really anyway, so it doesn’t effect me. Let them lose you as a customer too if that’s an issue and they surpass how much you’ll put up with.
just in time for GTA6 to come out and be 3TB in size
I wouldn’t even mind tbh.
Except it would take 3 literal months to download it (stupid home internet with a 1.25TB data cap)
Goodness, do you live in Australia or something? Are there any better options, or can you not afford them? My spoiled and priveleged self has trouble comprehending a data cap on my internet plan.
United States. They have data caps because
their backbone isn’t powerful enough for 2gbps home internetthey perfer to offer more value to customersYou forgot “and they’re greedy fuck pigs”
well, that’s a given
It’s Comcastic!
Can I ask what country so I can avoid it like the plague?
Ah yes, good ol’ US of A. Why am I not surprised?My ISP recently introduced data caps on unlimited (they throttle you to 4Mbit if you go past ~300GB or 500, not sure). I already wanted to leave but that’s really lighting a fire under me to move the fuck out of here.
And if you go to the store and buy it in person, it’ll be a empty cd case with a serial key to download.
or with a CD that installs a downloader, that is actually a background service always starting with the OS, and a few other bloatware to not waste CD space
except that almost nobody has a CD drive anymore. so it must be a pendrive instead that was forced to read-only access
And Apple will finally sell the iPhone starting with 256GB
What do you need 256gb for? You don’t seriously store photos and videos on your phone… as the only place?
My girlfriend learned that lesson the hard way. We now have a nas and off-site storage.
Fuck yeah! I NAS swap with a friend. I have my house NAS which syncs to my other one at his place and he does the same. (4 total)
Yeah, I don’t get this. I still haven’t used more than ~115GB in years that I’ve been on iPhone. All my photos are in RAW (since supported) and I’ve got a huge lossless (or better) music library.
Granted I don’t have 100% of everything on my phone all the time, but even my iCloud storage is pretty low.
I guess since I have Apple Music I don’t have very much on my phone at any one time.
Most of my heavy usage are my Virtual Machines. But really, those don’t all have to be on at once. Am I really using windows that often?
I use YouTube Music and the only time I download music for offline is if I’m going to fly somewhere.
My 100GB music library leaves less space than I’d like on a 128GB phone.
You really listen to that much music that often? I assume that’s compressed as well, because I don’t think there’s a point to high-bitrate media when you’re going to play it through phone speakers or Bluetooth.
Personally I just use plain old FM radio in my car, a couple dozen songs on my workout playlist for the gym, and YouTube streams for work.
Personally I just use plain old FM radio in my car
Great if you only want to listen to music half the time.
that’s what expandable storage (i.e. sd card) is for.
oh your phone does not know what that is?
that’s what expandable storage (i.e. sd card) is for.
oh your phone does not know what that is?
Technically the Pro Max already starts at 256 GB (starting with the 15 series iirc). But they simply removed the 128 GB option from the price stack.
The prices will stay the same. Manufacturers will just make more profit.
Is that what has happened to the storage market historically?
Not at all. The price of storage has plummeted so much that most video games comfortably use ~100GB for large games and don’t care because even SSD storage is extremely cheap.
If you don’t believe me, here’s a post on Reddit that shows it off pretty well.
There’s two ways to take that statement. The price of a hard drive will remain the same, or the price per memory unit will remain the same. Price per hard drive remains largely the same. Price per unit of memory drops.
The only exception here is SSDs are slowly dropping in price to meet magnetic disk drives.
Interpreted the other way, I don’t think that makes sense because on the whole storage has always gotten cheaper with time. Hard drives may cost the same, but they’re larger capacity so really this would only work as an argument if hard drive storage space stayed the same and prices remained the same for consumers but went down for manufacturers.
Also there’s a lot of competition in the space similar to other chips so I don’t see how a company making NAND or platters can afford to sit on their hands like that. The whole point of drive innovation right now is to drive the price per GB down for B2B sales. And that usually translates well to consumer sales too.
That’s business logic. Consumer logic is that when things get cheaper they should actually be cheaper.
They do get cheaper but the cheaper ones don’t get made because they aren’t worth anything anymore. Like sure you can get a 500GB HDD which used to be a moderately priced option and is now basically trash or free. The prices go down, but the key is that consumers no longer want the old thing either.
I’m not exactly sure what that chart is using for data sources. Historically every couple of years I’ve bought whatever goes on sale for around $200 and added it to my unraid.
I was able to pick up exos 14s a couple of years ago. And there’s still not back down to $200.
It looks like it depends on the drive size but also I think the pandemic has leveled this out in recent years. Some additional data I found by BackBlaze shows a bit more of the story though they have changed their drive sizes which leads to a more interesting graph.
That looks like I expected it to. Inflation probably doesn’t help.
Honestly, nowadays a 100Gb game is small. Games are easily 200+ for the AAA section.
Yeah, but modern consoles come with as little as 512 gigs of storage.
Yup.
For SSDs this has historically not been the case, there’s no way in hell you could buy a 1TB SSD within $200 a decade ago.
I’m optimistic. I’m making numbers out of my butt because I literally can’t remember.
But I think My 20GB SSD from 2010 was about $100. I used to dualboot.
Today, I can get a 512GB SSD for $50.
Today, I can get a 512GB SSD for $50.
Maybe 2.5" but not 2280
Regarding your 1st link: Receiving a geo block :|
Regarding your 2nd link:
I would only consider storge by known manufacturers like Intel, Samsung, Crucial/Micron, WD/SanDisk, Kioxia and maybe Kingston.
No experience with brands like Sabrent.
Same reason why I wouldnt shop for them on AliExpress. No confidence in those NAND.
I got a 1TB SSD for 55€, so about 60 something dollars. Prices are certainly dropping
Same SSDs are about 40% more expensive today than they were this time last year.
SSDs were relatively new in 2010, and priced accordingly. Now it’s just about increasing sizes and (hopefully) reliability. I just don’t think that all of a sudden we’ll have huge cheap SSDs - people are used to a certain price point and manufacturers will take advantage of that.
