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.
are HDDs finally dying?
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.
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.
Yet apple will still charge $200 for 128gb
Soon the new COD will weigh 5TB
I’m sure we will get some “random” fire at some factory to drive prices up again.
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.
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 they’re still not back down to $200.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I got a 1TB SSD for 55€, so about 60 something dollars. Prices are certainly dropping
Yup.
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.
This is it. Yes, spinning HDDs may be cheaper, but replacing mine with an SSD made my PC faster and quieter, especially on boot.
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.
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.
“Could”
And Apple will finally sell the iPhone starting with 256GB
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.
What do you need 256gb for? You don’t seriously store photos and videos on your phone… as the only place?
My 100GB music library leaves less space than I’d like on a 128GB phone.
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?
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.
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)
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.
It’s Comcastic!
United States. They have data caps because
their backbone isn’t powerful enough for 2gbps home internetthey prefer to offer more value to customersYou forgot “and they’re greedy fuck pigs”
well, that’s a given
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
Ah shit. That would suck. Personally I could start the download and have the game the next day. Which is roughly what it took to torrent a 4 GiB game back in the day if there weren’t enough seeds.
32 level “PLC” cells, OMG. How about staying at levels with some durability.
Good news but it’ll be a while before I can replace the 20TB drives in my NAS with these.
You would replace your NAS drives with SSDs?
Im not super experienced with NAS and only started home networking like three years ago. but I read SSDs would die quicker than traditional disks.
I’m not sure although it’s mostly used for media storage so there aren’t a lot of write operations. Having said that I do have solid state M2 drives in there for caching with no issues so far.
It’s looking like 2029 will be the turning point. Right now, we are on the verge of having 16tb m.2s on the market, and by 2029 SSDs will be around $10-15/TB like HDDs are now.
In 2029, if semiconductor trends continue, it is likely that we will have 16TB SSDs for ~$200 and 32TB SSDs for ~$500; Cheaper than the $320 we’re paying for 20TB HDDs right now.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/16tb-m2-ssds-will-soon-grace-the-market
The HDD industry doesn’t seem like it will improve at the same rate. It is likely that the SSD market will have better $/TB than the HDD market in 2029, unless hard drives make some massive breakthrough before then. The survival of the HDD industry past the next 5 years is basically riding on Seagate’s ability to successfully release HAMR technology.
While I fully agree with the SSD side, you seem to ignore that HDDs are also getting cheaper per TB (always have, and usually quite noticeably). Also the reliability of large to huge SSDs remains to be seen as well. Obviously a breakthrough in HDD technology would have an influence as well, as you mentioned.
I’m not saying SSDs aren’t here to take over, they surely will eventually (preferably sooner), but I think it’ll be a few more years until we got actual price parity per TB. Even when ignoring other aspects like reliability.
You can’t really reliably use consumer SSDs in a server/NAS situation though, unless you more prepared to replace them every 12-24 months and suffer poor read/write speeds under load
SSDs last longer than hard drives in most situations.
What do you mean poor speeds under load?
daamn 1 TB in 2029 now ay
This is per chip. A given NVMe drive usually contains multiple chips.
