I just want bigger drives… I feel like we’ve been stuck at 1TB for at least a decade.
You can get spinning rust all the way up to 32 TB in a single 3.5" disk and 8 TB in an NVMe drive. The tech is out there, but it takes time for the price of stuff like that to come down when there isnt much demand for it.
I refuse to believe there isn’t much demand for it when we have MicroSD cards approaching 2TB.
I do think the demand decreased in the past decade. The average consumer has their photos and documents in the cloud and signs up to streaming services for movies, shows, and music. Local storage is not as important as it used to be.
But on the opposite end games are only getting bigger and fast internet is still semi expensive so having large drives would be beneficial to people that want to keep multiple games installed on their PC/console.
fair point, even the MicroSD market would target the mobile user and not so much a desktop.
There’s lots of demand for large drives, it’s mostly for enterprise drives though.
There are 32 and 64TB enterprise SSDs out there now too.
SSDs have gotten much cheaper. 10 years ago, they were over $0.50/GB, now they’re just over $0.04/GB That’s over 12 times cheaper.
You can get a 2tb ssd for $85. 10 years ago a 2tb ssd would’ve been super expensive and very boogie.
SSDs were even cheaper until memory manufacturers decided it was getting too cheap: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/ssd-prices-predicted-to-skyrocket-throughout-2024
They predicted prices would go higher and, through the magic of intentionally constricting supply, it happened. Prices still have not dropped back down to where they were in 2023.
I’m not sure if SSDs were really cheaper before. RIght now, I’m seeing about $0.043-$0.05/GB. From what I recall, that’s about the same or a little better than what we had in 2023.
However, I very much agree that prices should have decreased much further in that time.
This isn’t extensive, but when looking up products on amazon through camelcamelcamel that existed in 2023 and now, the trend matches up:
Where can you get a 2TB SSD for $85? Most 2TB SSD’s I’ve seen cost about €120 with the cheapest going down to €98.
There are several options here below $90 (including a couple nvme ones), and a couple at or below $85: https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#t=0&sort=price&page=1&A=1600000000000,24000000000000
Yeah, my 2013 black 1TB cost like 100€ so 12 years ago, prices are going down but not really falling off a cliff lol.
The next monster hunter is gonna require this in the specs
Impressive. Very nice. Now let’s see the random read/write speed.
Let’s see Paul Allen’s io.
When do we start needing active coolers for our drives?
i have a samsung 2.5" ssd and it actually would benefit from active cooling. when i installed my os, downloaded my steam games, and then made a copy of one (because steam insists on updating which breaks mods) and noticed that write speed was slow af…so i tested with kdiskmark and all speeds were exactly at 75mb/s while they should be at like 550. it throttled to keep temperature under 60c.
Sequential read/write is very rarely interesting, cool to see it’s possible though. Random read/write and IOPS are much more important for daily use, preferably numbers without cache. Better cell endurance is always a bonus too, though I have yet to have a SSD die on me, probably just luck at this point.
It wasn’t that long ago when RAM had similar transfer speeds.
With PCIe 6, consumer grade SSDs shouldn’t need more than a single lane. That will be nice since AMD and Intel have been pretty skimpy with the PCIe lanes lately.
What about latency though?
The latency of RAM has been around 10ns for the last couple decades. The latency of a good NVMe SSD is about 1000 times worse than RAM.
I have never once been about to tell a real world difference in SSD speeds. Until OS I/O code improves, faster SSDs don’t excite me.
There was a jump between old early gen SATA SSDs and modern NVMe in my opinion, but it’s really only noticable if you’re running something like a game with a huge amount of data to load, and you’re actively comparing the two.
My old PC had several different hard drives of differing types and I’d periodically be too lazy to move a game from one drive to another so I’d play it off different drives over a period of time, and was able to compare the loading times.
So I’d say they’re faster, but it’s nowhere near the leap that HDD to SSD was.
I agree. HDD to SSD was a huge leap. NVME was a small, sometimes noticable upgrade. Past that, I can’t tell a difference. And it’s hard to get excited about the hardware updates when the software can’t use it.
Okay cool, but post the random IOPs please.
It will still be sold at a fraction of what Apple charges for their far inferior SSDs.
That’s more than DDR4 Ram bandwidth. Whoa!
I wonder if we reach to the point we’re RAM would be unnecessary.
