So all the other hard drives will be cheaper now, right? Right?
A 2tb SSD can now be bought for 100$ at least.
Incoming 1Tb videogames. Compression? Who the fuck needs compression.
Black ops 6 just demanded another 45 GB for an update on my PS5, when the game is already 200 GB. AAA devs are making me look more into small indie games that don’t eat the whole hard drive to spend my money on, great job folks.
E) meant to say instead of buying a bigger hard drive I’ll support a small dev instead.
That is absolutely egregious. 200GB game with a 45GB update? You’d be lucky to see me installing a game that’s around 20-30GB max anymore because I consider that to be the most acceptable amount of bloat for a game anymore.
Agreed, it’s getting out of control. The most annoying thing is I’m not interested in PvP, just zombies, so probably 80% of that is all just bloat on my hard drive.
I arrived at that point a few years ago. You’re in for a world of discovery. As an fps fan myself I highly recommend Ultrakill. There’s a demo so you don’t have to commit.
Thanks I’ll check it out. The gf and I like to shoot zombies but were it not part of PS Plus I surely wouldn’t give them $70. I’ve been playing a lot of Balatro recently, poker roguelike from a sole developer with simple graphics but very fun special powers
Do you have time to talk about our Lord and Savior FACTORIO? Here; just have a quick taste.
I haven’t played much since my curved monitor got broken but between Stellaris and Rimworld I don’t know if there’s enough time in a day for another build queue. I’ll check it out at some point and fall into the rabbit hole I’m sure.
Did it use 45 GB extra or were there just 45 GB worth of changes?
Requires an additional 45 clear to accommodate the update file and is currently sitting at 196.5. Deleting Hitman and queuing it up after the update is simple enough technically for someone like me with a wired high speed connection and no data cap, but still a pain in the ass and way too big for a single game.
Ok, I’m sorry, but… HOW??? How is it possibly two hundred fucking gigabytes??? What the fuck is taking up so much space???
More than triple the next largest game. All I want is the zombies mode and space to install other games, I could probably cull 80% of the COD suite and be just fine, but I have to carry the whole bag to reach in 🤷♂️
The game is 50GB, the other 200GB is just “fuck you” space.
It’s mostly textures, video, and audio.
The game code is probably less than 10gb
Change languages in your game, I am willing to bet it doesn’t download a language pack for whatever language you choose.
You need multiple textures for different screens, resolutions, etc. to provide the best looking results. Multiply by the number of unique environments…
Additionally, it’s not like they can only use “high” or “low” assets, as they progressively load different level of detail assets depending on the scene or distance.
Same with all of the video cutscenes in games, they play pre-rendered videos for cutscenes.
Clean up assets, are you kidding? Gamers have enough disk and time is money! /s
Oh, they’ll do compression alright, they’ll ship every asset in a dozen resolutions with different lossy compression algos so they don’t need to spend dev time actually handling model and texture downscaling properly. And games will still run like crap because reasons.
Games can’t really compress their assets much.
Stuff like textures generally use a lossless bitmap format. The compression artefacts you get with lossy formats, while unnoticable to the human eye, can cause much more visible rendering artefacts once the game engine goes to calculate how light should interact with the material.
That’s not to say devs couldn’t be more efficient, but it does explain why games don’t really compress that well.
When I say “compress” I mean downscale. I’m suggesting they could have dozens of copies of each texture and model in a host of different resolutions (number of polygons, pixels for textures, etc), instead of handling that in the code. I’m not exactly sure how they currently do low vs medium vs high settings, just suggesting that they could solve that using a ton more data if they essentially had no limitations in terms of customer storage space.
Uuh. That is exactly how games work.
And that’s completely normal. Every modern game has multiple versions of the same asset at various detail levels, all of which are used. And when you choose between “low, medium, high” that doesn’t mean there’s a giant pile of assets that go un-used. The game will use them all, rendering a different version of an asset depending on how close to something you are. The settings often just change how far away the game will render at the highest quality, before it starts to drop down to the lower LODs (level of detail).
That’s why the games aren’t much smaller on console, for exanple. They’re not including all the unnecessary assets for different graphics settings from PC. They are all part of how modern game work.
“Handling that in the code” would still involve storing it all somewhere after “generation”, same way shaders are better generated in advance, lest you get a stuttery mess.
And it isn’t how most game do things even today. Such code does not exist. Not yet at least. Human artists produce better results, and hence games ship with every version of every asset.
Finally automating this is what Unreals nanite system has only recently promised to do, but it has run into snags.
When I say “compress” I mean downscale. I’m suggesting they could have dozens of copies of each texture and model in a host of different resolutions.
Yeah, that’s generally the best way to do it for optimal performance. Games sometimes have an adjustable option to control this in game, LoD (level of detail).
I don’t know about that. These are spinning disks so they aren’t exactly going to be fast when compared to solid state drives. Then again, I wouldn’t exactly put it past some of the AAA game devs out there.
10 of these in a raid6?that’s 4x speed and 400tb.
Of it’s raid6 it’s 320tb or so.
Optimizations are relics of the past!
Why in the world does this seem to use an inaccurate depiction of the Xbox Series X expansion card for its thumbnail?
This picture: brought to you by some bullshit AI
Oh wow does it come with glowing green computery looking stuff like in the picture
The image is literally just the proprietary xbox drive plugged into an xbox
I had an Xbox and it didn’t do that either!!!
I know people love to dunk on Seagate drives, but it was really just the one gen that was the cause of that bad rep. Before that the most hated drives were the “deathstars” (Deskstars). I have a 1TB Seagate drive that is 10 years old and still in use daily. Just do some research on which drive to buy, no OEM is sacrosanct. I’d personally wait 6 months to a year before buying one of these drives though, so enough people have time to find out if this generation is trouble or not.
Many people can’t accept that one drive model isn’t going to kill a company or make everything from them bad.
The exception being the palladium drive. Although its not directly attributed to the fall of JTS, who at the time owned Atari. Its was clear from the frontline techs these things were absolute shit. The irony is that 1 out of say 10,000 was perfect. So much so I still have one of the 1.2 gig’s that still spins up and reads and writes fine. Its nearly a unicorn though.
I had one of these, it worked perfectly for years. I might even still have it. I remember it being a significant leap in size and cost per MB.
We had failure rates over 90% on them. We sold around 8000 computers on contract to the local schools that year and took a hit to our rep. We started going from school to school replacing them before they could fail.
The drive in the picture is dated mar 16 97. I’m pretty sure it was one of thousands of warranty replacements we received. Like I said its still good but really hasn’t been in service in over 30 years. I keep it because its a reminder of how bad, bad can be.
JT storage went out of business in 98. When we heard they had no one was surprised.
That is an absolutely wild fail rate.
i dunno man, i have about 20 years worth of bad experiences with seagate. none of their drives have ever been reliable for me. WD drives have always been rock solid and overall just better drives in my experience. I have two WD externals sitting on my desk right now that are almost 15 years old. Still going strong.
I have killed every single type of magnetic platter drive from every brand they are all bad
Not “bad”, consumable.
Maybe consider looking at what all those had in common… Ie you
The only drives I have ever had die on me were actually both WD, but it’s all anecdotal, and I’ve had tons of WD drives that were great (my favorites were the raptors and velociratpers). I’ve owned way too many HDDs over the many years, and I can say that I haven’t had issues with any, but again I do my research and only order from what I believe to be good runs of drives. In case you have never done so, take a look at the reports that Backblaze puts out on their drive reliability. I found it pretty eye opening. Before Backblaze start sharing their data, there used to be a site that crowd sourced HDD lifetimes and failure causes that I used to use when buying drives and I always entered my drive data there. I can’t recall the name of it now nor do I know if it still exists, but you could definitely spot the “bad” gens on there and WD and Seagate were both pretty even as far as I recall. I remember Hitachi being statistically worse, but it made sense as they bought IBM’s derided Deskstar business from them. Ironically, WD ended up buying Hitachi’s HDD business years later, but I think it was considered OK by then.
It is not anecdotal, Seagate, FOR A DECADE, had quantifiably the worst drives with some models hitting 30% failure rate. They still, to this day, have shit models with over 10% and are almost always, the worst in back blaze reports of all data center drives. The only issue we have on the reports is nobody does random sampling and Seagate has always been the cheapest so they get overrepresented in reports.
I would love to see your data on this if you have it available.
It’s all anecdotal for the most part. I’ve had two DOA WD drives in a row before, but no dead seagates.
As a side note, I hope you have those two WDs backed up, they’re overdue for a death.
Trust me, I’ve been waiting for those ancient WDs to die. I’m actually using them in a raid 1 config, so if one dies the other remains. I’ve also got anything really important backed up to cloud storage. I’ve worked in software (games) for 20+ years. I’m very well accustomed to data loss and recovery.
Anyway, much of my opinion on seagates comes from people I know who work in render farms and IT guys who manage entire studios. So its not really that anecdotal.
I’m very well accustomed to data loss and recovery.
Backs up anything “really important” to cloud storage
Yes, I do believe you are very well accustomed to data loss.
Almost every bit of data i have is redundant. The stuff I back up to cloud storage is the stuff I would care about if my house were to burn down. But that stuff is all double, and triple backed up, locally as well.
Imagine how long it’ll take to rebuild your raid array after one fails lol
underrated comment. i’d much rather clone a 16 tb drive than 50 tb one. Also better speeds considering the use of more drives. That said, if I can save on electricity, noise, enclosure space, and very importantly, money, it could be pretty cool. Just need to wait and see how reliable these things are and if they are going to carry a price point that makes them make sense.
I mean personally, for long term data hoarding, I dislike running anything below raidz2, and imo anything less than 5 disks in that setup is just silly and inefficient in terms of cost/benefit. So I currently have 5x16TB in raidz2. The 60% capacity efficiency kinda blows, but also I didn’t want to spend any more on rust than I did at the time, and the array is still working great, so whatever. For me, that was a reasonable balance between power draw, disk count, cost, and capacity.
honestly though. I kinda dislike that a 40 or 50tb mechanical drive is even a thing. What we really need is larger, more affordable solid state drives. Mechanical drives have had their place, but their limits are fairly clear at this point. And your point about rebuilding an array makes that obvious. They are just too slow. This move by seagate to make ridiculously large mechanical drives, should not be the beginning, as this article suggests. It should really be the end.
They’re slow, but they’re WAY more robust than most SSDs - and in terms of $/TB, it’s not even close. Especially if you’re comparing to SLC enterprise-grade.
I’ve definitely seen more hdd failures than ssd failures in my life, that said, enterprise storage is indeed very robust. My WD red pros have all been workhorses. And right now the price per dollar is definitely in favor of HDDs. That really needs to change though. The raw materials alone make HDDs more expensive to produce, the problem is only that there are less manufacturers with the means to actually produce the chips necessary for SSDs because HDDs have been around for a million years. Once that changes, I think HDDs will and should go the way of every obsolete storage medium thats existed prior.
Wow great. From seagate. The company that produces drives with the by far lowest life expectancy compared to the competiton
And IIRC moved their headquarters to some Caribbean island to avoid paying US corporate taxes.
Is this true? I remember them being very reliable in the past.
I think people say this because there was one specific 6TB model that does really poorly in BackBlaze reports, combined with a generally poor understanding of statistics (“I bought a Seagate and it failed but I’ve never had a WD fail”).
I will also point out that BackBlaze themselves consistently say that Seagate and WD are pretty much the same (apart from the one model), in those exact same reports
Heh. In my case, one WD SSD failed miserably on me.
Thanks for the explanation.
Repair technicians see by far the most of seagate drives
I’ve had at least 6 seagate drives over the past 20 years. none of them survived more than 2 or 3 years. Meanwhile, i have two almost 15 year old WDs sitting on my desk still going strong.
If EA or Ubisoft don’t get their shit together this won’t be enough.
If 50TB is coming fast, then so am I
i remember bragging when my computer had 40gb storage
Imagine losing a 50tb drive because you choose to use Seagate.
Seagate Exos is usually ok. Their generic stuff, is sometimes crap, but that’s true of all manufacturers, really.
That being said, I’d be nervous with a single huge drive, no matter where it’s from. And even as part of a redundant structure, the rebuild times would be through the roof.
exos are fine if you don’t mind them being loud as hell.
They’re not really meant for desktop use, so not really an issue. Also don’t keep your servers under your bed, the ventilation is quite bad.
Yup, if you can put em in a closet or something, you’re golden.
thats a lot of
pornhigh quality videosNo thanks. I’d rather have 4TB SSDs that cost $100. We were getting close to that in 2023, but then the memory manufacturers decided to collude and jacked up prices.
I thought prices seemed to be taking a while come down on 4TB SSDs as I had been looking at them for a while.
Don’t really want it enough to spend £200 though. Would be to replace a 1+2TB HDD LVM. Now that I think about it, I have never copied a few TBs of data in one go.
I just recently replaced a bunch of 1TB and 2TB drives with an 4TB SSD and 8TB HDD pretty cheaply back in December. I was trying to get those in before tariff shenanigans. Technically, those old drives are still in use, just for redundancy now. Even the scary old Seagate drives!
UK so hopefully not too much of an issue with tariffs here. Also tempted by an N150 miniPC, could stick proxmox on that.
To be fair, I believe the increased pricing then was mostly due to sales, and thus production, tanking post COVID along with the big inflation for a couple of years. There was almost certainly greed from the most prominent memory makers tackedo n though.
Memory manufacturers purposely cut production to help justify cost increases: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/memory-prices-rebound-due-to-reduced-production-increasing-demand
But yeah, they’ll also take advantage of demand (real or imaginary) to jack up prices: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/micron-confirms-memory-price-hikes-as-ai-and-data-center-demand-surges
Hey! You! Get offa the Cloud (and grab yourself one of those drives). You can keep your thoughts to yourself, now you can keep your data to yourself, like in the recent old times.
Best to get at least 2 so you have a backup
Your own lil cloud
cool 50tb. i can now download more stuff.