Quote from: NikoB on February 26, 2021, 20:27:29
13-15$ for 1TB on HDD today?! No same prices. It unreal. Real prices - 35$ for WD Purple (3 year warranty, as my old WD Green 2010-2011). No changes in prices for 10 years!!!
Quote from: _MT_ on February 24, 2021, 12:48:49Quote from: vertigo on February 23, 2021, 17:03:22I primarily work with small files. So, it's all about random access for me. Endurance matters to me when it comes to caching, scratch drives, memory swapping, that sort of stuff. To the extent that I even use Optane. In professional settings, some people can generate terabytes of data in a day. And then endurance really matters.
As for the PRO, IMO the bigger difference isn't the endurance, it's the speed.
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They might claim it doesn't affect the performance (as ADATA did, but from what I could tell they were full of it with those claims) and maybe even genuinely believe that, or at least believe it's not enough to affect 99% of their consumers, but then they should be transparent about it and let the consumers decide for themselves.
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I'm the same with Amazon, but it's getting a lot harder. I actually spent half a day driving around to three or four local computer shops looking for something I needed (mSATA-USB enclosure), and none of them had it... I wonder if there's a block on sale of certain technology to your country.
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But yeah, it sounds like it's largely an issue of buying power, if each country is acting independently in that regard instead of the EU behaving as one large market.
Frankly, SATA is plenty fast for office work. I guess the biggest benefit an ordinary consumer can get from fast NVMe drive is loading in games. They probably don't have a fast enough Internet connection or NAS to see the difference when downloading/ copying. Even their home LAN is probably not fast enough. How many people have 10 GbE or something even better in their home?
Fortunately, around here, all the shops with computers/ electronics worth a dime are on the Internet, they have their e-shops, I can see their inventory across the country, they participate in product comparison sites, so I don't have to go blind. Often, they don't have the part in a store, it's in a warehouse. It can be in a store within hours, but you have to place the order first. We have logistics networks where one store can send a product to a participating, but unrelated store for you to pick up locally that's cheaper than post (great for small stores in small towns). Recently, I was building a PC for a friend, it was a wonderful winter day and so I made a walk out of it (they all happened to be in the same direction). 25 km loop, five stores, under five hours, I did over half of the distance through wooded parks, the rest was mostly in quiet streets. Life is good. :-) I placed orders in the morning and computer was built in the afternoon. They were not easy to get components either, hence why five stores instead of one (among them, 4750G which is currently offered by only one store in the entire country and they had to get it from their supplier as they just sold out their stock before I could place an order).
I think it's the seller who can limit where an item ships. I think it's mainly related to shipping. They're just not interested in dealing with it. Or perhaps they don't want to deal with warranty across border. I have certainly encountered German e-shops that don't ship into all EU countries (not even all Schengen countries). And they're typically large. The small ones actually tend to be flexible. There are some tax implications for the bigger players (based on volumes delivered into individual countries). We're both in the EU and it's not like I'm buying explosives. :-) There is no legal problem. Amazon DE in general does ship. Funnily enough, I can buy a firearm in Germany and have it shipped home. And on the other hand, there are German e-shop that have language mutations of their website to attract more cross-border business. SK Hynix has, for whatever reason, decided not to. They're new to SSDs and they're probably still in the process of rolling out. I can get RAM from SK Hynix locally so they have distribution channels. It looked like even in Germany, Amazon was the only place that had P31.
It's really not about acting, we get treated that way. And I think languages really play a big part of that. From both sides - it's more difficult to build pan-EU presence, but it's also more difficult for people to shop around the entire EU. It's hard to shop in Spain when you don't know Spanish. And try reaching out to them for help. We've got almost as many official languages as countries. There're many chains that are pan-EU. But not really in consumer electronics. And even pan-EU presence doesn't necessarily mean same prices. I remember a British brand I liked, they set-up a local branch, the British website started redirecting me to a local one, they started refusing fulfilling orders placed with the British one if you managed to get around that geo-IP nonsense. I would happily buy from the local store... if only it wasn't almost twice as expensive as in London. Given how cheap airline tickets were, it was ridiculous. That was an extreme example but it suits many sellers to have EU divided. To have different prices or to even offer different quality in different countries. You can get into a ridiculous situation where you're paying more money for a lower quality. Typically, excuses involve something like differing tastes.
Quote from: vertigo on February 23, 2021, 17:03:22I primarily work with small files. So, it's all about random access for me. Endurance matters to me when it comes to caching, scratch drives, memory swapping, that sort of stuff. To the extent that I even use Optane. In professional settings, some people can generate terabytes of data in a day. And then endurance really matters.
As for the PRO, IMO the bigger difference isn't the endurance, it's the speed.
...
They might claim it doesn't affect the performance (as ADATA did, but from what I could tell they were full of it with those claims) and maybe even genuinely believe that, or at least believe it's not enough to affect 99% of their consumers, but then they should be transparent about it and let the consumers decide for themselves.
...
I'm the same with Amazon, but it's getting a lot harder. I actually spent half a day driving around to three or four local computer shops looking for something I needed (mSATA-USB enclosure), and none of them had it... I wonder if there's a block on sale of certain technology to your country.
...
But yeah, it sounds like it's largely an issue of buying power, if each country is acting independently in that regard instead of the EU behaving as one large market.
Quote from: vertigo on February 23, 2021, 16:41:31Sure. The scenario given was home video (as a reason for why people need a lot of storage). As I wrote, when you rip movies, you can blow through storage like crazy. But these days, many people use streaming services and online rentals. So, that scenario should be even more niche than it used to be.
Again, it largely depends on what you're storing...
Quote from: _MT_ on February 23, 2021, 13:09:51Yes, the P31 is praised for it's efficiency and commonly recommended for laptops. I wrote Evo Plus, not Pro. Evo Plus is actually rated faster than Pro (even in random I/O). At least here, Evo Plus is priced very close to Evo. The main benefit of 970 Pro is twice the endurance. Which is not true for 980 Pro. It has twice the sequential speed of 970 Evo, but the same endurance. 970 Pro only makes sense if you need the endurance but not capacity or speed.
Quote from: _MT_ on February 23, 2021, 10:09:45
When you compare prices, you have to realize that they have diametrically different lifespans. I think 100 GB Blu-Ray M-Dics is about €6-8. So, you're looking at 60-80 per TB. If I go with €80 and 80 % utilization, it's €100 per TB. But it's going to outlast you. Even if you consider that storage keeps getting cheaper, how many hard drives will it take to get you to 50 years. And how many if you try to "insure" yourself against drive failure. If you start getting into RAID or multiple copies, the cost equation is going to look very different. The main threat to M-Dics is physical destruction. Your biggest worry should probably be having a drive that can read the thing in the future. Not the survival of the data. Unless your house burns down (you can have a fire resistant safe - good for important documents as well) or a child stuffs them into a shredder, they will probably survive. No moving parts, no electronics to fail.
I think that video in particular is a good application for optical discs. It's static content. You can keep clips you really like online. And if you want to watch something else once in a blue moon, you can just pull the disc out and put it into a player. But what do I know. As I said, I find it a waste of time. Perhaps those people want to have everything at their fingertips. And then you want a server, probably a RAID, perhaps a couple backups. Not cheap. And as you said, you'll probably go with HDD, not SSD. SSD only for caching.
For regular consumers, I think a social network that allows you to upload video for free and share it in private might be the best compromise. It certainly has drawbacks. But I don't think a typical consumer is even aware of them. They have it available all the time on any device, there is no direct payment for space they use. And it might just survive on the Internet for ever.
Quote from: _MT_ on February 23, 2021, 10:09:45The rub is that €100/ TB is SSD territory. That's where the 870 QVO lies. Without any moving parts to fail.
I think 100 GB Blu-Ray M-Dics is about €6-8. So, you're looking at 60-80 per TB. If I go with €80 and 80 % utilization, it's €100 per TB. But it's going to outlast you.
Quote from: vertigo on February 22, 2021, 15:58:44Yes, the P31 is praised for it's efficiency and commonly recommended for laptops. I wrote Evo Plus, not Pro. Evo Plus is actually rated faster than Pro (even in random I/O). At least here, Evo Plus is priced very close to Evo. The main benefit of 970 Pro is twice the endurance. Which is not true for 980 Pro. It has twice the sequential speed of 970 Evo, but the same endurance. 970 Pro only makes sense if you need the endurance but not capacity or speed.
The SK hynix I have is the P31 Gold. I looked at several benchmarks and it's currently one of the top performers both in speed and efficiency, which was particularly important because I'm using it in a laptop. I made a mistake in my earlier post, it was the 960 EVO I bought a few years ago (970 wasn't out yet), so the SK hynix is far better than it, but it is actually better than the 970 as well. And the PRO is much more expensive, I'm pretty sure more than 12%. I typically just buy a Samsung whenever I need an SSD, because, like you, I see them as a brand that delivers consistent quality (for SSDs, I hate Samsung for pretty much everything else), but I was first turned off of them by the large number of Amazon reviews saying people received a smaller or entirely different drive, where someone else had bought it, swapped it out, and returned it. And Amazon and Samsung were largely taking the stance of not believing them and doing nothing, despite the fact there were a very large number of people all saying the same thing. I just didn't want to risk it, nor did I want to support a company doing that.
So I started looking at others, and was about to go with the ADATA XPG until I found they did exactly as you said and switched out the controller after getting a bunch of good reviews on Amazon and review sites. I was leaning toward the WD SN750, but I felt they were asking too much for it, both on its own and, especially, compared to the 970, as they were asking for as much or more despite it being a mostly inferior drive based on all the reviews I looked at. And then I learned about the P31, and the more I looked into it, the more impressed I became. And SK Hynix is a big name in memory, just not on the consumer side. As I'm sure you know, they make a lot of the chips used by other manufacturers. So it's not like they're some unknown, unproven brand. Unfortunately, the only place I could find it was Amazon, though that's becoming the norm for many products due to their monopoly, so I had to buy it there. The only downside is that it's only available as 1TB, so I had to sacrifice space for a better price and better product. Hopefully they'll release their 2TB Platinum version before long and I can swap it out and either put the Gold in my desktop or use it as an external drive.
I always get drives when Best Buy and others do sales on the WD external ones, as those are cheaper than buying internal ones oddly enough. They're just Reds or Whites (which the general consensus is are also Reds) in an enclosure, and you can pull them out (shuck them) and use them as an internal. But I like to buy in increments of 4TB, so I prefer not getting 14 or 18. This is because when I bought 8TB drives, I could use my old 4's to back them up, 2 each, and if/when I switch to 12 or 16, I can use 3-4 4's or an 8 and a 4 or two 8's to back those up. Just works out better, and allows me to keep drives in use longer and minimize how many new ones I have to buy, by using the old ones as their backups instead of buying double the new ones to use them for the backups.
It sounds like it's not really an issue of HDD pricing but of regional pricing on them. The companies are making and selling them at better prices than ever, but clearly not everywhere. Not sure if they're only able to offer the prices they do here because they make up for it by selling so high in other places, or if it's due to tariffs or other factors, or just buying power of retailers here. So are prices stagnant there over the past several years, or has the price/TB come down a lot but it's just still high, and it was even higher before?
Quote from: vertigo on February 22, 2021, 15:58:44When you compare prices, you have to realize that they have diametrically different lifespans. I think 100 GB Blu-Ray M-Dics is about €6-8. So, you're looking at 60-80 per TB. If I go with €80 and 80 % utilization, it's €100 per TB. But it's going to outlast you. Even if you consider that storage keeps getting cheaper, how many hard drives will it take to get you to 50 years. And how many if you try to "insure" yourself against drive failure. If you start getting into RAID or multiple copies, the cost equation is going to look very different. The main threat to M-Dics is physical destruction. Your biggest worry should probably be having a drive that can read the thing in the future. Not the survival of the data. Unless your house burns down (you can have a fire resistant safe - good for important documents as well) or a child stuffs them into a shredder, they will probably survive. No moving parts, no electronics to fail.
As for optical discs, I used to do that, but not only is it more expensive than HDD space, but you get coasters, which drives up the cost, not to mention the time of swapping discs out, burning, swapping out, burning, ad nauseum, and trying to maximize their use by figuring out what to burn to what discs so you use as much of the disc as possible, instead of only using 80% because you don't have a file small enough to fill it. And finally, you can't reuse them, which unless you're doing true archiving, is a drawback. If you're archiving data that either occasionally changes or goes obsolete or whatever, it's nice to be able to change it as needed. Discs are probably fine for certain things, especially smaller amounts of data, but when you're talking large amounts and/or large files, they're not ideal.
Quote from: vertigo on February 22, 2021, 15:58:44For consumers, QLC is indeed typically perfectly fine. When consumers store bulk data, it's typically largely static. When it sits there for months on end, it's not going to wear out the drive. In this scenario, MTBF is more important.
Not sure about SLC. I primarily look at MLC or TLC, but QLC is perfectly fine for most people. People get all worked up over the lower lifespans, but most people, at least those that would even be considering them, would take a decade to go through their TBW.
Quote from: _MT_ on February 22, 2021, 13:05:41
Is SLC still a thing? I thought it's a niche now (industrial, embedded, that sort of thing). With even enterprise storage having moved on.
If you want archival, then how about archival grade optical discs? Well, it's not exactly cheap, but they can survive a lot longer than 20 years. I think M-Disc has a 1000 year product. It's not an online storage unless you buy a library ("jukebox"; very expensive). But it's great for true archival. Personally, I find home video to be a waste of space and time. I mean, who watches it? Sure, there might be some truly exceptional moments worth preserving for decades but most are not. Expensive storage forces you to rationalize what you want to store. These days with streaming services so prevalent, most people shouldn't need that much storage. In the olden days when people bought DVDs and ripped them to their own home servers, you blew through storage like there is no tomorrow.
Quote from: vertigo on February 21, 2021, 03:51:41Which SK Hynix is far superior to the 970 Evo? Sure, it's sequential write speed isn't anywhere close to the best there is. But if that bothers you, Evo Plus is just about 12 % more expensive, at least around here. I don't really care for Samsung as a brand but they're one of few brands of consumer SSDs that I trust to deliver a consistent product. Most of the players in this field switch flash and controllers around as it suits them so you can never be sure what you're getting. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone in the country sells SK Hynix SSDs (I have been looking around for the P31 to test). 2 TB 970 Evo Plus is among the cheaper 2 TB drives in my neck of the woods, retailing for around €300. Cheaper than many questionable brands, in my opinion, like ADATA. Not much more expensive than 665p from Intel (maybe 20 %).
Only a few years ago, I paid $400 for a 1TB 970 EVO drive. Last month, I paid ~$130 for a 1TB SK hynix, which is a far superior drive. That's quite a big difference. I really wanted 2TB, but there were only a couple options and they were both almost $400, so I'll agree we definitely need more, faster advancement in SSDs, but it hasn't exactly been stagnant. Nor have HDDs, which now cost ~$13-16/TB and come in capacities up to 14TB (or larger?), which is a pretty big improvement from when I paid $140-150 for 4TB drives ($35-37.5/TB) 7 years ago. So that's an almost 3x price decrease per TB with a simultaneous ~3x increase in capacity since 2013, yet you claim there's been no price progress since 2011. I get wanting/needing more, and I'm also often frustrated by the cost and size limits, but let's be honest about the situation.
Quote from: NikoB on February 20, 2021, 15:08:54Is SLC still a thing? I thought it's a niche now (industrial, embedded, that sort of thing). With even enterprise storage having moved on.
The most interesting thing is that with this technology it is already possible to make an SLC SSD with a capacity of 250-1TB, which is quite cheap with 100k rewrite cycles. However, some manufacturers like Gigabyte have already released them for 250-500GB.