Laptop SSD Capacity To Remain Flat As NAND Flash Dearth Causes Prices To Rise (computerworld.com) 167
Lucas123 writes from a report via Computerworld: Laptop manufacturers aren't likely to offer higher capacity standard SSDs in their machines this year as a shortage of NAND flash is pushing prices higher this year. At the same time, nearly half of all laptops shipped this year will have SSDs versus HDDs, according to a new report from DRAMeXchange. The contract prices for multi-level cell (MLC) SSDs supplied to the PC manufacturing industry for those laptops are projected to go up by 12% to 16% compared with the final quarter of 2016; prices of triple-level cell (TLC) SSDs are expected to rise by 10% to 16% sequentially. "The tight NAND flash supply and sharp price hikes for SSDs will likely discourage PC-[manufacturers] from raising storage capacity," said Alan Chen, a senior research manager of DRAMeXchange. "Therefore, the storage specifications for mainstream PC [...] SSDs are expected to remain in the 128GB and 256GB [range]."
That's not a problem for Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
They're still using 5400 RPM HDDs in their low-end-yet-too-expensive Macs.
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And Dell,Acer,HP,ASUS,lenovo are doing the exact same thing.
In fact almost NO stock laptop comes with a high end drive installed. Even the alienware Laptops come with low end hard drives and the first thing you do is swap them out. Buddy of mine just bought one and immediately removed the drive to replace it with a WD black.
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They're still using 5400 RPM HDDs in their low-end-yet-too-expensive Macs.
I know you're being snarky, but it's worth pointing out that the Macs you're mentioning are outliers. To get a sense for the trend across their product line:
- 2010 was the first year they launched a Mac with no HDD option at all (MacBook Air)
- 2012 was the last year they launched a laptop with HDDs as an option (MacBook Pro)
- 2015 was the last year they launched a desktop with HDDs as an option (iMac)
So, to say the least, it's pretty clear which direction the winds are blowing. Of the Macs that haven't been
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In 2017, at the prices Apple asks for their computer, you'd expect that even the low-end models would at least come with SATA SSDs.
Re:That's not a problem for Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That's not a problem for Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, that's my right to buy something else. Know what else's my right? Bitching about how over priced these systems are. Hell, the trash can pro is still starting at 3K with 4+ year old hardware.
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Dang, that is one ugly PC, who buys it? Of course the flip side is M$ probing you like there is no tomorrow and like they own you and your body (keep in mind that probe will follow you to the dentist, the doctor or even a proctologist when you need one, windows anal probe 10 riding that camera where it has never been before).
So Apple gets to charge a premium. Unfortunate but true, as a lack of competition allows price gouging on one hand or privacy gouging on the other. At least with Apple you pay once, wi
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So Apple gets to charge a premium. Unfortunate but true, as a lack of competition allows price gouging on one hand or privacy gouging on the other. At least with Apple you pay once, with M$ you'll pay every time you turn on windows 10
For some pretty low levels of gouging. If you triple the price, that's gouging. If you are like some folks, like the guys I saw nearly getting in a a brawl over 5 cents on Ram Price, it's unforgivable gouging, Geek rage is the best rage.
So many of us are so hung up on platform rather than process. I have all three major OS'. My Mac I run my Video and audio work on. It also runs Windows. My other Windows machine runs the one program I need Windows for, and to keep me up to date for support for others, an
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I sure wish the Surface Pro and Surface Book would run under OS X. Neat hardware but the OS just annoys me too much.
Of course, if Apple continues on it's current path, the annoyance level of OS X^HmacOS and Windows 12 will converge sometime during Trump's second term.
But by then I'll be spending too much on healthcare to care about computers. .....
Looks like the meds are wearing off again. Time for a refill.
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I sure wish the Surface Pro and Surface Book would run under OS X. Neat hardware but the OS just annoys me too much.
Of course, if Apple continues on it's current path, the annoyance level of OS X^HmacOS and Windows 12 will converge sometime during Trump's second term.
But by then I'll be spending too much on healthcare to care about computers. .....
Looks like the meds are wearing off again. Time for a refill.
Hey - I give you credit for a real mashup of subjects - that's pretty cool.
Anyhow, NyQuil and an AlkaSeltzer Plus will work in a pinch.
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Macs are for Xcode users (Score:3)
The price of a Mac includes an Xcode license. If you don't need Xcode, consider buying something other than a Mac.
Re:Macs are for Xcode users (Score:4, Insightful)
The price of a Mac includes an Xcode license.
It also comes with an Apple logo, which is priceless if you want to hang with the cool kids. My daughter is a freshman in college, and she says that only the total dweebs use Windows on their laptops.
Re:Macs are for Xcode users (Score:4, Funny)
You should probably kill her now, to help avoid spreading your genes any farther.
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Vainglory used to be on the deadly sin list.
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My daughter is a freshman in college, and she says that only the total dweebs use Windows on their laptops.
Give her a Dell laptop with a Linux installation...
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The price of a Mac includes an Xcode license.
It also comes with an Apple logo, which is priceless if you want to hang with the cool kids. My daughter is a freshman in college, and she says that only the total dweebs use Windows on their laptops.
Mine has some software I must use that is not available on the Windows platform. It also runs Windows very nicely, speaking of priceless.
Peer pressure also gets people to buy Windows machines and Android phones. The cycle of larf. Ford versus Chevy for geeks.
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[My Mac] has some software I must use that is not available on the Windows platform.
For future reference, what might that happen to be? I mentioned Xcode because it's probably the most salient example of such to Slashdot users.
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[My Mac] has some software I must use that is not available on the Windows platform.
For future reference, what might that happen to be? I mentioned Xcode because it's probably the most salient example of such to Slashdot users.
I do use Xcode some, Final Cut and it's audio support programs. The amount of time spent learning the PC vid programs which I've tried is not financially sensible, and aren't as good, IMO. I might save a couple hundred on a computer, and spend 50K on the learning curve. In addition, the Windows machines are the least reliable, breaking fairly often on updates.
Side note - I'm probably not all that typical of a Slashdot user. I'm not really a programmer, just know enough to get by, or mainly to keep from
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The cost of that computer is insignificant compared to professional software and labor costs.
I guess a hobbyist would see it differently, as might a hobbyist attempting to turn professional for the first time. A programmer attempting to bootstrap a micro-ISV, for example, might develop her first commercial app for Windows, GNU/Linux, and Android first and then put the revenue toward buying the hardware needed to additionally support macOS and iOS.
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In 2017, at the prices Apple asks for their computer, you'd expect that even the low-end models would at least come with SATA SSDs.
And you'd expect everyone to buy Nissan Versa Sedans too. that $12,855 base price makes them the best car around.
Not everyone is fixated on price, and not everyone is fixated on SSD's.
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The 11 ms barrier (Score:5, Informative)
Well, today's 5400 RPM drives are not the same as yesterday's. Increased density makes them much faster than they used to be
An increase in density increases throughput, not latency. It still takes the same amount of time (up to 60000÷5400 = 11 ms) to spin a particular sector toward the head, plus however long it took the head to move to the appropriate cylinder.
[tinfoil]Artificial scarcity ![/tinfoil] (Score:5, Interesting)
At any rate, let's just hope that as many manufacturers as possible survive as long as possible to avoid establishing one of them as the WD of NAND. Hopefully things will stay competitive for a while longer.
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SanDisk is the WD of NAND (Score:2)
let's just hope that as many manufacturers as possible survive as long as possible to avoid establishing one of them as the WD of NAND.
I thought SanDisk was the WD of NAND since May 2016 [theverge.com]
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Well, last year DellEMC shipped over an exabyte of flash to customers. And this is one company only! I can believe that all flash production is being drained.
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I'm just gonna call it "AND gate" and invert it when I read it.
A general question for the community (Score:4, Interesting)
When I first started to buy SSD's for my school, I tried to do some research and quickly became confused about the differences between TLC, MLC, and SLC. I found various sites like this one [speedguide.net] that gave a good overview, but I didn't find very many that really analyzed the performance differences.
I settled on the Kingston V300 [kingston.com] series of disks, an MLC unit that seemed to get decent reviews. It's been treating us well, but I always wonder whether the MLC was worth the extra money over the UV400 [kingston.com], a slightly cheaper TLC variant.
Has anyone ever used both MLC and TLC drives and care to comment about whether the differences in performance justify the cost?
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All I can say is that, at work we use mostly consumer SSDs made by a large Korean manufacturer. They are under heavy use (completely overwritten about once every 30 days and we can't TRIM them) and they seem to be holding up. Those manufactured by a large Idaho-based manufacturer didn't seem to last as well.
However, this is a very small sample and may not be representative. We don't have any critical data on the drives: it is a minor inconvenience if they die.
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It depends on what you're doing.
I have a few laptops with TLC SSDs and they work great for a typical desktop workload - mostly random reads, occasional burst writes. None of them have ever used more than 1% of their rated wear lifespan over several years. They're
We tried using some TLC SSDs in ESXi hosts at work for disposable dev/test VMs. This is a write-heavy workload and runs them full speed 24x7. We found the hosts would chew them up and spit them out in about six months. MLC drives handle it fine
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I'm curious what models of TLCs you used and how you used them.
I've had good experience with Samsung 850 Pros in Server 2012r2 tiered storage spaces. They get beat on pretty good with daily tiering operations and the default write caching to SSD, but so far no lost disks.
I've always been curious about using 850 Pros in VM hosts or even for repopulating an older iSCSI SAN. I've seen torture tests run against them that show endurance greatly exceeding manufacturer spec.
While I'm sure some might die, with th
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We experimented with 840 EVOs when they were basically the only thing available for 1TB SSDs. Those reliably got wrecked in VM hosts... We have a very write-heavy workload and simply used up the write endurance too quickly. For laptops, though, they're great.
The 840 Pros held up fine until we took them out of service this year. Out of about 100, I think we had 2 fail, which is on par for consumer-performance SSD.
Note that mainstream (Intel 3xx / Samsung EVO) and performance (Intel 5xx / Samsung Pro) are
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Note that mainstream (Intel 3xx / Samsung EVO) and performance (Intel 5xx / Samsung Pro) are both cheap-out solutions, but they filled a need for us.
That's what I'm getting at, though. When I spec out servers and storage for clients with enterprise flash, it's stupid expensive and I always ask myself if *most* workloads wouldn't be just fine on Samsung Pro even if the cost of ownership wasn't 2-3 disks a year needing to be replaced.
Even Samsung Pros will deliver performance vastly beyond 15k spinning rust,
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A few reasons.
One, is long-term engineering investment. HDDs have been around for decades and current HDDs have the benefit of years of incremental engineering improvement to solve a lot of problems that cause premature failure -- components, manufacturing, software and so on.
SSDs have only been around for maybe a decade and the technology package has been rapidly evolving, including the core storage technology, NAND, so there's still a process of honing the engineering associated with them. Obviously the
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Physically, there is nothing different about the NAND. So most modern TLC drives initially write new data as MLC or even SLC to avoid the speed penalty. Then later during idle time they will re-write that data as TLC. Reading is still a bit slower, but writing should be the same speed unless you're writing
0% transparency (Score:2)
Clearly, we need a "100% opaque" upmod.
Unbelievable that PCs/Macs are still sold with HDD (Score:4, Insightful)
I find it almost unbelievable that people are still sold computers with old-fashioned HDDs. At the coffee machine, a secretary told me they bought a spanking new iMac. "But it's so slow", she asked, "is that normal?"
I told her to bring it back and get a model with an SSD. She didn't know what it was. I find it unbelievable that salespersons still sell this shit to consumers.
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And cheaper prices for those bigger sizes. It is easy to fill up those tiny cheap SSDs. :(
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I also agree with you. At this point, it's kind of crazy that you would be buying an computer with an SSD. Of course SSD can't really be summed up with a nice big number. When they see one laptop with 1TB storage, and another laptop with 240 GB storage, most unaware users aren't going to really understand just how big the performance difference is between the two, but they will grasp the difference between 1 TB and 240 GB.
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Shit? When you can get an 8TB SDD for $300 then come back and tell us that HDDs are shit.
Frankly I'd be more concerned if the consumer choice was no longer available.
its the slow adservers (Score:2)
connecting to abc.xyz.adsvr.adcorp.com ....
Fucking ads, they wont render the rest of the page if that one img/vid isnt loaded.
What causes a shortage of NAND flash? (price fix?) (Score:2)
Shortage of NAND flash?
Did we have a bad crop this year? How can you have a
sudden "shortage" -- or is it that no one bothered to expand capacity in a growing market to meet demand? Is that normal market strategy?
(maybe it is, but having paid $60 for an optical drive that cost $40 about 5 years ago and $25 for a comparable about 5 years before that, AND seeing big BluRay drive manufacturers had to pay large fines and 10-30$? rebates to end-buyers of computer manufacturers like Dell for illegal price fixing
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I like that reason ... sounds almost truthy! :-)
But my 2TB SSD Mac rocks (Score:2)
Makes me even happier about my recent purchase!
A lot of mac haters and people saying SSD are unreliable, etc. Guess what, even the touch bar is way better than I would have expected based on the flames on Slashdot.
Well I have lost 1 or 2 files in the past on my 2009
MBP 17in which I loved, despite the weight, until the HDD errors started piling up. I use Windows and run some linux servers too. The price was quite high but I configured the best model I could since I expect to get 5-10 years of use out of it.
Grandfathers these days (Score:2, Offtopic)
I had to load my ASSEMBLER programs from carved rocks.
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right. i had to get up in the morning at ten oâ(TM)clock at night half an hour before i went to bed, drink a cup of sulfuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day using mud to make the circuit, and pay the mud owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing hallelujah.
Re:I'll stick with HDDs for now (Score:5, Informative)
I've had SSD's exclusively for 8 years now. No failures. Of course I never bought OCZ pieces of shit.
When any hard drive fails you can lose everything immediately and all at once. That's why you have backups. You have backups, right?
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Like Dunbal, I've had a slew of them (well over a dozen) and put them in a lot of customer systems with very few problems.
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"no there is nothing wrong with powersupply in any of them"
Did you actually test with a proper multimeter on every power rail or are you just talking out of your ass?
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I had similar issues, except I stopped buying SSD after too many failures on totally different machines. Several Kingston, several Patriot, several Trancend, one Mushkin. Sure, none of the highly praised Samsungs. This was - of course - over 5 years ago, so I suspect they really had issues by being too new. Early adopter tax. I fell for it again. It put me off from SSDs for a long time. It's not that I
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The other AC was saying there's something wrong with the house's power lines, not each individual computer's power supply. A house can have poor quality wiring or lots of noise on the line. I'm not really sure how you get line noise, but from my experience from using devices that communicate through the power sockets, you can certainly have sockets in a house that are worse than others.
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One of the easier I've found is Light bulbs that last less than expected, which is something few people really pay attention to, the compact fluorescent bulbs I bought lasted about 5 months in our home, I believe this was less than half the expected lifespan. Bad power may not be obvious all the time either, at my house (midwestern US) we get
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Good point. I didn't consider that.
However, wouldn't that reflect in odd behaviour in all electronics? That would stand out, no?
The only way the power line could be affecting the SSDs is if the computer was losing power which most SSDs are intolerant of. The ones with internal power backup should handle power loss fine but in practice even some of them do not.
Power loss while programming Flash can be fatal to the drive do to corruption of the Flash translation layer. Unlike a hard drive, it can result in more than just an incomplete write; it can result in data corruption.
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Your problem was that you were using Kingston, Patriot, etc... all third-rate SSD vendors who use whatever flash chips happen to be cheapest. Crucial (aka Micron), Samsung, and a few others are first-line vendors.
SSDs can certainly fail, but its kinda like PSUs... some vendors are first-line, most are not.
-Matt
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Your HDD is built by Seagate or WDD, etc and meant for a very cut throat, well established business... They work very hard to maintain quality control.
SSD manufacturers on the other hand are contracting it out to the lowest bidder and it's a free for all. Sandisk was even found to be using two different chipsets in the same part #, one fast one slow,
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Actually unlucky you.
The GP's example sounds more like the norm. Also the aggregated failure rate of Samsungs is nothing to write home about, except for one Linux bug. Have you seen if you're PC is doing something specific that is causing it to trash drives? For the most part there is no general uproar about SSD reliability and other than one bug, nothing spectacular about Samsung. This is quite different to OCZ who sank their own company on their poor reliability and utter shit firmware.
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I have OCZ pieces of shit. 8 years, no failure.
Generalisations are fun. But you touch on something interesting: with firmware problems all but resolved now the failure of SSDs fall under predictable flash error rates. HDDs with moving parts however have their reliability defined by a roll of a dice in terms of random failure modes.
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How does one swap a controller on an SSD? The entire unit is a single solid chip board with everything soldered together.
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With a heat gun. It's called reflow soldering, you should give it a try sometime, it's fun.
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Why do people make this so hard? Replacing platters? Controllers? JUST BACK UP THE DATA.
Geez.
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When a spinning disk fails, you usually get some auditory clues beforehand.
I had hard drives that failed immediately and without warning after five years of 24/7 service. SMART alerts can indicate when a failure is likely months before it happens. I routinely replace the HDDs in my file server every five years.
Plus they wear out all too quickly.
My coworker told me that his six-year-old 120GB SSD that he got for $200 finally gave up the ghost. He got a replacement 240GB SSD for $75.
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All drives are ticking time bombs, that's why you need backups if you don't want to lose data and RAID if availability is important.
HDDs suddenly fail sometimes. And although it is a less common failure mode than on SSDs, you can't rely on auditory clues. Also, you are unlikely to ever hit the wear limit on SSDs with a normal workstation or gamer type usage. Something else will break before that.
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How the hell is an HDD in a server, sitting in a data center, in a rack with another dozen units, all with fans going at full speed, going to give auditory clues to the people who aren't anywhere nearby to hear them?
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Don't you watch movies? ALL server / starship / government installation hardware fails with earth shattering kabooms, sparkles and smoke.
You can't miss it.
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Server grade at least give you some clues.
I am extremely skeptical about that. "Server grade" and "enterprise grade" are mainly marketing terms used to sell the same drives at triple the price. Several large scale longitudinal studies, by Google, Backblaze, and others, have found no reliability advantage to using "server grade" drives.
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Not necessarily the case. I have taken apart multiple desktop and enterprise/server grade drives to remove platters.
Every enterprise/server grade drive I've taken apart has slightly different construction inside - circuit boards are a different design, and the magnet/head assembly is MUCH beefier in the enterprise/server drives. It is, however, disheartening seeing over the last decade or so how cheap the manufacturers have become in construction of these drives.
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All drives are ticking time bombs, that's why you need backups if you don't want to lose data and RAID if availability is important.
Amusingly late last year I had that exact same discussion with my wife about her 12 month old Mac, explaining that all drives eventually fail. She laughed saying she has never had a problem and said I was just doing my usual anti apple thing, so I shrugged and let her have her way. She was in tears the following weak when her drive did fail and she lost a heap of photos and I got some suspicious looks wondering if somehow I had something to do with it. I avoided the "I told you so" line and simply got the d
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you dont know women do you (Score:2)
Obviously....
Maybe she didnt want it to be touched with in the first place no matter what.
But personally I think all mac people are stupid because they trust apples icloud crap shit, when you can backup 1tb photos to flickr, or unlimited to google.
iCloud, fuck, what a joke , 5gb, pile of shit.
Re: I'll stick with HDDs for now (Score:2)
Can't you tighten it again?
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It doesn't matter if you have a HDD, an SSD, floppies, Zip disks, cassette tapes or stone tablets. Whatever you store your data on, if you dont have suitable backups your data is at risk.
Just because certain models of HDD may make noises in certain situations prior to failure doesn't mean HDDs are better than SSDs. I have had several HDDs go bust over the years without even the slightest hint that something was going to fail.
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I don't trust SSDs. They always seemed like a ticking time bomb. When a spinning disk fails, you usually get some auditory clues beforehand.
When an SSD fails, you loose everything immediately and all at once. Plus they wear out all too quickly. You can only write to the same region hundreds of times before it fails.
I don't have SSDs, but as a former flash memory guy, I'm fine w/ them, although am skeptical about MLC flash. Nonetheless, I nowadays have OneDrive enabled to back up all my data for my Windows laptop. For my PC-BSD laptop, I have a 500GB drive that I can back up to.
Anyway, the way the semiconductor industry works, things happen in waves. Right now, there's a shortage, prices are rising, that will create a glut in the market as manufacturers try to make money of that demand, bringing down prices, the
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My Pr0n collection is > 34 TB (archiving all downloads since ~2006).
It's a great Big(Binary)Dataâ, storage platforms and heterogeneous metadata test environment!
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Video (there are other things besides porn).
High end digital photography (there are other things besides porn).
Both take up metric shitloads of space.
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ever use a ps4? it needs 1tb min to hold all the downloads.
the average photographer needs 1gb a day.
musicians use gigs per day too.
the people using the least data are boring fucks with no hobbies and just browse facebook.
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I guess it depends on what you're doing with it. The full install of Visual Studio Community 2017 was up around 50 GB when I checked all the boxes. I ended up unchecking a few because I didn't want to use the space, and bringing the install somewhere close to 15 GB. Just the base install of Windows can get quite large once you add in things like the paging file and hiberfile.sys, and assuming your laptop has about 8 GB of RAM, you've already used up a significant portion of that 128 GB. If you just use yo
and c/temp that never empties (Score:2)
Not to mention the temp folder that is anything but temp, but perm, and fills up forever.
also every Chrome update, and iTunes updates keep the last few versions and at least two copies somewhere incase malware infects it - taking gigs.
Dont forget to purge it with diskcleanup
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"If you need more, then you should be using a networked drive."
Yea, using a networked drive when playing an open-world game is such a smart fucking idea...
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Your 120GB HDD is currently 100GB due to OS and other pre-installed shit.
To boot, IOPS on a network-attached drive is Marianas Trench low, pretty much any modern game will suffer from performance issues.
Star Citizen alone when it launches will be 100GB. X-Plane 9 clocks in at 70GB install. Most open world games clock in starting at ~40GB now days, so at best you get three to install before you're right out of space with your 120GB drive.
Let me look at my steam library... I don't even have a hundredth of my
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Quite a few. Mobile GPUs have been more than capable for quite some time.