HDD prices

[General Kenobi]

I bit the bullet and paid a bit of extra for a WD Caviar Black 1TB for my new rig, but at least it was just one drive. I don't envy people who need to buy more than one right now.

 

[exdeath]

Ah, I get it now. You only needed large hdd's in the past b/c you are a thief. Now that you've given up your law-breaking ways and decided to become an honest citizen, anybody else who needs a large hdd must therefore also steal things from other people. That makes sense.

Ah yeah, like Walking Dead HD DVR rips I had downloaded and no longer need because the official BRD is out now

Most people who do things like that don't know where the del button is and freak out about their "precious data" being safe for the next 15 years every time they have to copy it to a new HDD when the old one starts failing. Buying the Blu Ray or not, other people would likely just leave their DVR copies on ther 4 bajillion terrabyte HDD just because they can "afford to waste space", and then use the excuse they have too much data and can't get an SSD. I bought the Blu Ray the day it came out, thats like 30 gigs I don't have be mindful of ever again.

I never needed large HDDs. I've gotten by just fine with 18 GB 15k RPM drives in my desktop when everyone else was running out of room with 100+ GB. And now like then it's painful watching others suffer, more painful when I have to use their slow piece of garbage just because they can't delete or uninstall something every once in a while and "need" more space than an SSD.

Seriously though my sterile barren anti-hoarding tendencies are probably just as bad a psychological disorder as actual hoarding. :awe: I can't stand too much "clutter" or "stuff", digital or otherwise. But at least it makes me a dead ringer for a SSD power user, can't complain in the slightest.

 

[bryanW1995]

I bit the bullet and paid a bit of extra for a WD Caviar Black 1TB for my new rig, but at least it was just one drive. I don't envy people who need to buy more than one right now.

You can still find deals out there on external usb 3.0 drives at least. On BF I got a 3tb free agent go-flex for $100 + tax at Best Buy of all places. And regular price was only $160 on it. Haven't seen anything like that on internal hdd's, unfortunately.

 

[randomrogue]

I did the opposite. I noticed that my dvd's and cd's were starting to get old and some weren't reading very well. Ripping them to my HD and throwing away the media was pretty nice.

However it's really digital pictures that take up my space. When you shoot in RAW you need a ton of space. If you edit something in photoshop the psd file can be enormous. I can't even imagine how much space people need who shoot digital video.

 

[Sephire]

$89.99 3TB Hitachi drives from Fry's before the flood

 

[BFG10K]

Have you ever actually stored or retrieved 2 TB of data to/from a 2 TB drive? It still takes over 5 hours at the maximum mechanical speed for SEQUENTIAL... god help you if they are lots of little files like source code, etc.

When are you retrieving 2 TB at a time? The only time I can think of is a backup/restore, and you don’t do that every day.

Meanwhile I can backup/restore my entire 960 GB of SSD in about 8 minutes; if it was 2 TB it would STILL be only 8 minutes to move 1920 GB of data. I could fill and erase my SSD over 40 times in the time it takes the HDD to complete one transfer.

That’s great, except a 2 TB SSD setup would cost over $3000 while a 2 TB HDD costs ~$200, even with “outrageous” flood prices.

SSDs don’t suddenly make disk transfers instantaneous without waiting. Here are a bunch of SSDs still making the user twiddle their thumbs:

Modern mechanical HDDs are actually competitive with slower/older SSDs; those early adopters basically got glorified thumb drives at horrific prices:

Meanwhile hard drives, you're stuck at .1 GB/sec regardless if you have a 1 GB HDD or a 10 TB HDD;

Eh? I assume you’re talking about small files?

in other words HDD get SLOWER with respect to total storage capacity as they get larger. As data size increases and HDD capacity increases, it just takes longer and longer to manipulate that data at "dial up" speeds. You're now moving 2,000,000 MB at the same speed you used to only have to move 100 MB with.

It’s true that mechanical performance isn’t ramping as fast as its storage density, but it's still significantly increasing:

 

[BFG10K]

New system builders now dont have a price benifit on going magnetic and will allow them to try out SSD's for the first time as boot drives.

They still very much have a price benefit given HDDs cost ten less per GB than SSDs and also offer capacities unreachable by them.

And who is going to need the uber fast high capacity magnetic when your going on storage.
Has anyone had any latency issues streaming anything off a 5900rpm drive over a 7200rpm drive?
-quick answer... no... so no one will even bother to look at a 7200rpm anymore because if one needed speed, they would be looking at SSD's.

I never saw the logic in getting an expensive thumb-drive sized SSD and pairing it with a slow green HDD.

On the one hand we have people so worried about performance that they don’t worry about the cost of the SSD and treat it like a glass princess, doing things like moving the swap file off it, fearing that it might be asked to do real work like a mechanical HDD.

Then on the other hand, performance goes out the window and suddenly cost becomes enough of an issue to get a slow green drive because it’s for “storage”, whatever “storage” means. Hint: everything is stored.

Even if you somehow completely avoid launching any programs from the HDD, you still have to read & write data to it, and green drives are significantly slower than 7200 RPM drives in that respect.

 

[Gillbot]

Spend $8 on a BRD once in a while and you wouldn't need to pirate them and have a need for a billion TB of space. Everyone I've ever met that needed that much space was because they had libraries of ripped movies.

I deleted all my ripped and pirated stuff and now my entire data set fits in 100GB, allowing me to keep even my life's data archive on a SSD.

Seriously a 2 TB drive is like 50 2hr HD 1080 movies, I don't buy any other reason to need that kind of capacity outside of a data center.

But then again I've prioritized speed over capacity since day one, and don't hoard anything I can re-download or re-rip.

Don't mean to be an ass and tell other people what they need, but a I'm seriously depressed at our crappy 1950s hamstrung technology as a species. Demand for higher capacity dino drives is partly responsible for making SSD niche and too slow to go mainstream and IS in fact a lot of careless hoarding. I want to see them adopted faster (since I have to work on them all day and want to hang myself waiting 5 minutes for computer management to open, which costs me productivity and money) and people "needing 100 TB" is preventing that even when cost is no object. Developers too aren't helping with their bloated Java email clients that take up gigs of space and make everybody dependant on higher capacity dino drives to do the same thing we did when 2GB HDDs were new.

I won't be happy until the memory gap is destroyed with a vengeance and we can finally move on to the next revolutionary era of computing not limited to 19th century data rates. Seriously I can THROW an HDD across the street and transfer 2TB in half a second, why is the average computer, which can do 10 billion ops per second or more, still hamstrung by 1 MB/sec random access still in the 21s century? Sickening. Like 20,000 songs on an iPod on random shuffle....from a cassette tape... frustrating.

Ah, I get it now. You only needed large hdd's in the past b/c you are a thief. Now that you've given up your law-breaking ways and decided to become an honest citizen, anybody else who needs a large hdd must therefore also steal things from other people. That makes sense.

I have lots of 1080 footage, all legit. Two kids and many birthday parties, etc can fill up a 2TB fast. Not to mention the DSLR shots all in RAW. I keep two 2tb spinners duplicated in different locations in case of a failure on one. Is it fool proof? No, but it sure as hell is much cheaper than SSDs.

 

[exdeath]

It's morning, have to apologize for going off like an ass. But really I'm seriously depressed that with all our technology evolution over the past 50 years we still use data storage on par with punch cards and cassette tapes and it's really holding back our tech


In the examples above we see a jump from 40 MB sec to 80 MB sec... wow. In the same time frame the size of the data set has gone from 1 GB to 100 GB to 1000 GB nearly overnight. Double the data rate and 10x the data = 5 times slower despite technological progression... In the same amount of time main memory bus has gone from 6 GB sec to over 30 GB sec... Everybody is worried about Moores Law and CPU speeds and how to make chips smaller, but are completely oblivious to falling off the cliff known as the memory gap and hitting rock bottom at Mach 10 and coming to a dead stop.

It's like doubling pennies vs doubling $10,000 bills. In the end, it's still only two pennies.

Working with computers all day and dealing with 100s of GB of data, for me, the data storage device is the only thing I'm ever truly waiting on, the only reason for the OS to display an hourglass or progress bar, and it costs some serious productivity time.

I want one of those storage volumes you see on sci fi movies that transfer 100 EB of data in like 3 button clicks or like the CSI shows that produce search results instantly. I'd seriously get 20x the work done, and make more money while having more free time. 15 minutes to uninstall/reinstall something, 4 hours to backup 50 GB of small files, rebooting a server, etc, it all adds up to alot of time wasted waiting on primative data storage units that simply need to GO.

 

[C1]

What you say is true. Im also a big data user too (videos) plus used to do lots of large complex documents including databases of CAD (ship engineering drawings).

In a way storage seems to be like shipboard computers. No matter how fast they got, people would ask them to do more.

In the case of storage, there are other facets to keep in mind. These include:
- Reliability (requires error checking)
- Useability/findability

Once information base becomes massive, the issue of even being able to find/locate stuff (eg, a particular old photo) can become an issue.

There is also this tendency (at least at the personal level) to keep and maintain stuff just for the sake of keeping it. For example, I have all kinds of archive crap (about Mary Kay Letourneau - remember her - to Monica Lewinski to the famous Dr Laura Schlessinger scandal involving Bill Balance). Stuff no one will probably ever request to look at at least not on my machine. The problem at a certain point is that the stuff you never use can get in the way of the stuff you currently frequently use. For example, using huge drives to keep everything on, 95% which is archive stuff probably never again to be accessed. This is a case that potentially jeopardizes reliability and possibly findability, but certainly impacts time if backup is involved.

My guess is that as storage becomes faster, then people will take up the slack by requiring to store more anyways (eg, HD movies which are now exploring 4K and even 8K resolution as standard).
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Note: A common storage estimate for the Library of Congress is 20TB.

PS: Frys Electronics today has a 250GB WD Scorpio Blue on sale for $69.