SSD's.... >(

I’m quite irritated at the whole price vs speed vs size isn’t going anywhere. What happened to the whole industry? I get it that there have been a chip shortage that isn’t really going to end very soon, but why aren’t the prices of m.2 and 2.5" going down? The HDD prices went down, and the size even increased. There have been years since we were first introduced to the technology. I have 256 GB USB Memories that are about 3 CM long. I have seen 1TB MICROSD cards, but we still have a standard of about 100 euro per TB and the SSD’s seem to be stuck in a ridiculous speed race instead of upping the size’s.

Why haven’t we seen consumer higher TB SSD’s and lower prices for the m.2 market yet? Is the professionals stuck in ideas of how to create massive storage’s with solid state technology? Kingston which I use predominantly have 2 m.2 sticks which goes to a maximum size of 4 TB. Really?

For years there’s been discussions about how to fix the storage problems and the need for better solutions, where in magnet band tapes have been in the discussion to be used again in an answer to the problem. I know that there are bigger SSD’s for servers, but what happened to the consumer industry? I personally need to build a NAS. The next tech in the line is crystals, but it’s a slow process, since the lasers are expensive and the write speed is slow, but you can store hundreds of terabytes within just a square centimeter. I hope that technology finds light soon.

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I know some people will jump at me, but what happened is capitalism.
Sorry, there is no other way to put it.
New faster tech is coming in, it just gets more expensive. Nothing is getting cheaper. Why should it? People are still buying it. The market dictates it’s fine with spending money so why leave money on the table?

Another huge reason is there is no need for anything.
General public is fine with 512 GB and 1TB SSDs. There is no need for larger ones. I mean I have 3 different drives, total storage 1,25 TB and I have most of it empty.
Also PCIe 3 is plenty fast for the general public.
512GB PCIe3 drives have been around for ages and they are still more than enough for the general public. Why push forward when there is no need? Nothing uses the speed for the average user. Nothing needs the size… Why bother…

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I installed all games that could fit on my disks, that’s about 14TB of games. Gaming consoles still need bigger disks also. The general consumer needs stable disks. I saw 20 TB HDD’s for about 500 EURO, they are loud, they are slow and for me, my 8TB HDD slows down my whole system as it sometimes needs to start up in order for the rest to move on smoothly. I don’t know why, but it acts as a bottlenecks for the rest of the system sometimes.

Consumers want fast computers, responsive hardware, and reliable functionalities.

Blaming it on capitalism isn’t the right way to go either, since it’s greed that made the prices go up, and stay up. Once a technique is learned it takes less effort.

People have set their own trap to be honest, they adhered to the terrorism of scalping and the industry followed, because a few percentage bought up the stock every time they got one. It’s going to bite them in the ass if or when the cryptomarket goes to shit, and people start to sell of their cards, the prices will fall and the demand will be less then what is created, greed always takes the better out of us. The more expensive it gets, the fewer will eventually have money to buy it, and that’s the dilemma of the market. It’s never the market that controls the price, it’s always the greed of the few. In this case with SSD’s, they are arrogant when it comes to the whole situation to what normal humans would ever want to have lots of storage for.

For myself, I don’t have a lot of money. If I want to buy a HDD of 20 TB I will have to save money with discipline for 6-12 months. Lots of others don’t have to do the same.

chip shortage, Flash memory is made from silicon chips, so are their controllers, and the ram cache inside them
hard drives are made from aluminum platters

due to the physical dimensions of m.2 the most you can fit is like 4 large flash chips plus dram and the controller and vrms

SSDs have been going down if price because if you were around when 1TB hard drives were 50$ then you’ll recall a 60GB SSD being about 90$

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Sure, you can do that - but why would the average consumer ever want to?

The average consumer plays three or four games at a time then moves on to a new shiny one. They don’t cycle between 30 different games all the time. And, realistically speaking, while some people undoubtedly will do that… A lot of games still fit on a 2 TB drive, which is what I would call the upper capacity limit for most hobby gamers.

Prices are still slowly going down, two years ago I was hunting for a 2 TB drive for €150, I had to settle for a 1TB for €90. 2TB was €190 or more. Today, those drives cost €150 finally - though 3.0 gen drives, still plenty fast for now. 4.0 drives will get there within the next 6 months or so, so 2 TB for €125 or so at the end of this year? Not unheard of.

4TB has good bang-for-the-buck but starts to get pricey, 8 TB is pretty far out and 16 TB… No, ain’t gonna happen soon. Today you pay about 2x-4x the premium of an HDD for < 4 TB SSDs.

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I would love to see some benchmarks of sata Vs pcie3 Vs pcie 4 ssds for specifically gaming. I am very sure that as far as loading times and asset streaming goes it makes next to no difference from a gaming perspective but i don’t have much actual data to base this on

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It’s really more about latency than throughput. And once the data is loaded into memory, you don’t need to reload it from disk again. If you watch disk IO while gaming, there is a big sequential chunk when launching and comparably little traffic after that. And with read cache in place, restarting the game doesn’t have any disk IO at all. If you think a couple of seconds of loading time for like 2 hours of gaming is a big deal to spend extra 200€ on, that’s totally fine. But keep in mind that most of the loading time isn’t caused by storage deficits.

I keep my desktop in sleep state to keep my memory and cache going. I hardly ever see disk IO for gaming, other than launching new games.

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I bought a 1TB Samsung 860 Evo for AU$479 in Feb 2018.
I bought a 1TB Samsung 870 Evo for $169 last week.

65% cheaper over 4.25 years.

I don’t know what you are talking about. Are you not happy with a 15.3% per annum (average) decrease in price?

PS: A 1TB Samsung 960 Evo M.2 NVMe I bought in Feb 2018 cost $619. Now a 1TB Samsung 980 Evo M.2 NVMe can (also) be had for $169. 73% cheaper over 4.25 years. -17.1% per annum. Even better.

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Some people never can get enough…

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Case in point: GTA Online Modder Says Rockstar Could Fix Loading Times In a Day - IGN

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Yeah. Mostly code optimization. But that’s not a Rockstar problem, but a general problem with most games. I know this because I usually have the game files in main memory already and you can’t beat DRAM latency+throughput.

Game loading time was limited by storage for ages. But ever since SATA SSDs became available,HDDs weren’t also used for swap and HDD loading causing CPU and FPS issues during gameplay, this is no longer the case. You can certainly measure a difference between SATA SSD and main memory, but it’s not what I would call significant. And people eager to push the last percents are likely to have 2x SATA SSD RAID0 or a basic NVMe to pretty much converge towards maximum loading speed.

From my own experience, anyone calling for faster storage on gaming is basically corporate marketing or caused by a hangover from the 90s-2000s where things were very different. It’s really code optimization and loading techniques/behavior that’s standing on the brake as of now.

What I’d like to see is a steam page cache or ARC equivalent once you start e.g. Steam. It fills up your memory and prefetches MFU/MRU game files and is a simple software solution to eliminate most storage-caused loading. Well and of course game companies taking a look at their side of things.

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The price of flash HAS come down a heap.

However you need to compare like for like. Newer devices are far faster and high speed controllers aren’t free. So that might be why you think they’re stagnant.

If you shop for SATA based SSDs they’re really quite cheap now and good enough for games generally.

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To add to this… I have 32 GB of RAM on my gaming rig. Most games I play take up, in total, 10 GB or less on the harddrive. While compression is a thing, all of the asset files can easily be loaded into RAM these days - not just the game itself. Of course, only one at a time.

Heck, there is even a case to be made for using the old-school 16 bit palette / tilemap compression techniques here, too. While the full 24 bit color space is awesome to play around in, a lot of that image space can be compressed. Especially when it comes to, say, menus / HUD items.

There are a few 8TB M.2 sticks out there, like the Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB NVMe. However, they are absurdly expensive and gimped in performance. If you have a desktop you want to kit out (not a laptop) you are not going to be happy until you consider the U.2 form factor.

Pick a drive you like from the previous generations, and set up an alert on ebay. Eventually a screaming deal will pop up from a reputable seller (not those new 0 feedback accounts from china). Take the following for example:

Intel SSD D7-P5510 Series 2.5" 7.68TB SSDPF2KX076TZ - MF1610 | eBay~ And they’re gone, that didn’t last long.
Intel SSD D7-P5510 Series 2.5" U.2

  • 7.68TB for $760. That’s ~$100 per TB, on par or better than quality M.2 NVMe drives.
  • It’s intel’s QLC in pTLC mode
  • Has GB’s of dram, though I’m not clear on how much. Seems like between 4-8GB. How often would you even be able to fill the low end of that? This thing is basically a modern flash backed DRAM drive for a normal consumer.
  • 17.5 Petabytes of endurance. Even if you buy a used one, you’ll never ever be able to wear it out.
  • Real power loss protection with capacitors
  • Chad steady state enterprise performance, vs virgin consumer burst writes.
  • Far more consistent latency range, and big dick IOPS
  • PCIe 4, and all of the above only needs 4 lanes.
  • Fully implemented Namespaces
  • It uses 25 watts max, or 18 watts on average while active. This is why M.2 sticks can’t even approach what U.2 drives can do. So consider putting a fan on it, not that any of us would ever be able to use it’s performance capacity even a fraction of the time. Sits at 8 watts at idle. Power and heat are literally the only downsides here.
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In some of my own personal tests even budget cacheless SSDs tend to have a sustained 400-550 MB/s read speed(write speeds dip to ~400-450 MB/s) which is good enough for most users, it was more about curiosity of performance impact in actual Steam games.
What I do think is impacting SSDs is the chip shortage, it has made it harder for higher density chips to be sourced and/or made along with controller chips too. Also some SSD makers are still swapping parts so you never quite know who will change a part.

They had competition in the form od SSDs, theybhad to get cheaper and or bigger just to stay relevant.

SSDs do t have that, theh are the top of the chain for consumers so have no reason to get cheaper. The bigger or lack of is a consequence the price they set. They know we wont pay what they want for the bigger sizes because theh set a price for the smaller sizes that cant scale. And theh wond drop the price as everone stands to make a ton off it.

It will happen, when there is competition.

Ssd has definitely become cheaper. I remember not so long ago a 4t enterprise SSD was similar cost to my car.

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Oh yeah it has massively so, just they are still quite expensive in general. But that is what it is. PCs at the moment… Its all expensive.

Yes and no. Minimum Viable gaming rig today would be something like this:

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/XK7zPX

PCPartPicker Part List

Type Item Price
CPU Intel Core i5-12400F 6c12t $169.95
Motherboard MSI PRO B660M-A WIFI DDR4 $139.99
Memory Silicon Power 2x8 GB DDR4-3200 CL16 $49.97
Storage Crucial P2 1 TB NVMe SSD $95.99
Video Card PowerColor Radeon RX 6500 XT Fighter $199.99
Total $655.89

But, otoh, if you add $350 you get a much better system that destroys 1080p:

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/ry4yW4

Type Item Price
CPU AMD Ryzen 7 5700X 8c16t $279.99
CPU Cooler ARCTIC Freezer 7 X CO $25.52
Motherboard MSI B550M PRO-VDH WIFI $119.99
Memory G.Skill Aegis 2x16GB DDR4-3200 CL16 $99.99
Storage Crucial P2 2 TB NVMe SSD $159.99
Video Card Sapphire Radeon RX 6600 PULSE $329.99
Total $1015.47

Are the olden days where you could build a serious gaming rig for $500 over? Yeah, pretty much. OTOH, you get so much more if you add $300 to your computer right now. So yes, while low end price bar has moved up and you now need $700+ for a computer, the step to $1000 from $700 almost doubles your performance in almost every aspect. So, while the low end is now garbage, the mid-end is highly interesting instead.

Then there is also the AM5 platform which promises to stick to it’s guns for at least 4 generations, means you can spend between $800-$1200 for a great rig and then stick to the same motherboard, RAM and storage for the next five years, and upgrade to the last CPU on the line. Just like the X370 crowd can do right now on AM4. That is $1500 in total for about six to eight years of comfortable gaming. Not bad.

So there are lights in the darkness, too, and Zen 4 promises really great advances with their APUs. Let’s wait for reviews first though!

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It looks like everything will be an APU for Zen 4. This promises to be interesting for sure.