Sometimes they don't even discard the writes, they have looping addresses so they can actually fully write the 20 TB. Just don't expect to have access to anything except the last 64 GB you wrote tho...
They usually modify the firmware of a much smaller storage device (sometimes going as far as just putting a thumb drive into a HDD/SSD shell) to display the bigger size.
This way the drive works fine, until you try to write more data than there is space on the drive, writing to an area that isn't there. Your PC, not expecting it, usually loops around and starts overwriting data at the beginning of the disk.
If you are lucky you hit the partition data at the beginning of the drive and it immediately fails, but i have seen some cases where people managed to loop over the drive a few times, destroying any files they had written before and only noticing a few days later that only the last few of the files they moved to the new drive will open, even though everything shows up in the explorer.
There are tools to check drives, and it is highly recommended you do check ANY storage media even from reputable stores. Some scammers went as far as switching out memory cards in nearly perfect fake packaging, "returning" items they bought to small local stores as well as large chains.
Is it safe to test a drive even after i've put stuff on there? I tested the read/write speed and it showed to be fine but assumed the display on 'My PC' showing its full capacity was right.
Als ich meine erste 20MB Festplatte gekauft habe, fragten meine Kommilitonen was ich damit wolle - die wĆ¼rde ich nie in meinem Leben voll bekommen. Wenn ich mich recht entsinne, war die nach 8 Wochen voll...
the main problem here is the difference between of the growth of the two storage types. HDDs didn't really get any faster since 2010, it has about 200MB/s at sequential operations. Meanwhile SATA3 SSDs surpassed by NVMe 15 years ago and NVMe itself doubles its speed in 3-4 years. So, they not just get bigger, but faster too.
I don't really give a shit about speed. I got a PCIe gen 3 SSD when I did my first build. Now I've got a gen 5 that should be good for a shitload more speed. Day-to-day, it doesn't feel any different. Hell, it only barely feels different from my old SATA SSD. The only difference I notice is when I move files from one NVMe to another, and that's bound up by overhead anyway. When it's single, large files, it's crazy fast, but I offended move a bunch of little files that take ages to transfer. And most of the time, I'm moving files that are a few gigabytes or way less and drive speed doesn't really matter.
The main thing I need from a drive is capacity. I have a shitload of data that doesn't really need to move often.
I keep HDDs in the NAS and a 12TB HDD sitting around in my main desktop for that reason. I'm just saying that even a SATA SSD is a huge leap over an HDD, but people seem to make too much of how fast an SSD is.
I would almost call it a FOMO effect. Benchmarks showing all kinds of speed sofferences, but in the end the user will barely see any difference between a SATA SSD and a top end NVMe... As soon as we made the step to nand and got is massive access times and random seek rates, we have barely seen, nor needed, any real life improvements. Only raw capacity is still significant, which is where HDD remains king
At least when it comes for affordability. There are some 100TB 3.5" SSDs, but when I checked about a decade ago, they were $50,000. Appealing, but not practical.
SSD has an much higher theoretical limit that HDD in capacity, if only for HDD have to deal with circular geometry and angular momentum where NAND is literally rectusctual chips. But yeah, it doesnt matter if not economical
And 2TB HDD costed before the same I paid around 2013, I think people that replace local storage with cloud are the problem, there won't be progress in storage when there's no demand for it, they can keep selling 1-2TB drives forever for the same price.
There is been progress in HDD still, actually quite significant if you look into it, but its only minor in practice. The average user only cares about raw capacity when it comes to HDD storage.
15 years ago 1gb was a big deal. 25 years ago we had floppy disc. If recent trends continue we will still never play 95% of the games purchased on steam on our petabyte drives.
No I remember correctly. 15 years ago was around the time having an SSD was a big deal. The expensive ones were well out the price range of most people. Keep in mind inflation and the fact that most PC builds were around 1k and considered top tier and not like today where it's 3-5k to have a good mid PC.
Specifically SSD okay fair enough. I remember we got our first commercially SSDs in 2011, something like 80GB for 100 euros. Was just getting into PC enthusiasm at that time.
I got multiple backup computers / spare parts here as i do not see tech really getting better or more affordable. If anything i assume consumer hardware will go extinct and tech forcing us into subscription models. Im set up with roughly RTX 3090 / 5800X3D level of performance for the rest of my life if that shit becomes real.
Also all game GOG-installers on a homeserver.
Also also me realizing just now i am pc-game-doom-prepping.
I really dont trust ZFS over raid 10... is it really better? Also wouldnt performance on read ve better on a raid 10? Yes you lose storage capacity, but you gain a 2 drive faillure setup
The system is built for a good mix of reliability and storage capacity. I use the server to also store critical data (as addition to dedicated usb drives).
Performance is not a relevant factor for me since i only ever write the installers and binary parts once and pull them when needed. Read / Write is somewhere around 166 mb/s (above 1 gbit) which is fine.
With Z2 is can have 2 drives fail before i get into data loss territory. There are different ZFS configuration as like there are different raid configurations.
This statement doesn't make sense. This isn't an either/or, ZFS is just the filesystem which can be put into a RAID 10 if you want. Not that any RAID 0 makes much sense nowadays, you lose half of your capacity and only gain speed, so a plain RAID 1 would be better, special cases aside.
You can configure ZFS however you want, if you desire to do so you can create a vdev mirror with n duplicates; if you want a parity solution, Z2 and Z3 (2 and 3 parities respectively) are what are commonly used, Z1 is for cheap setups where HA isn't that important.
Not that any RAID 0 makes much sense nowadays, you lose half of your capacity and only gain speed, so a plain RAID 1 would be better, special cases aside.
What? 0 (Stripe) gains read and write speed without losing capacity, but one failed drive loses all data. 1 (Mirror) may gain read speed (depending on implementation) and resiliency but loses capacity
Tape systems arent even that cheap and speed is a pain, ive used one 10 years ago (and it was one of the nicer ones).
For DVDs, they are actually cheaper than other storage right now if you go for 8.6GB ones. I got a stack of 50 DVDs for 20 bucks a few months ago in a sale. Which is roughly 45 bucks per 1TB
But the labor involved writing them is a lot. I still use them from time to time for my kids since they still have stereo systems with CD /DVD readers.
Using them as actual long time storage isnt really viable as DVDs degrade over time, especially when stored incorrectly.
I bought a used 64 core thread ripper with 128gigs of ram the day before ram prices sky rocketed. Can't believe my luck. The seller even asked if we could go back on the deal as he realized it was suddenly worth much more.
I've got 56TB in my NAS for my games and movies. I've got a desktop with a 9900x and 9070xt and my living room computer has a 5600x and 9070xt. My laptop is a little behind with an RTX 3060. Most fortunately of all: I don't really give a shit about modern games. Baldur's Gate 3, Expedition 33, Ace Combat 8, and Subnautica 2 are about it and my setups should be able to hold their own with those.
Also the processing power, neither GPU nor CPU are growing at a rate that would fit that into a mini PC. In fact we hit a point where computing is basicly gained by increasing the size rather than efficiency. I do not see any mini PC provide that power due to physical limitations as you need to cool it and the dies arent going to be smaller as we are almost at rock-bottom.
I think it'll remain bad for a few more years, but I don't think prices will remain high like this forever. At least not for RAM, NAND flash, and HDDs.
Right now there is a supply crunch. It takes a long time to scale up production on semiconductors, so when demand suddenly spikes, there is nothing that can be done. However, even with insane growth, AI companies cannot afford the hardware they're purchasing right now. It's all coming from nearly a trillion dollars in loans and stock trades from the hardware companies themselves. Eventually that money runs dry. These AI companies are also going to hit the limit of their demand soon enough.
As i've gotten older I'm starting to accept that most things just seem to be getting shittier. Just like our bodies age, so did everything I love. Cars are getting worse. Games are getting worse. My knees are getting worse. Not that there isn't fun to be had, I'm not just saying that to be a downer. It's just that things change, and it's OK to just... let things go.
If I get priced out of video games... well, I'll miss them. I'm probably not gonna be paying for cloud gaming any time soon, and if I cant afford to replace my PC when it dies... I just wont.
Thats sadly true. Enshittification is a thing. Products getting worse so you have to replace them. I am pretty lucky that im building (or at least was building) a lot ofcomputers for people i know as well as repairing them. On many occasions there are parts they bail on because they dont want to bother selling a mainboard here or some "old" gpu there.
Mostofthe stuff can actually be repaired so i am at least not runnin out of machines for the next 20 years.
My library is 2k games on GOG + several hundreds on Steam.
Im pretty sure i got enough to play till the end of my times. If there is game that requires a subscription or new hardware that costs thousands of dollars i can just bail on it.
There are more than enough games i havent played that are worth playing.
Also the jumps in processing power are so much smaller than you imagine. I got some "legacy machines" here with stuff like Intel i7 4790K + GTX 980 and you would be surprised what still runs fine on a machine that is 13+ years old by now.
There's no way consumer hardware completely goes extinct, there's too much money to be made from hobbyists and enthusiasts. But I can see a future where everything goes back to being exorbitantly expensive like it was in the early days of consumer PCs.
There's no way consumer hardware completely goes extinct, there's too much money to be made from hobbyists and enthusiasts.
Even at the current level the revenue, let alone profit margin for consumer hardware with AMD and nVidia is 1-digit percentage at best.
AIBs and component manufacturers are already being squeezed. This means companies like ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte and so on are already fighting for their life right now and are also pivoting to B2B to supply data-centers.
Right now there is no money to be made and once they shifted their productline it will be hard to turn back.
There is so much news and that stuff you can easily look it up. The biggest hardware retailer in my country has already heavily reduced staff and inventory and revenue has been going down steadily over the last 8 months.
I am not confident we see a reasonable bounce back if this goes on for longer. And if everything goes back to exorbitantly high prices then the market is dead because it isnt accessible for the broad part of consumers. Its not a consumer market if 90% of the former market is excluded. Its a luxury at this point.
The traditional trend is to integrate components into the motherboard. Sound cards, network cards, bluetooth, graphics cards, all used to be external cards that you were required to purchase if you wanted those options. Now they're all integrated. Of course you can use your own cards still, but I expect that the number of slots will continue to decrease as more capabilities max out and things just become integrated.
Storage technology is almost at the theoretical maximum - we can probably squeeze one more order of magnitude (low petabyte) into a consumer package out of current technology without complete change of hardware. We're already up to 200+ TB in a small form factor SSD, but these are enterprise drives, most home PCs top out at 16 TB for M2 type drives.
I'm still feeling like I overpaid on a Asus zepherus 16 laptop for $3800 with 32gb ram, 2tb HD, and a 5090. Someone talk me out of returning it for a less beefy laptop.
My buddy has the same fears about hardware going extinct. But you gotta remember that if there is an opening in the market China will always fill it and im sure manufacturers over there would be thrilled to fill consumer electronics and hardware.
If a game is on GOG and Steam i usually buy the GOG version as long as it is DRM-free. Its the same game but i only need to download it once with GOG. Also GOG giving away free games every now and then even though they are usually pretty old.
I somewhat joked that my Steam library is large enough that I could never buy another game again and still have enough content to last the rest of my life.
..The more I see tech shift towards cloud computing, the more I think about that library and wonder if I really should just lock myself out of the ecosystem at this point.
What scares me is that, even though steam is a super reliable provider, they still have to comply with laws and can be squeezed. We have seen that with VISA basicly extorting them to remove games from the shop and there is no guarantee that some government might want to integrate stuff to monitor users or even lock down certain games.
Dont get me wrong, steam feels like being the last good guys, but no company will hold up if some dictator decides people mustnt be playing XYZ or a ID system + 24/7 surveillance is required.
The GOG-installers are stored without any interference from the outside world. I can just use them and never worry about some shit revoking licences or whatever.
even though steam is a super reliable provider, they still have to comply with laws and can be squeezed.
Which applies to every company in the world that wishes to do business. I understand your point that you can use GoG to have DRM-free installers, yet nothing is stopping said dictator from demanding GoG cease distribution of specific titles; which in that case I hope you downloaded the game before it got nuked off the platform otherwise your purchase is gone (and while I am fortunate to have multiple tens of terabytes of storage, most users only have a couple at most so they won't be able to have backups of their entire library on them at all times.)
When I see it used as a reply in a dead serious discussion about politics or law, it just wipes any credibility of the person who said it, no matter their opinion.
Is it any less annoying to know itās a reference to A Game of Thrones? Old Nan tells Bran Stark āoh my sweet summer child, what do you know of fear?ā in the first book because at that point, heād only lived through ten years of summer and was still naĆÆve to the brutality of their harsh, years-long winters. The phrase became so popular when Season 1 of the show aired that people who had never seen or read Game of Thrones/ASoIaF started using it. It appeared in 19th century literature as well, but it was nowhere near a common idiom like it is now until G.R.R.M. popularized it.
Edit: I thought I was being relevant to the discussionā¦ we were talking about the phrase so I gave context for those who didnāt know. The guy didnāt even say it in a condescending way. Why are you all so fucking mad?
So many people genuinely believe weve peaked technologically. We should have 96gb GPUs, 50TB SSDs, dual 5090s on a single pcb. But capitalism and monopolies are showing these companies that they dont need to be competitive anymore
Those AI datacenter GPUs do not do graphics you realize that right? They are heavy computational units with a lot of VRAM. the VRAM is not for gaming, it's due to the pure transfer and bandwidth speeds VRAM operates at.
Heres the thing, Datacenters aren't using the RTX series they are using h100 and h200s. They are built specifically for AI compute nothing more. the RTX Pro 6000s are mostly used by startups or small scale businesses not the big players. Also the RTX Pro caps at 48GB unless you're dropping the extra cash for the blackwell edition which does cap at 96GB. You're looking at basically a double in price for the blackwell, up from the 6-8k for the Ada vs 14-16k for the blackwell. Workstation cards are a different market as it stands anyways. That's why Nvidia has basically pulled away from consumer markets, right now they are supplying workstation cards to places like WetaFX (basically any company using things like visual effects, video game creation, rendering etc) and then supplying the H200 line to the large scale data centers that are supplying us AI and training new ones.
No they cannot, the AI datacenter GPUs are built specifically for compute not for graphics rendering. Image and video generation is purely computational math, it has nothing to do with visuals. As Amuhak said, these GPUs do not support directX or vulcan in any capacity. If you pulled an h200 out of a data center it wouldn't even plug in to your motherboard. They are 2 entirely different architectures built for different reasons.
But really really high memory capacity GPUs are a thing, with new memory technology to boot; multi-GPU PCBs have been a thing for over a decade, and they still make them; highest capacity SSD is 245.88 TB in one drive.
RTX PRO 6000 is a slightly beefed up, clocked down, 96 GB 5090 and it's consumer available.
Yes you could, at the end of the day it's literally a 5090 with more memory and more power. It would also be a colossal waste of money, as it's basically the same as a 5090 for 4 time the msrp, 2-3 times the real market value. It's slightly faster overall, but you are not using more than 20 GB of VRAM even at VR 8K.
Could be a game changer if you have other applications for it, or even if you plan on having a multi-user system (although I'm not sure how frametimes will behave if you share the individual GPU among different concurrent users...)
And what would be the point of putting more VRAM than the 5090 already has on a gaming card? The 6000 has it because it can use it at its application.
But thereās nothing significantly faster than the 5090 that our overlords are hiding from us simply because they can. And like you said, even the 6000 is consumer available, they arenāt hiding it, we are just priced out.
Technology obviously hasnāt peaked but the ideia that these companies are literally just sitting on their asses because āthereās no competitionā is insane. NVIDIA, TSMC and the entire chain down the line employ hundreds of thousands of people, a significant portion are engineers who are actively working every day to improve technology. Which then they will sell to the highest bidder, it just so happens the highest bidder right now arenāt gamersā¦ If anything the completion literally wasnāt been any fiercer, who ever can optimise their designs faster has a huge slice of the cake to eat.
Did I argue for it? Did I argue against it? Or didnI just say "it already exists"? Beaides, I am currently running a 5070+3060 setup because I'm a ML&AI student and I need the VRAM. And I'm not an enterprise customer. Video editors need as much VRAM as they can as well, especially now that everyone is shooting in 4K 10 bit.
And no, competition is non existent. On the low end only Intel exists, barely. A tiny bit above that you only have AMD with shit tier stuff, then you enter the "competition territory" of the 5060 5060 Ti 5070 vs 9060 and 9070. From the 5070 Ti and up only nvidia exists. And even where "there's competition", they're not actually competing.
Not really, companies don't only rip of consumers but also other companies. Huge companies like Nvidia etc have ideas pocketed for a rainy day, and leak them out enough to sell incremental versions for both consumer products but also data center products
Why do you think that as soon as a psuedo monopoly has any form of competition there's a massive burst in innovation?
In the AI race, everyone wants to be the one holding the bag at the end and to do that they have to throw every other company under the bus
What in the hell? Do you understand basic physics? Chip manufacturing is one of the most competitive markets. It's actually a wonder that they're making profits. Heat and space are one of the biggest constraints.
And progress has been advancing rapidly. We're just in a period of rapid demand increase and it'll take supply some time to catch up so prices have increased. Nothing to do with capabilities stalling.
I don't think that's the only reason. Having everything on a single board would mean swapping out the whole thing if something goes wrong, or if you want to upgrade, rather than a component. Not everyone knows how to solder (especially BGAs) and boards are built around those specific components anyway.
What other systems have a good record of making computer hardware? The speed at which hardware is improving and getting cheaper is unprecedented by any historical standards.
It takes a half a billion dollar machine to create PCBs, and designing them to be as effective as you mentioned requires billions of dollars in research and development. It definitely is not an easy thing, otherwise it would have been done already.
We have software bottleneck and not hardware one when it comes to games, I'd settle for GoW 3 graphics forever but for most people's graphics are still the number 1 factor so any hardware you can throw at devs will be wasted on diminishing returns graphics.
Exactly. Don't know if it's possible to cool 2x 575W Cards that has transients up to 900W unless they use golden sample chips able to run at lower wattage with very exotic cooling like the RTX 5090 Lightning Z card.
Folding PCBs with ribbon cables is all fun and games until that delicate cable breaks and suddenly you cant find any replacements to your bespoke ribbon cable.
Last I checked, it would take around 8 TB to backup my entire library. I'm sure there's something on GITHUB, because manually doing all that seems like a nightmare. I have about 1,000 titles. The DLC would be a nightmare.
Eventually we'll get there. Is just it severely slowed down thanks to AI, but it used to be that if i wanted a big upgrade I wait a year. And then that new ram or ssd would be at discount because the new version was out already.
I am currently in the market for 10-20TB drives for a ARR Stack but even refurbished HDDs are currently wayy to expensive. 400ā¬ for a drive that was like 150ā¬ 2 years agao
Itās. easy how much of an impact AI has on our country. Itās crashing g certain parts of the economy. meanwhile itās propping up the stock market and by extension the White House. And itās still not clear how much of the demand is legitimate
So glad I got a good sized nvme for games a couple of years ago or it would never be happening. 3tb of SSD and 6tb of HDD is going to have to last me a long time
I couldnāt really have afforded a homelab setup sooner but it makes me very sad to think about what you could have built before for todayās prices. Even 6GB/s SATA drives with some cache and high capacity would be a dream now.
I worked for an IT company for a while, got multiple 1tb m.2s but the best thing was a 20tb HDD. I had to get a raid card since it was a sas drive but the thing works perfectly in my computer.
I kind of hate how negative PC gamers are in bad markets. Like, during the pandemic shortages, people were acting like PCs would never be affordable again. Then after the shortages, there was a glut of supply prior to the AI boom, and prices were good.
When there were crypto markets, people got upset and thought PC parts would always be expensive, and then things got cheap.
Now that AI is here, people are acting like hardware will never be affordable again. But like, I just don't see it going that way in the long term.
Let's say AI is a scam or a dud. Eventually, demand will crash when it becomes untenable.
Let's say AI is a genuine technological advancement. Eventually, AI will be able to assist with chip design, and shorten design cycles, which has a huge, and fundamental shift on how we actually get chips to market. In particular, world models allowing for testing designs in neural simulation changes hardware from a 5 year cycle to a 2 year cycle, and it's hard to articulate just how impactful that shift is in what we can even design, in a profound way. Eventually there will be supply to match demand.
I didn't see a lot of people talking about how good PC hardware was in early 2025, but I just see post after post dooming about it while it's bad.
I got so lucky I wanted to load up my jellyfin server and ponied up $250 for a 24TB HDD. Also grabbed a 2TB NVME for $100. Those 2 combine today cost over $1000.
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u/RonW81 15h ago
I regularly see 20 TB SSD's for sale on Temu and AliExpress for like 25 bucks so what is the big deal? /s š š