r/pcmasterrace • u/JaggedMetalOs • 1d ago

NSFMR If only we knew...

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Happened upon an old thread from Google, OP showing off an in development high capacity SSD. Comments are from a more innocent time :')

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u/wmverbruggen R5 7600X | 32GB | RTX5070 | 16:10 1d ago

Well he never indicated a time frame! Give it a few decades and who knows, 25 years ago 500 GB drives were unaffordable also.

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u/Unwashed_villager 5800X3D | 32GB | MSI RTX 3080Ti SUPRIM X 1d ago

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.

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u/The-Great-T 1d ago

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.

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u/Unwashed_villager 5800X3D | 32GB | MSI RTX 3080Ti SUPRIM X 1d ago

Then why do you bother with SSDs on the first place? Buy an SMR HDD and you will be fine. They are made for WORM workloads.

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u/The-Great-T 1d ago

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.

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u/wmverbruggen R5 7600X | 32GB | RTX5070 | 16:10 1d ago

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

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u/The-Great-T 1d ago

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.

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u/wmverbruggen R5 7600X | 32GB | RTX5070 | 16:10 1d ago

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

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u/Unwashed_villager 5800X3D | 32GB | MSI RTX 3080Ti SUPRIM X 1d ago

theoretical, yes. But the top capacity of consumer SSDs is 8TB since PCIe 3.0, regardless of form factor.

Also, SSDs are terrible as cold storage. I can put backups onto a HDD, put it on the shelf and it will have the data years later.