

1TB SSD - helwr
http://www.slashgear.com/ocz-colossus-1tb-ssd-gets-official-1863745/

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jrockway
I am not sure if there is a consumer market for SSDs this big. If you have a
high-performance online transaction processing app, then this could be great.
But if you just have a terabyte of porn, you are wasting your money. Disks
(and even tape) handle this workload just fine.

For a boot drive, 30G ought to be enough. I only use 7G on my desktop and
about 4G on my laptop:

    
    
        Filesystem             Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
        /dev/mapper/ssd-root    28G  6.9G   19G  27% /
        /dev/mapper/md0_crypt  917G  331G  587G  37% /home
    

No reason to pay $3000 for a 1T SSD when a 30G SSD + 1T hard drive will give
you the exact same performance for 1/10th the cost. (I have 3 drives in
md0_crypt, and so it ends up being as fast as an SSD too. The bottleneck on
both disks is the crypto; apparently i7s don't have hardware-accelerated AES,
but the i5s do. Grumble.)

~~~
barrkel
It's awkward to fit Windows 7 Ultimate in 30G, never mind applications. Swap
file and hibernation file, which will both be present by default, added up to
over half that in my case immediately post-install (12G memory).

I'm using an Intel 80G SSD in my desktop as the boot drive, on Windows 7.
Rather annoying is the fact that directories like Program Files, ProgramData
and some others cannot be moved to another drive and replaced with junctions
(the moral equivalent of a mount point), because some MS application
installation features rely on hard links for some kind of checkpointing, and
these cross-device links fail silently.

~~~
electromagnetic
My C is devoid of Program Files and all my temporary files and such are also
on my second drive. What seriously irks me is that some applications
(especially games) install files to 'My Documents', I've admittedly not looked
for a resolution to this as I have more than enough room to accommodate this.

~~~
ryanpetrich
Windows provides a facility to move the My Documents folder. It's even
possible to use an NTFS symbolic link to move it to a SMB path.

~~~
electromagnetic
Thanks, I never really looked into it, if it's really that easy it's worth the
time to stop the colossal growth I get there with iTunes and crap. I already
have 5 gig in My Documents inside a few months of a fresh install.

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ShabbyDoo
I'm told that older datacenters are maxed out on power consumption, not
physical space. It seems that companies with storage-intensive needs could get
great deals for colo if they used SSDs along with low wattage processors. Of
course, for $4K/TB, it doesn't makes sense. However, when prices drop or
someone makes slow-but-cheap solid state storage (for long tail stuff, not
OLTP), things will get very interesting.

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aswanson
Not sure of the price/density coefficient multiplier for flash versus hard
drives, but if it's near unity then these should be set to disrupt the
magnetic drive market in 4-5 years.

~~~
cperciva
This 1 TB SSD is listed on Amazon for $3919.99. 1 TB HDDs are listed on Amazon
starting at $84.99.

SSDs are already disrupting the high-performance storage market, but I think
it will be more than 5 years before they disrupt the bulk storage market.

~~~
aswanson
My parents, representative, I believe, of the average computer users, have an
80 Gb hard drive that is at less than 15 % used capacity. The point at which,
say, twice that level of storage drops to less than $100 in SSD format makes a
strong economic case for widespread consumer adoption. We see the beginning of
this in netbooks.

~~~
fnid2
I only use about 40GB on my laptop. I'd buy a 60GB disk for $100, but not a
120GB for $300. They should concentrate on getting the price down rather than
the capacity up. They're too expensive.

~~~
drats
It's getting pretty close, with various 32 gigs under $100 and 40gigs and
60gigs in the $100-$200 range. $130 for a 40gig Intel for example:
[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167025)

~~~
fnid2
That's easily within reach. I remember there being issues with read/writes.
You could only write so many times or read so many times. Is this still true?
How long will an SSD last?

~~~
gvb
Flash has a wear mechanism for writing, limiting the number of erase (and thus
write) cycles. The firmware in the device does "wear leveling" which spreads
the wear around as evenly as possible rather than concentrating it. The net
result is that the SSD will probably outlast the computer it is in.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive#Disadvantages>

Depending on how the "garbage collecting" (moving active sectors out of erase
blocks and erasing the blocks, number of erased blocks held in reserved, etc.)
is implemented, SSDs can be fast for initial writing, but slow down
significantly after they are used a while. Some manufacturers use better
algorithms, but the algorithms are based on heuristics and trade-offs, so what
works well for your neighbor may not work as well for you.

[http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/10/intels-black-
bo...](http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/10/intels-black-
box-40-performance-increase-mass-ssd-death.ars)

[http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-
of-...](http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-
ssds.html)

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jacquesm
Nov. 2009. These have been for sale for a while now.

The more interesting variety is the PCI-Express version, but it's a bit pricey
still.

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elblanco
Diskspace is basically close to free nowawadays. I've made it known on a
number of projects that "I never want to hear we're out of space, ever,
eliminating copier paper is more worthwhile to get an extra TB of space for a
project."

Diskspeed however is worth its weight in gold for some applications.

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travisjeffery
I don't even want to know how much this would cost.

~~~
sketerpot
Too bad, because I'm going to tell you. It will cost $2,200.

