SSD Prices Continue 3-Year Plunge

Lucas123 writes "After dropping 20% in the second quarter of 2012 alone, SSD prices fell another 10% in the second half of the year. The better deals for SSDs are now around 80- to 90-cents-per-gigabyte of capacity, though some sale prices have been even lower, according IHS and other research firms. For some models, the prices have dropped 300% over the past three years. At the same time, hard disk drive prices have remained "inflated" — about 47% higher than they were prior to the 2011 Thai floods, according to DRAMeXchange."

Comments

Re:Can't wait

[Celeritas 5k]

"Artificially" inflated?

Re:UK HDs seem to be down to 2011 prices

[gparent]

No, you can't name the seller. Slashdot is a tyranny.

Hard Disk prices no longer inflated

[Anonymous Coward]

This report is for the whole 12 months, but recently, prices are now within 10-20% of the pre-flood levels.

Cheapest UK price for a 2TB disk in mid 2010 was £49.99. Can pick one up now for £59.99 (Aria UK has deals)

3TB drives I've seen for about 90 quid. These were far more expensive before flooding.

SSD prices seem to have stabilised though. 256GB is about £150, 128GB is about £79. Been that way for a while.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[Hadlock]

OCZ Vertex drives have had a consistently 5% return rate (that's 1 in 20) since May 2012 now. I would stay the hell away from the Vertexes in particular, as they're closer to 7%, the company as a whole is closer to 5%. Granted, that's return rate, not confirmed failure, but a return rate that's been consistently ten times higher than the rest of their competition should give you pause when buying cheap hardware. Compare to 0.5% for manufacturers like Intel and Samsung.

Here's another WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary says that the prices on some models has dropped 300%. That's impossible, since the price cannot drop below zero, unless of course THEY are paying YOU to take the drive (as in soviet russia).

Re:Here's another WTF

[omnichad]

Yes, this is one phrase that people use that might mean something to a particular group of people, but sounds absolutely stupid to anyone else. I do not subscribe to that form of English.

Re:Here's another WTF

[Sun]

Yes, this is one phrase that people use that might mean something to a particular group of people, but sounds absolutely stupid to anyone else. I do not subscribe to that form of English.

Forget subscribing. If you understand what it means, do share.

I was under the impression that the fact that I'm not a native English speaker was irrelevant to how I understand basic algebra. Guess I was wrong...

So, if a drive was priced at $100, and its price dropped by 300%, how much would it go for now (assuming -$200 isn't the right answer)?

Shachar

Re:Here's another WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

approximately 66%

Re:Here's another WTF

[PIBM]

The price dropped by 2/3, exactly, or approximately 66.667%. You are now paying 1/3 of the previous price, or approximately 33.333%.

What was your point, again ?

Re:Here's another WTF

[geminidomino]

66.666...%

Re:Here's another WTF

[omnichad]

Assuming it's proper English to someone, I'd assume the logic goes like this.

The price was $12, now it's $3. The price dropped by 300%. That is, 300% of the final price has been subtracted from the first price. It's complete nonsense, and completely backwards really.

Re:Here's another WTF

[omnichad]

Language changes over time, often for the sake of shorthand. "To be" is often left off and simply implied in a lot of regional dialects now, especially combined with "needs."

Re:Here's another WTF

[geekoid]

100% of 100 dollars is 100 dollars.

300% of 100 dollars in 300 dollars.

So, how did the price of 100 dollar drive drop 300 dollars?

Re:Here's another WTF

[geekoid]

show your math.
explain how a 300% price drop is 66.67%

Re:Here's another WTF

[Twinbee]

Hmmm... maybe price/300% = price/3 = 66% reduction in our terminology.

Re:Here's another WTF

[ColdWetDog]

You get a free iPod?

Re:Here's another WTF

[omnichad]

Yeah - dropped = subtraction in my experience.

Re:Here's another WTF

[crazyvas]

Sounds right, don't know why you're modded funny. Using percentages always carries the risk of ambiguity for this very reason, unless phrased well. It would be nice if people instead started phrasing these things as "hard drive prices are a fourth of what they used to be" or if they insist on using percentages, "hard drive prices are 25% of what they used to be."

Re:Here's another WTF

[omnichad]

How can you read that train of logic and not laugh?

Re:Here's another WTF

[slashmydots]

I'm not even convinced that headline-baiting jackass who wrote the article knows what a computer is let alone an SSD or how much it costs or how to do math. If you go to newegg right now, you'll see they're all up about 15% from 2 months ago.

Re:Here's another WTF

[ChrisMaple]

The problem is that the statement obtains an entirely new meaning when expressed in this manner. Any fool who speaks in that manner is asking to lose a whole lot of money if they sign a contract with such language. (In this case, consider that "needs" can be a noun.)

Hard drive prices remind me. . .

[smooth wombat]

of the extra fee or increase in prices that companies such as FedEx imposed when gas prices were around $4. They claimed it was in response to the increase in fuel prices.

Now that prices have fallen by 50-70 cents, I don't see those fees being revoked.

Same thing with hard drive prices. Initially, with limited supply, a price increase was justified. Now that production is back to normal, I don't see the prices coming down.

Re:Hard drive prices remind me. . .

[ArsonSmith]

I'm guessing you just haven't looked? before floods I bought 3TB for $130, right after flood 3TB was $200, now 3TB $120.

Re:Hard drive prices remind me. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't correct for the fall in prices that occur yearly. If something costs the same now as it did back then, that means that it is much more expensive than it should have been.

Re:Hard drive prices remind me. . .

[Kjella]

And the reason is consumers don't register price drops nearly as much as price hikes. The company that drops the price a dollar only to raise it a bit later with a dollar again will lose more customers than those that just stay flat, even if they've offered an equal or better deal the entire time. That is also why food companies are notorious at reducing package size rather than increase the sticker price until they eventually release another big "economy size" package. And over time most companies want to increase prices due to inflation in their own costs just to stay even in real dollars, but people react on the nominal sticker price.

The result is that any price hike you can blame externally you take and keep to avoid the PR hit of raising them later. Of course it also helps your margins which is another reason, but the main reason is psychological, not only directly but also of the brand. If you just raise prices, "you" raised prices. If you can blame it on some external factor then "you" were not at fault, everybody understands that if your costs go up your prices must go up as well. Of course then people should ask "Why have you NOT lowered your prices?" but what didn't happen doesn't get anywhere the same attention as the price hike that did happen.

Re:Hard drive prices remind me. . .

[Solandri]

People need to get over this. Hard drive prices aren't going back down to "normal". The problem was that "normal" was too low. The hard drive industry was one of the most cut-throat in the tech industry (which is already pretty cut-throat). The margins were so slim that IBM (who had been in the HDD business since the beginning) decided it was more profitable just to sell off their entire storage division to Hitachi rather than try to compete. A decade later, Hitachi decided the same thing and sold it to WD.

So with too much competition, prices were too low and HDD companies were struggling to remain afloat. That's why they've now consolidated into 2.5 competitors (Seagate and WD; Toshiba only makes 2.5" drives). Probably an overshoot due to the extremely low margins, but that just means in the future there will be room for 1-2 new HDD manufacturers (in so far as HDDs remain a viable product in the face of SSDs). The flooding just happened to coincide with when this was going on (my BIL worked at Hitachi's storage division, and long before the flooding he told me the department was in financial trouble and Hitachi was shopping around for a buyer).

Yes this means you'll be paying more for your HDD storage. No that is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. Now that the industry has healthy margins, the manufactures will be making enough profit to invest in R&D to advance the state of the technology more quickly. Whereas before most of the companies were going broke just trying to produce what they could sell.

Re:Hard drive prices remind me. . .

[mirix]

Pretty standard in a broken market, usually a sign of collusion.

Here, gas shot up from 80 cents to $1.50 per litre when crude oil went to near $150 a barrel.

Oil has since gone down considerably, and gas has fallen very slowly, down to $1.20 over a few years.

You'll be waiting a long time

[DidgetMaster]

At $.90 per GB, SSDs are still about 15 times more expensive than the same amount of hard disk space. Forget about trying to put your 2 TB of data on SSDs. I like the trend of reduced prices for SSDs. They are finally affordable enough to put my most active data on (e.g. boot files, applications), but if you think they will be a viable complete substitute for hard drives anytime soon, think again.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[tlhIngan]

At $.90 per GB, SSDs are still about 15 times more expensive than the same amount of hard disk space. Forget about trying to put your 2 TB of data on SSDs. I like the trend of reduced prices for SSDs. They are finally affordable enough to put my most active data on (e.g. boot files, applications), but if you think they will be a viable complete substitute for hard drives anytime soon, think again.

SSDs are an excellent example of Moore's Law in action - because doubling the transistors at a basic level doubles the storage.

Thing is, everything else doesn't have to follow Moore's Law - spinning rust has been growing faster than Moore's Law for a little while now. And in some formfactors, spinning rust has made an exit because it's not possible to cram all that mechanical stuff in there (see the 1.8" formfactor - exclusively SSD these days because the largest spinning rust is 160GB - while you can get 256GB SSDs for cheaper!).

But where space isn't a problem (2.5" and 3.5" drives), the SSD will always be more expensive unless someone comes up with a way of storing data more densely with the same access times.

However, SSDs are big and cheap enough to be the only hard drive in many computers these days. And given the pervasiveness of networking, having a few TB of spinning rust attached and accessible via one's "personal in-home cloud" will serve to handle most people's bulk storage needs.

Of course, there will be industries where the files are so large and sequentially accessed that an SSD benefits are basically nil - like movie editing, where they can stream through TB of data, sequentially accessed.

After all, SSDs excel at random I/O, but spinning rust excels at sequential continuous access - if all you're doing is accessing data in megabyte or larger chunks, the slowness of moving the head around is hidden by the sheer speed of pulling the data off the media.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[holiggan]

Agree! Currently I'm using a Corsair F120 for my SO and main games and apps. The rest of my stuff goes to normal, run of the mill HDD. This SSD was probably the most effective upgrade I've ever done, both in terms of value for money (payed around 120 € more than a year ago) as well as pure performance. I think that having a main SSD drive (a 120 GB one will be enough for having the SO + some stuff), along with one or more additional standard HDD should be next "unofficial" mandatory config any new computer nowadays.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[poetmatt]

I'm sure your significant other would approve. (OS instead of SO, haha)

Meanwhile, I do wish SSD's were a little cheaper, but I'm happy at the direction they are going, same as you and the OP. I've been holding off this entire time, but not for much longer at there rate the prices are dropping.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

Using the phrase "spinning rust" the first time was clever.

Using it the next four times was just pretentious and annoying. Just use the term "HDD" like everyone else if you want to refer to them more than once.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

My steamapps folder is well over 500 GB.

Right now I'm using an NTFS junction point, so the Steam client can live on the SSD and at least it will start up quickly, even if the actual games take a while to load.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[holiggan]

ahahah nice! :D damn me and my awesome bilingual capabilities! xD

Anyways, yeah, you will definitely be amazed at the difference an SSD will make :)

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[Nadaka]

I got a 512gig ssd for just over $300 at newegg recently, and that was one of the OCZ high performance drives. So prices are a lot closer to the ~10x range right now than ~$15

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like a dork writing "spinning rust" repeatedly.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[loufoque]

My laptop only has a SSD drive.
I have two operating systems, some Windows video games, and some films and TV series.

It's fine.
When your disk is full, it just means it's time to move your old stuff to some slow large-capacity disk as an archive.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[geekoid]

"SSDs are an excellent example of Moore's Law in action - because doubling the transistors at a basic level doubles the storage."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEgh8TUlpQc

Please read and attempt to understand Moore's paper.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

if floating gate FETs are not transistors... what does the T in FET stand for again?

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[LordKronos]

You're obviously a copyright thefting pirate if you need more than 256 GB storage on an SSD.

Or a parent with a camera that records video.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[ericloewe]

To be pedantic, HDDs haven't used Iron Oxide in a long time. Last I checked, some Cobalt alloy was used in pretty much every drive instead of rust.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[ericloewe]

Or have a very large collection of games installed.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[noc007]

The point of it is the prices are dropping in the double digits. I picked up a 240GB SSD for $140. That's $0.583/GB and it was an Intel SSD with no rebate nonsense! Granted that's no $0.033/GB for the 3TB HDD ($100) I picked up at the same time, but it's a stark difference to the >$1/GB that was last year.

Personally I'm looking forward to the prices to keep dropping and the density to increase.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Or a GIS geek.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[Kelbear]

Steam is ok with installing games to different drives now. You can just cut n' paste the game over to the Steam folder on the SSD, restart Steam, and it'll recognize it just fine. I don't imagine you'd play a different 6-12 games everytime you sit down, so the few seconds it takes to swap locations will probably make up for itself in saved loading times pretty quick.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[Guspaz]

Except they're already dropped lower than $0.90/GB on sales.

When I bought my first SSD, an Intel x25-m G1, I paid $700 for a 160GB drive ($4.375/GB)
I recently saw the Intel 330 180GB on sale for $90 ($0.50/GB)

So if we compare to a regular drive, like say a 2TB WD Black for $180, we get (90/180) / (180/2000) = 5.6x

So we've already gotten to 5.6x, which is pretty impressive! Compared to 4TB drives, it's actually at 5x flat.

The price of SSDs is dropping much faster than the capacity of HDDs is improving (otherwise the ratio wouldn't be decreasing). Considering that my first SSD something like three ago was ~49x (or worse, HDDs were cheaper before the flood) and now it's down to under 6x, I don't see why you'd think it will be years before SSDs are affordable for bulk storage...

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[Guspaz]

Thing is, everything else doesn't have to follow Moore's Law - spinning rust has been growing faster than Moore's Law for a little while now.

Have they been? WD announced 2TB drives in early January 2009. WD announced 4TB drives in late November 2012. That's a period of 34.5 months to double capacity, and launch pricing was roughly $400 in both cases.

Moore's Law as it is currently accepted says we should see doublings every 18-24 months (18 months is for doubled performance, 24 months is for doubled transistor count), so it's clear that HDDs are improving at a rate much slower than Moore's Law, not faster as you claim.

SSDs, on the other hand... The Intel x25-m came out in late 2008 at an MSRP of $1,190 for the 160GB model. Today I've seen the Intel 330 180GB as low as $90. Per-gig, that's $7.4375/GB -> $0.50/GB, or 14.875x improvement in price.

That's 3.9 doublings over the course of 4 years. So SSDs are improving much faster than Moore's law, while HDDs are improving much slower than Moore's law.

Without significant changes in the improvement rates, SSDs will become cheaper per-gig than HDDs in less than four years.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[omnichad]

Yeah....RAM is empty on boot. People like fast-booting machines. And waiting on the first time read to generate that cache on every boot is not as good as having it read from SSD at a much faster speed.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[pclminion]

With a lot of RAM, you won't notice the SSD gains as much compared to an hard drive.

I have 10 GB in my home machine, not a small amount. I installed an SSD a few days ago. It is, hands down, the most amazing performance upgrade I have ever done in 20 years of building computers. I feel like getting a few more drives and RAID'ing them just to amplify the awesome.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[Dogtanian]

Have they been? WD announced 2TB drives in early January 2009. WD announced 4TB drives in late November 2012. That's a period of 34.5 months to double capacity, and launch pricing was roughly $400 in both cases.

I'm pretty sure that the exponential growth of hard drive capacity has *slowed* significantly in recent years. In the 90s and early-2000s, they seemed to be increasing much faster. I remember considering buying a 120MB HDD for my Amiga circa 1993, which was moderately big at the time IIRC, then five years later my first Wintel PC had a 3.4GB HDD, and that was nothing special by the standards of the time. Four years after *that* I got an 80GB HDD, which was quite decent, but still pretty mainstream in terms of capacity. All this was well above (the misapplied to spinning discs) Moore's Law.

Nowdays... well, it's over 5 years since 1TB drives became "mainstream" affordable... we should be at around 10TB if we were doubling capacity every 18 months, and we're not. By ordinary standards this would still be amazing growth, by the standards of 10-15 years ago, it's not.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[washu_k]

Nope, that's complete BS.

I have 32 GB in my system and the difference between an SSD and the best mechanical drive is still night and day.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[dylan_-]

Have they been? WD announced 2TB drives in early January 2009.

Yes, they have. It's a *trend*. Look at it over a longer time period. By definition, you can't tell when a trend has stopped as it's stopping.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

A real dork would probably know that rust - spinning or not - is not ferromagnetic, and would be rather sub-optimal for a harddrive.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[lister king of smeg]

or college student with a MS "dreamspark(tm)" account that is grabbing a copy of every MS product available for free while they have they chance so if they ever need it later they won't have to pay through the nose for it. Or some one that likes to play with blender and has large cg renders, or uncompressed video for editing, or even a moderate music/audiobook library in lossless audio, or several virtual machines, or some one who backs up all of their software on optical disks to iso images (took my civ v disk shattering and sibling who liked to "barrow" (read; scratch) my infinity engine games to learn the value of backups) or if you back up multiple computers with clonezilla, i can think of lots more reasons to have many large hard drives that in no way infringe on copyright of others

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[Wolfrider]

--A real geek would know that modern HD platters are made of either aluminium or glass+ceramic, and thus rust plays no factor. :P

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[mirix]

Well, they still have a ferromagnetic coating, else they wouldn't be able store data.

So the platters still have a layer of 'rust', what the substrate is made of is irrelevant.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[rsmith-mac]

A real dork would know that the saying is Rotating Rust, not Spinning Rust. Mind your alliteration, people!

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[mirix]

I should add, i don't believe the magnetic compound is iron based anymore, so rust is a bit of a misnomer in that regard.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[Guspaz]

Well, go back farther then, and pull the data. You'll see from around '98 or '99 until about 2001ish, we were going way faster than Moore's Law, then from 2001 on it was going a little bit slower than Moore's Law but more or less on-par with it, and then from 2009 it's been way below Moore's Law. Is it too early to call an end to the trend? Perhaps, but it depends on technological advancement.

Seagate is saying HAMR will take them to 60TB (where HAMR is expected to reach its limitations) in a 3.5" drive within a decade. This would be 3.9 doublings over a decade, which is roughly 31 months per doubling... It doesn't sound like Seagate thinks they'll keep up with Moore's law either. But even if they did keep up with Moore's law, SSDs are still getting cheaper much faster than Moore's law.

I attribute this to a combination of Moore's Law and increasing demand (economies of scale). If you move to a bigger wafer in your manufacturing process, for example, you can significantly reduce your costs without getting improving density any. Eventually SSD pricing will settle in closer to Moore's law, but it hasn't yet.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[DavidDK]

SSD prices fall faster than harddrive prices, so it's only a matter of time before SSD is at the same price point, and then harddrive production will cease to exist.

Harddrives hasn't got much bigger the last few years, we're still at 3 TB max. SSDs are growing fast. Soon, harddrives have no advantage.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[Kurrel]

If it's through MSDNAA, I'm pretty sure those licenses expire after you graduate. :(

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[Adriax]

Turtles.
FET = Flying Electric Turtles.
That's why SSDs are so expensive still, they have to breed nano-scale turtles that are almost impossible to corral because they either fly over the tiny fence or conduct along it.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[pod]

Assuming you have enough memory to not swap to disk under normal usage, replacing a spinning disk drive with an SSD is by far, hands down, the best all around performance improvement ever in the history of computing.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[Anonymous Coward]

SSDs excel at random I/O, but spinning rust excels at sequential continuous access

This is no longer true. Desktop SSDs are now saturating 600GB/s channels (~550MB/s in practice) in sequential reads while the fastest enterprise 10k RPM HDDs are at ~160MB/s. Source: http://www.storagereview.com

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[toddestan]

Unless they do something about the reliability problem, harddrives will still have at least one advantage.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[ls671]

You have a point, it depends how often you boot I guess... I don't boot that often myself. I never minded about fast-booting that much myself especially with hibernate and sleep.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[ls671]

Swapping to disk is good to clear up space for disk buffers/cache space. Especially when swapping out part of programs that leak memory-wise. I never understood the obsession some have about not swapping. Don't try to oversmart the kernel.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[TwentyCharsIsNotEnou]

Or dual boot.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[HuguesT]

Or a scientist working on time series of micro-CT tomographs, i.e 2048^3 image datasets. 16GB per frame. Acquiring 10-15TB of data per run is common.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[elucido]

Unless they do something about the reliability problem, harddrives will still have at least one advantage.

How many of your SSDs have failed? None of mine have ever failed but all of my harddrives fail within 10 years.

10 years from now I'll just transfer my data off the SSD onto something bigger. Just buy a new SSD within 10 years. My SCSI from Seagate failed over the course of a year.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[elucido]

Hmm... you get better performance with a lot of RAM. Put at least 4GB or more in your laptop and the OS will cache hard drive content in RAM (buffers/cache) making things go a lot faster. RAM not used by programs will typically be used by the OS to cache hard drive or SSD data. RAM is much faster than SSD.

So, scaling down on memory is a bad idea, scaling down on CPU is acceptable. With a lot of RAM, you won't notice the SSD gains as much compared to an hard drive.

On the Revodrive ram is not much faster than SSD actually. The speed limit of the Revodrive is PCI x16. Ram might be faster but I doubt it.

Re:You'll be waiting a long time

[elucido]

My laptop only has a SSD drive.
I have two operating systems, some Windows video games, and some films and TV series.

It's fine.
When your disk is full, it just means it's time to move your old stuff to some slow large-capacity disk as an archive.

Exactly. I don't know what people are doing with their 3-4TB drives.

Re:BULLSHIT

[Anonymous Coward]

2TB drives used to be 69 and below, they are currently sitting between 90 and 100.

70* 1.47 = $102

47% higher seems about right.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Prices fell because old product was trying to be cleared. Then prices rose back up because the new product uses new smaller litho flash. The belief is that old SSD at larger lithography are able to handle more writes + unknown quirks about new products.

I agree, with parent poster, was tempted by pre-black friday sales but pulled trigger too late. Ended up spending more money than I wanted to, but I got more capacity.

Re:300% drop?

[NixieBunny]

There's a large, smoking hole in the ground where the price fell through the Earth's crust.

Is this really a surprise?

[JustAnotherIdiot]

Look, I know there's some exceptions, but for the most part when a product is made by more than one company, the price is slowly lowered as they try to outsell each other.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[Admiral Llama]

Or to put it another way, name a PC manufacturer who uses OCZ drives. Go ahead and try. Yep, didn't think so. Above and beyond performance, reliability is the primary concern for a drive, and OCZs aren't there. Samsungs and Toshibas are.

Re:Can't wait

[codewarren]

I've never had an SSD, and had a very bad experience with a first gen one

So what was the bad experience you had with a first gen SSD besides not having one?

Kinda tiny

[garyoa1]

I'm still trying to figger out a use for a drive so small. Even a 250g main drive is kinda pushing it for space.

Re:Kinda tiny

[NixieBunny]

Given that my first disk drive held 72 kilobytes, I find your comment a bit funny.

Re:Kinda tiny

[omnichad]

Put your OS on it, and application binaries. You can have a second drive for everything else.

Re:Kinda tiny

[telchine]

I install my OS and my apps on a fast 120GB SSD. That fits pretty much everything I want; the OS boots fast and the apps load quickly. My Drobox folder (5GB) also goes on this drive which is where most of my important documents are. All the stuff that isn't speed dependant goes on a traditional hard drive. Movies, music, stuff like that.

Re:Kinda tiny

[oodaloop]

Strange that other people are buying them then, right?

Re:Kinda tiny

[jedidiah]

72KB wouldn't be big enough to store the extracted text captions from a single movie. It's too small for a single photo or a single record album compressed in MP3 or AAC.

You probably can't find a current OS or even a single application that can fit in such a small space.

It's no longer 1980. Imagine that?

Your nostalgia was outdated even by 1990.

Re:Kinda tiny

[ranton]

I can see where the original poster is coming from. I recently had to upgrade my SSD to 240 GB from 120 because I was having to delete applications to install new ones. Sometimes I could easily find something I wasn't going to use anymore, like an old game, but it was becoming tricky. Applications like Visual Studio, Office, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, etc. seem to keep getting bigger (maybe not all of them, but most of them).

Luckily I was able to buy the newest Intel 240GB SSD for the exact same price that I bought my last Intel 120GB drive just a little over a year ago.

Re:Kinda tiny

[jedidiah]

Other people buy Big Macs and Fords too...

That just means that they have no clue, or no taste, or just buy things based on some sort of conspicuous consumer herd mentality.

Re:Kinda tiny

[omnichad]

Those programs might be huge, but a lot of the large resource files can be symlinked (Unix) or junctioned (NTFS) off to another drive. Final Cut Studio would have taken dozens of GB on my computer if I hadn't done that.

Re:Kinda tiny

[Zan Lynx]

120 GB is plenty of space. I ran Windows 7 plus some apps like Firefox and LibreOffice on a 30 GB SSD in 2010 so I know it can be done. My current laptop has 128 GB and is only half full.

Re:Kinda tiny

[garyoa1]

Depends on what you're doing. I have a 500g main drive and 3 2t slaves. I do a lot of graphic design and some gaming. I don't install anything on the main drive outside of the OS but that doesn't mean nothing gets installed there. The main drive now runs around 250g of free space. But if you start crowding the main it slows down the whole machine.

Re:Kinda tiny

[marcello_dl]

In 2012 my linux desktop systems never went above 30 gig, excluding data (/home). And a live system is chock full of apps in 2-4 gb.
So these drives make plenty of sense. I wouldn't even use them for data which gets rewritten a lot.

Re:Kinda tiny

[NixieBunny]

That's the thing about storage - since it doubles in capacity every 1.5 years or so, the app writers happily double their app sizes at that rate.

Re:Kinda tiny

[ls671]

Are you serious? You can't be, floppies stored more than that. Anyway, my first hard drive was 20MB and I am serious...

Re:Kinda tiny

[MobyDisk]

I can't seem to fit these 2 hard drives into my laptop. :-p

Cheekiness aside, this is why I want to see more hybrid drives.

Re:Kinda tiny

[omnichad]

That's why I don't own a laptop. Wait for the hybrids. I won't give up my desktop because it's just too cheap upgrade. And because I like that one of my screens doesn't have a foldout keyboard attached to it.

Re:Kinda tiny

[IndustrialComplex]

That's exactly how I do it, and I'm only using a 120GB SSD. I'm running a PC with Windows 7 and the standard accoutrements (Office, etc) and after about a year of standard installing, uninstalling, and patch-creep it is sitting at around 30gb free.

I don't run swap file, but I would say that 120GB for a modern system is the absolute minimum if you don't want to run into issues. 250GB would be massive if you don't load it down with media. I keep 2TB of space on the cheaper spinning disk HDDs for local media storage, and with just a bit of discipline, you can keep your main OS/Program drive footprint pretty small.

Re:Kinda tiny

[IndustrialComplex]

Aka "I'm too stupid to junction my 30G+ game installs to spinning rust"

Why would you put the files for programs that are dependent on loading media files quickly on the slower drives?

The first time I played Skyrim from SSDs I was disappointed a bit because it loaded so fast I missed out on the loading screen trivia.

Re:Kinda tiny

[omnichad]

I'm using 120GB for OS X on a Hackintosh and it does quite well. Alongside that I have a 2TB internal drive that also serves as a backup drive for other computers on the network, and a 500GB external drive for video editing.

Re:Kinda tiny

[NixieBunny]

Movies are stored on 1/2" wide tape. Music is stored on flat, black plastic discs. What is this business about storing movies and music on computers?

Re:Kinda tiny

[killermookie]

Yup, pretty much this. I have two 128G SSDs striped for my OS and applications. I have two 1TB drives stripped for all my data. External drive for backups. System boots up quick. Computer operates with speed. Liking it so far.

Re:Kinda tiny

[VanessaE]

The first 8-inch floppy disks held only 79.75 kB (read-only, in 1971). The first 5¼ inch floppies held 87.5kB (in 1976). Even the first 3½ disks only held 280 kB (in 1982). In each case, of course, capacity inflated rapidly over a few years' time, but if you subtract out filesystem metadata, which of course varies with the disk format, each one would easily drop by 5 or 10 percent, putting those first 8-inch disks in the just-over-70kB range.

prices have dropped 300%....

[vincefn]

For some models, the prices have dropped 300% over the past three years

Great, so this means that in 2012, to get some SSD disk you will be paid twice the price you would have paid to get them in 2009 ?

Sounds interesting, just the kind of storage I need for my perpetual motion simulations !

Re:prices have dropped 300%....

[omnichad]

Yeah. I wish that abuse of English would die a painful, horrible death. It might mean something to someone, but it doesn't mean anything to someone who thrives on math or logic.

Re:prices have dropped 300%....

[na1led]

It must be a typo, must meant 30%.

Re:prices have dropped 300%....

[llZENll]

No he meant 300%, the writer admitted it was an error in the comments and said he should have wrote dropped by 2/3rds or 66%. The drop from $3/GB to $1/GB is where he got the "300%" from.

Re:prices have dropped 300%....

[GonzoPhysicist]

I think this explains the whole issue, percentage is not not an additive operator so it should never be combined with "more" or "less". It's a multiplying operator so it should only be used with the words like "of" or "as much".
As in "my car has 200% the efficiency of yours, I can go 2 times the distance with the same fuel." or "This sandwich cost 50% as much as what Bob paid"

Re:prices have dropped 300%....

[mattack2]

Written, not wrote.

Re:prices have dropped 300%....

[Patch86]

Maybe it's because it's getting late, but I think "wrote" is correct. "Wrote" is the active past participle, "written" is the passive past participle. "He should have wrote" sounds like an active phrase ("he" is doing some writing in the past), so "wrote" is correct. "Dropped by 2/3rds is what he should have written" would be the passive form (the phrase "dropped by 2/3rds" is the subject of some writing in the past), so that would be the version with "written".

But then I am quite tired, so shoot me down if I'm being crazy.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[Hadlock]

Here are the hard numbers for anyone who's curious:

http://www.behardware.com/articles/881-7/components-returns-rates-7.html

- Intel 0.45% (against 1.73%)

- Samsung 0.48% (N/A)

- Corsair 1.05% (against 2.93%)

- Crucial 1.11% (against 0.82%)

- OCZ 5.02% (against 7.03%)

Return rates specifically for OCZ models:

- 40.00% for the OCZ Petrol 64 GB

- 39.42% for the OCZ Petrol 128 GB

- 30.85% for the OCZ Octane 128 GB SATA II

- 29.46% for the OCZ Octane 64 GB SATA II

- 9.73% for the OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB 3.5"

- 9.59% for the OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB

- 6.73% for the OCZ Vertex 2 60 GB

- 5.43% for the OCZ Agility 3 240 GB

- 5.12% for the OCZ Vertex Plus 128 GB

Also if you have a Crucial M4 make sure you have the correct firmware as Crucial keeps releasing/shipping units with buggy firmware updates that can brick your drive.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[Synerg1y]

Haha, I feel your pain, I've been slowly crawling around for a deal to replace my smaller ssd with a larger one as I'm completely out of space on that OS / apps drive. I saw some good deals on woot for refurbs , but the one (240gb corsair $125) I would've wanted most sold out before I could get it :(

Having said that, we're probably stuck till January, this time of year isn't known for it's bargains post-black friday. Also, stores get pretty unpleasant around this time of year, unless long lines and cramped isles are preferred.

P.S. the series matters more than the brand with ssds, normally you typically get what you pay for, but searching for a deal, you should keep this fact in mind. A 400mb read performs a lot worse than a 500mb read if only cause of the underlying components involved (IOPS, NAND)

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[codewarren]

What the fuck planet are they shopping on? Fell 10% my ass!

I had assumed this was posted from an alternative universe where "fall by 300%" makes sense.

Re:Can't wait

[necro81]

If you are looking to build a system (I will assume a desktop), then don't worry about waiting for cost parity. There is really no reason to put most of your files on an SSD, unless you are building a server that requires lots of random I/O requests. Instead, go both ways: purchase a modestly-sized SSD for the OS and Apps (64 GB), and a conventional spinning disc for bulk storage (photos, video, etc., 500 - 4000 GB). Sized appropriately, you can configure a system that gives you the speed where you want it and capacity where you want it for a decent price.

mSATA SSDs

[Gliese 581]

Some HDD sizes are now cheaper than before the Flood. The 3TB 3.5" models should definitely be cheaper, simply because the technology has matured with the move from four platters to three 1TB platters. Increased areal density has also pushed down the cost of 1TB 2.5" (laptop) drives.

I'll wait for 500GB SSDs to go down to the prices of today's 120GB SSDs before making the plunge. I have a 750GB 2.5" HDD installed on my SFF desktop, with about 300GB of data that can be moved to an external drive.

I'm also looking at installing mSATA SSDs, which cost about the same as full-size SSDs. With the graphics now built into the CPU and mSATA, I'd have almost the entire system on the motherboard, making it easier to just unplug the PSU when changing desktop cases.

Re:mSATA SSDs

[Digital Vomit]

Some HDD sizes are now cheaper than before the Flood.

Too bad Moses spent so much time trying to save squirrels and zebras that he couldn't be bothered to save some of that tech.

Re:mSATA SSDs

[Hes Nikke]

Not to mention that 2.5" 1TB drives now actually fit in most laptops due to using only 2 platters instead of the 3 they had last year. 3 platter 2.5" drives are just too tall for those tiny spaces!

Re:mSATA SSDs

[Kjella]

Heh, the entire group I was on fell for this trick question recently: "How many of each kind did Moses bring on the Ark?" as nobody noticed they didn't actually say Noah.

Re:mSATA SSDs

[aynoknman]

"How many of each kind did Moses bring on the Ark?"

Well, there were 2 cherubim. And although Poland hadn't been invented yet, there were also 2 Poles.

Re:mSATA SSDs

[Digital Vomit]

Good lord, I must have had one hell of a brain fart there. Yet, somehow, it made the line that much funnier.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[bedroll]

Oddly, I read this and thought the exact opposite. Most of the deals I've seen on Slickdeals since Black Friday have been in the 50- to 80-cents-per-gigabyte range. The latest deal, posted just yesterday, had an Intel 180GB SSD for $100 after rebate. That's 55-cents-per-gigabyte. That's only one deal site, so I'm sure there's other deals that I've missed.

The store doesn't matter so much as the price. Where you shop has become less important than how you shop. If you're only focusing on a few retailers, and not leveraging the Internet to comparison shop and crowdsource deal opportunities, then I'm sure SSD prices are still quite high.

Re:UK HDs seem to be down to 2011 prices

[1_brown_mouse]

I read that as "tranny" and it was much funnier.

Re:Can't wait

[jbolden]

Yes. Margins are much higher. Essentially what happened:

a) A situation of oversupply in the HDD market leading to thin and sometimes negative margins.
b) Huge drop in supply due to natural disaster
c) drop in supply causes sharp increase in price which leads remaining suppliers to experience high margins
d) as supply comes back on board margins remain high because there isn't oversupply

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[Hadlock]

I'm not sure you understand how percentages work.

Efficient storage solutions

[Synerg1y]

Let's think about who the primary user affected by this is: the computer builder / tinkerer. There's ssds that come as a feature on higher end laptops / desktops and I'm sure those are affected by the price drop too, but the OEM will probably pocket those profits.

So, yes SSD space is more expensive than even inflated disk drives, but the performance difference is significant in the 4-5x range. Most people that this applies to probably already know this, but what you do is buy an SSD that fits all your mission critical games / apps (those game take up A LOT of space very quickly and are a major decision when deciding how big of an ssd you need) and everything else: data, movies, music goes on a spinning disk, preferably encrypted. You can install your apps / games on the disk drive, but you're kind of missing the main performance boost for those things. So buy a bit more than you need to future proof it and couple it with a spinning disk to actually store data. Doing it this way makes buying an ssd make a lot more sense.

Cpt. obvious strikes again, but reading some of the discussion, maybe not for everyone.

Wow!

[Quiet_Desperation]

though some sale prices have been even lower

You don't say!

the prices have dropped 300%

They can't even give them away!

Re:Can't wait

[SuricouRaven]

Hard drives are getting gradually cheaper per-gig too. Even if SSDs became really cheap, hard drives still would have a storage-per-cm3 advantage that would give them some advantage in bulk storage - one rack enclosure full of hard drives could store as many bits as a whole rach full of SSDs, with associated reduction in power, controllers, cabling and management costs.

Re:Can't wait

[neminem]

I've had bad experiences with busses before, but I've never owned a bus.

Re:Can't wait

[somersault]

Yup. I thought that was a pretty well known and/or obvious thing to do.

Though my SSD is only 64GB, so I had to put my Steam install on my hard drive. I currently have something like 400GB of games installed on there. It sounds like it's about time I looked at a dedicated games SSD though :)

the article is worth what you pay for it

[jlv]

"The better deals for SSDs are now around 80- to 90-cents-per-gigabyte of capacity"? Where's this guy been?

The better deals for SSDs are now close to 50 cents a gigabyte. Two months ago I picked up four 128GB Samsung 830s for $70 each. This past month I've seen a PNY 120GB for $70, an Intel 160GB for $90, and the 128GB Samsung for $70 again. Better deals on larger SSDs (over 200GB) are now 70 cents and less - Newegg just had the a 500GB Samsung 840 for $330 (66 cents/GB).

Re:the article is worth what you pay for it

[blackmonday]

And I just installed a 256GB OCZ in my Macbook Pro, cost $130 after a $30 rebate. What a difference! I lose out about 64 GB over the stock HD, but totally worth it. And I got an external case for the old drive for less than $8 that works perfectly. Big fan of SSDs here.

Re:the article is worth what you pay for it

[Hatta]

Let me know when I can get a 32GB SSD for $20 or less.

Re:the article is worth what you pay for it

[jcdr]

Let me know when I can get a 32GB SSD for $20 or less.

Actually, the cheapest 32GB SDCard or USB memory are about that price.

Ok, there are not as fast as a SSD, but still show a valid indication that the price per capacity can be improved in the short term.

Re:the article is worth what you pay for it

[noc007]

Yeah he almost sounds like he looked at prices a year ago. To add to your list, around the pre-BF sales I picked up an Intel 330 240GB for $140. It almost feels like we'll be seeing $0.10/GB or lower in a couple of years; I can't wait.

Re:the article is worth what you pay for it

[Hatta]

Yes, but you need to buy a controller/adaptor in that case. At least CF-IDE adaptors are passive, so they're stupidly cheap. I only have to wait for the price/gb to halve once more and 32GB CF should be about what I want to pay for it.

Re:the article is worth what you pay for it

[jlv]

Let me know when I can get a 32GB SSD for $20 or less.

And you won't be able to. It doesn't work that way. For instance, you can't get a 320GB hard drive for $10 or less, even though a month ago I bought a 3TB hard drive for $90 (Newegg sale on a Seagate Barracuda 7200.14).

Re:the article is worth what you pay for it

[Hatta]

Sure, if you're talking spinning metal platters, there's a significant cost in just providing the physical package, regardless of how dense the bits are packed onto the platters. But when you're just talking some silicon for storage and a little more silicon for logic, production is cheap, dirt cheap.

Re:the article is worth what you pay for it

[Guspaz]

Let me know where you can get any new and current HDD for $20 or less.

Re:the article is worth what you pay for it

[jcdr]

Why did you needs an adapter ? If your target is a PC, you certainly can use a USB memory, and if your target is a embedded system, you can certainly use the SD Card in the SPI mode. I have used the two methods many times without major issue (BIOS might need an update, especially on Gigabyte mainboard).

Re:the article is worth what you pay for it

[jcdr]

Agree. If you need performance and durability, you will certainly not looking at the cheapest possible memory.

In my experience, USB memory and SD Card are very reliable. I have user a lot of them and have yet to see a defective one. Even my oldest 64MB USB memory (yes MB, not GB) still work like a charm. On embedded systems I have see some memory issues, but there was related to design errors (bus or power supply noise, wrong voltage or timing, not enough current, missing protection and software weakness or bugs). There exists a couple of "Industrial grade" memories with specialized controllers that make extra checks and errors corrections.

Re:the article is worth what you pay for it

[jlv]

Sure, if you're talking spinning metal platters, there's a significant cost in just providing the physical package, regardless of how dense the bits are packed onto the platters. But when you're just talking some silicon for storage and a little more silicon for logic, production is cheap, dirt cheap.

No, it doesn't quite work that way.

The cheapest DDR3 memory I can find is a 2GB stick for $8 (Newegg). The cheapest PC133 memory I found was 512MB for $9.50 (Amazon) (Newegg's cheapest is 256MB for $19). That makes PC133 4 to 16 times more expensive than DDR3.

The cheaper production goes hand in hand with higher density parts. This is why you won't see 32GB SSDs for $20 or less.

Re:the article is worth what you pay for it

[Rockoon]

Let me know what you can get a 32GB HDD for $20 or less.

The only HDD's on NewEgg that are less than $20 are refurbished (aka used) IDE drives.

But I do have good news for you, you can easily buy a 32GB drive on NewEgg for under $20, and they are in fact solid state. They are called USB Thumb Drives.

Re:the article is worth what you pay for it

[Hatta]

Or, that makes the bare cost of a PCB with some silicon attached to it around $10. Whether the silicon is DDR2, DDR3, NAND, or whatever shouldn't matter.

Re:the article is worth what you pay for it

[jlv]

I gotta stop feeding trolls.

Re:the article is worth what you pay for it

[bingoUV]

You have to package it, inventory manage it, advertise it, market it, ship it, provide toll free number to customers for complaints, create software to update and verify firmware, support the software on various operating systems, manage warranty , RMA it. Advertise and branding spending needs are higher here because this kind of product stores precious data, there isn't space for 500 brands here like is the case of Bluetooth dongles.

Such products also need to come with screws, 3.5" adapter, SATA cables, software CD to update and manage firmware, secure erase, TRIM etc. All of this is optional but decreases brand value to skip them, and brand is important as mentioned earlier.

Re:Can't wait

[mlts]

I would not mind seeing SSDs and HDDs merge, with a smart "SAN in a can" drive controller. This drive controller would do autotiering. If a region of blocks is used often, it gets moved to the SSD. If more areas get used more frequently, that set of blocks goes to the spinning platters. This way, over time (assuming consistent usage), there is a good balance between SSD speed and the capacity of traditional HDD.

Re:UK HDs seem to be down to 2011 prices

[gparent]

LOL. Works both ways, I suppose.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[Baloroth]

We've been over this at some point... OCZ has a greater volume of sales generating higher return rates, it's a rule of QC. Crucial (#1 lowest returns) has relatively minor sales in comparison so not as many are shipping out that can fail.

What? Higher sales generates higher returns in absolute quantity, not in terms of return rates. Return rates are a percentage, and are independent of the quantity shipped (although a larger shipped quantity means the rates will more accurately reflect actual failure percentages).

Re:Lies!

[jedidiah]

> I payed $300 to upgrade my Mac Mini's drive to an 256 GB SSD. Therefore prices haven't changed in three years. ...and they never will.

Re:Can't wait

[MightyMartian]

We have some small branch offices (2-3 employees each), and when I built the custom routers, I bought fanless Mini-ITX boards and 64gb SSDs and slapped a minimal Debian install, enough for routing, firewall and VPN. The main reason is a minimum of moving parts.

Re:UK HDs seem to be down to 2011 prices

[telchine]

LOL. Works both ways, I suppose.

That's what (s)he said!

Re:Can't wait

[mlts]

One thing I'd recommend is going with a RAID 1 setup for the HDDs. Drive failure is still a constant issue, and there is a big difference between seeing a dialog that pops up and going "crap, time to replace a drive", compared to hoping you have a recent backup... somewhere. Even if documents are saved on Dropbox or backed up via Mozy, it still is a PITA to reload/activate the OS, reload/activate apps, etc.

For SSDs, I have not seen any concrete proof that they are any more reliable than HDDs, so I'd have a second controller and have those mirrored or RAID-ed as well, so their I/O performance isn't linked to the I/O of the slower HDDs.

Re:Can't wait

[geminidomino]

As someone who finally picked up an SSD on Black Friday, I have to ask: does Windows 7 work any better than XP about having apps installed on other drives rather than in Program Files/User folders?

I remember trying a similar setup once for XP, back in the mists of the past, and it was not a happy fun time.

Re:Price

[ArcadeMan]

I just bought three 256GB SSD and the guy at the checkout paid me 600$.

Re:Can't wait

[Anonymous Coward]

And hence not artificially inflated.

Re:Can't wait

[Joce640k]

I need to build another computer in the near future and I've been thinking long and hard about SSD versus HDD. Still undecided, but with trends like this, I'll be opting for SSD

That "future" better not be too near.

I'm not holding my breath for a 3TB SSD in the $100 range...

Re:Lies!

[PIBM]

To 'upgrade'. You were already paying X$ for the previous PITA of drive included in the price so the reduction is 1-167/(300+X) (167 being the lowest price found on newegg in 30 secs.)

We could estimate X being in the range 50-100, thus, a reduction of ~ 53 - 58 %

Re:Can't wait

[Bearhouse]

Cool - but you needed 64GB to do this in Debian?

(Not trolling - I'm an old BSD fart so just curious...)

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[Synerg1y]

quantity goes up this gains a higher margin with higher quantities. This is why you don't term your 10m a year product line with a 5% return rate. But on a 500k a year product line, 5% may not be as acceptable. So, if OCZ sold 1m drives and crucial 100k... and OCZ's failure rate is 5% and crucial's is 2%, your chances are still higher to get a working drive with OCZ.

Re:Can't wait

[omnichad]

NTFS Junction Points. Learn to love them when you have an SSD.

PRICES REDUCED 1 BILLION PERCENT*

[Andy Prough]

.....(*compared to last year's price drop of 1/billionth of a penny).

Re:Can't wait

[omnichad]

I keep reposting the same advice, but look into NTFS junction points. It's much safer than trying to pick a random folder to install to. They work like Symlinks on Unix-like systems.

Re:Can't wait

[Anonymous Coward]

So how do you transfer bytes from your not owned SSD to your presumably not owned CPU/GPU? Rented buses? Madness!

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[omnichad]

That might partly be because they don't already have an OEM agreement. For Samsung and Toshiba, it's just adding product lines to an existing HDD relationship.

Re:Can't wait

[Celeritas 5k]

Sounds like a perfectly functioning market to me, nothing artificial about it. If a government were putting pressure on a manufacturer to increase their price, or speculation caused people to buy up huge stocks in anticipation of a price increase, that would be artificial.

Re:Can't wait

[somersault]

Actually I moved my documents directory to my HDD using those. I suppose I could do it with individual game directories on Steam if I want better loading times. Thanks.

Re:Can't wait

[ajlitt]

You mean like one of these?

Re:Can't wait

[Johann Lau]

Yeah, more like "not articifically deflated any longer".

I remember the the brick that was the 52mb external HD for my Amiga 500 haha... harddrives today could cost 10 times more and I'd still consider them crazy cheap, and moaning about their price seems kinda greedy... It's not like anyone with a real need for anything, or real money problems for that matter, ever does that. Or maybe I just missed it.

Re:Can't wait

[jbolden]

I agree with you. I was simply laying out the series of events to ggp.

There are ways artificial can be meant though other than government manipulation which are true.

a) Artificial pricing meaning above industry average margins. In other words a pricing scheme that will lead to more people entering a market. In which case it is true that under that definition right now HDD prices are artificially high. This what people mean when they say "Apple's computers are priced artificially high", or "magazine prices are artificially high so that mall book stores and convenience stores carry extra magazines".

b) That the is some sort of trust like collusion. Artificial pricing here is a legal term. And were these American companies I suspect what is going on might be seen as illegal.

etc...

Re:Can't wait

[geminidomino]

That's an idea. Are they supported natively, do you know, or do I still need some third-party utility to make them like I did back in the not-so-good old days?

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[Tarkhein]

Their Sandforce Vertex drives (Vertex 2 and 3) yes. Their Marvell chip with Indilinx firmware Vertex 4 has much lower return rates on par with Intel/Samsung/Crucial.

Re:Can't wait

[ls671]

It is already happening and has been for a long time. All modern OS use RAM buffers/cache. Put more RAM in your computer.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3324693&cid=42327113

Re:Can't wait

[Celeritas 5k]

If a company sets a low price to create a market, it seems to me that they're buying a product at a price. It's not all that different from dumping cash into your advertising department. But my understanding of economics is largely informal, and a bit simplistic, so I'll take your word for it. We're arguing semantics anyway.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[Rockoon]

I'm quite sure that he doesn't.

Re:Can't wait

[omnichad]

They are supported natively. Use mklink from the command prompt. It's built in on at least Windows 7+.

Re:Can't wait

[geekoid]

I had to read that several time to realize you weren't talking about computer buses, but large vehicles

Re:300% drop?

[ls671]

Simple, they pay you twice as much as you used to pay them and you get the goods on top of that !

Say you use to pay 100$ for something, now you get it for -200$, that's a 300% price drop.

Re:Can't wait

[GuldKalle]

Which problems are you referring to?
I use symlinks if I want to store data on other drives, that works like a charm. I think those are added after XP, though.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[geekoid]

thing on sale more expensive after sale, news at 11

The trend is downward, and lately the trend has steepened. You really don't understand the market, the idea of trends, or and article review trends.

I'm going to be buying a 3TB drive for 90 dollars this afternoon, but I certainly wouldn't use the single data point as a trend, or to refute a trend.

Wise up.

Re:Can't wait

[neminem]

From your comment's siblings, you are apparently not the only one. I didn't even think of that potential pun when I was posting that; as a laptop user and supporter of public transportation, I ride buses a lot more than I install them. :p

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[geekoid]

5% is 5% regardless of the number of unit generated.
It's a strong indicator of poor QC.
He may not know statistics, but based on your post, you sure as hell don't know statistics.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[geekoid]

holy crap you are BAD at math.

Don't stop, you have moved from facepalm WTH stupid into entertaining stupid.

first macintosh had 128K core

[peter303]

And 384K disks; which was double the average PC. A 100G of flash stores hundreds of hours of musics and tens of hours of video

Re:first macintosh had 128K core

[Osgeld]

whats your point? a 128k Mac isnt going to stream HD video in millions of colors while I compile and glance at the weather radar

forgot to show mine:

[geekoid]

% reduction = (A-B)/A*100
a= original price, b = new price

300% = 300/100
So you are subtracting (300/100) x 100 = 300
And 100 - 300 = -200

Re:forgot to show mine:

[geminidomino]

You did your own math wrong.

reduction = (A-B)/A = (300 - 100)/300 = 200/300 = .6666...

Re:forgot to show mine:

[geminidomino]

I get the impression we're talking at cross-purposes here, though. From your GP post, I think maybe you think I'm saying something I'm not.

Are you aware of the AC post that says "If the price/GB was $3.00 and is now $1.00, how much has it dropped?"

~67% is the answer to that question, not the bogus "300% price drop" crap

Re:Can't wait

[geminidomino]

Awesome. Thank you.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[Synerg1y]

so having a wider margin of acceptable error on a higher producing product line doesn't make sense to you? lol

I don't even know why I'm trying to explain this to you, this business concept is obviously way over your head and an excellent example of how statistics can be warped to prove a not-so-correct point to a sucker.

Re:Can't wait. But was have you see ?

[jcdr]

I've never had an SSD, and had a very bad experience with a first gen one.

Are you old enough to have tried the first affordable hard disks widely available to the consumers ? A lot of them was terrible at this time. Full scan of the media was a common procedure to mark bad sectors. Media deterioration, heads crash and motors failure at start up was probably as common as the SSD problems we see today.

The hard disk are much reliable today, but still have a limited life time and have a probability to fail. I am certain that the SSD can a least archive the same kind of reliability in the future.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[Kjella]

Sounds about right to me, it's the same response I get when I get when I compare anything else that is per person, per square kilometer or anything like that "hurr durr the US is bigger, therefore 5% 2%"

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[suutar]

okay, you've now outlined the business case for why OCZ keeps going with shitty defect rates. You have not yet explained why I would want to take a 1/20 chance of a defective product over a 1/200 chance.

Re:Can't wait

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I don't know about Debian but a full Slackware install including source doesn't take that much space.

Nigerian 419 Drives now 300% off

[drainbramage]

Apparently it's true!
I got an email this morning from the assistant to the president!
All I need is some of your personal information and some cash to prove your interest in this fine offering.

Re:Can't wait

[Hes Nikke]

Or this? (scroll down to "Fusion Drive")

Re:Can't wait

[Bearhouse]

Thx. Kinda what I figured. No need for GUI for that app methinks.

Re:Can't wait

[Anonymous Coward]

There is also something similar to a mount point in NTFS - Disk Management GUI allows you to map new volume to a point in a directory tree instead of a drive letter.

Re:Can't wait

[Guspaz]

Why? HDDs don't have that advantage today, I don't see why they would in the future. Don't confuse current chassis size and capacities for what is technologically possible. There's nothing stopping somebody from making a 4TB 3.5" SSD today (or even more, 8TB wouldn't be impossible) except for economics (they'd be crazy expensive) and performance (controllers have a fixed number of channels, putting several times more NAND would be slower than a comparable amount of storage in multiple drives).

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[voidphoenix]

quantity goes up this gains a higher margin with higher quantities. This is why you don't term your 10m a year product line with a 5% return rate. But on a 500k a year product line, 5% may not be as acceptable. So, if OCZ sold 1m drives and crucial 100k... and OCZ's failure rate is 5% and crucial's is 2%, your chances are still higher to get a working drive with OCZ.

To quote someone's Slashdot sig:

Protip: Never go full retard.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[Guspaz]

Intel didn't have any existing OEM agreements for HDDs either, that didn't stop them from getting OEM agreements for their SSDs.

There's a reason why OCZ never managed to secure any new OEM agreements, while Intel did.

Re:Can't wait

[hairyfeet]

What inflated? I've seen 2Tb for $99, 1Tb for $70 and the prices continue to fall. and when it comes to SSDs you have to watch for the hot/crazy scale which as a retailer who has gamer customers into the double digits when it comes to SSDs because of all the failures i can tell you is a BIG problem.

In fact with the prices falling the way they are I'd say the ONLY problem we have is Seagate. Instead of Seagate raising up Maxtor it appears that Maxtor brought down Seagate, with Seagate drives being sold cheaper and cheaper due to the high failure rates. During the BF and Xmas sales so far I've seen WD charge 40%+ markups not because that price is a fair market value but because like Intel WD knows that their "competition" can't really compete on anything but price so they feel no need to lower their prices.

Now I don't know if this is true or not, just what I heard, but here is the scuttlebutt I was told when it comes to Seagate: When Seagate bought Maxtor they got the cheap ARM controllers from Maxtor and that when combined with piss poor firmware is making the Seagates die left and right. From what I was told the ARM chips get too hot and when they do the firmware starts fucking up, it fails to "see" where the end sectors of the drive are and tries to go past end of the drive and bye bye drive. I know that the failure rate on anything Seagate above 500GB from what I've seen in the shop is just pathetic, I've had to RMA enough of them i won't even touch a Seagate larger than 500GB ATM. Since most people don't care about the drive itself but the data this is a serious problem, I even had to walk a guy through building a clean box so he could swap the platters on a less than 3 month old Seagate in the hopes of getting his pictures back.

But I'll tell you like I tell my customers that SSDs are ONLY useful for certain use cases, like any tool you have to make sure that you have the right tool for the job. If its a laptop or netbook AND you have limited non cloud based data or are religious about backups? Then SSDs make sense there, less power usage and no moving parts make it a good fit especially if you pull the drive and slap it in an external and use it to hold backups of the OS and important data. If its gonna be used on a desktop as an OS drive AND all your data as well as backups of the OS are gonna be kept on a HDD? Then it makes sense, the increased speed is worth the risk. if its gonna be a mission critical system or you are working on data you can't constantly backup and would hurt if you lost? Then there it is NOT a good fit, the high failure rate makes the risk too great for any advantages.

Now as far as HDDs go from the shop here is what I've found, again YMMV but in order from best to least I've found the best to be pre-buyout Samsung and Hitachi drives, especially the EcoGreen on the samsung as their excellent firmware and well thought out use of the 32Mb cache makes them test nearly as fast and sometimes faster than a 7200RPM drive while putting out MUCH less heat and taking insane abuse, we're talking construction trailers and warehouses where the systems get seriously nasty with dirt and grime, followed by the WD drives and finally Seagate which over 500Gb I wouldn't trust with anything I cared about.

So if you want to go SSDs just remember the hot/crazy scale and backup often, and avoid the OCZ drives like an STD because from what I've seen they are just garbage. Like Seagate this is reflected in the prices, with the better quality Intel and Samsung drives carrying a much higher per GB price than the OCZ because the OCZs fail like crazy. Why they can't put a simple ARM chip that would take over if the main controller dies and simply allow the drive to be used as read only so you could get your data off I don't know, but from what I've seen here in the shop over 90% of SSDs fail not because the cells fail, but because the controller dies. Until they fix this serious problem I'd be leery of trusting my data to an SSD.

Be careful

[Futurepower(R)]

At the link you gave, Seagate says, "Up to 3 x faster than a traditional HDD". There is a superscript 1 for a footnote, but no footnote.

"Up to 3 x faster" can mean 10% faster. There are marketing people who have no knowledge of technology and no interest in technology who believe that marketing always includes some kind of lying or sneakiness.

And, what happens when one fails? Are there weird failure modes in which your files get scrambled? Seagate's web pages are not reassuring.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[Guspaz]

But can you trust them? They're actively selling SSDs with 30-40% failure rates (the Petrol and Octane series). They're not new drives, the failure rates are STILL that high, and they keep selling them.

Talk about an unscrupulous company.

Re:Can't wait

[neminem]

Ooh, I have considerable raid experience, too! I quit before Pandaria, though.

Re:Can't wait

[bill_mcgonigle]

This drive controller would do autotiering. If a region of blocks is used often, it gets moved to the SSD. If more areas get used more frequently, that set of blocks goes to the spinning platters.

But then when your SSD fails you have to throw out your hard drive too. It just so happens I'm here because Mushkin just sent me a "prove that you own the drive with the lifetime warranty" mail for the 60GB Chronos drive that was in my server and I'm procrastinating looking up the invoice. ;)

Software handles this well. Windows has it built-in and Linux has several options.

I use flashcache (from Facebook) and ZFS (zfsonlinux project). bcache is also in-progress being integrated into the md stack.

ZFS:

zpool create tank /dev/sda3
  zpool add tank cache /dev/sdb1
  zpool add tank log /dev/sdb2
  zpool attach tank /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc2

(read cache and mirrored write cache on mountpoint /tank )

Flashcache:

flashcache_create -p thru home-cached /dev/sdc1 /dev/sda4
  mount /dev/mapper/home-cached /home

It just so happens that I specified my Thinkpad with Centrino wireless so the mSATA bay was available and I put a 120GB drive in there and it's really a beautiful thing. I haven't done the measurements, but flashcache in front of /home should cut down on the power usage, besides being a nice speed boost. For me, $1/GB was the magic number to make it worthwhile. Oh, and hey, if anybody wants to help with the implementation of /etc/cachetab, hop on the list!

Re:Can't wait

[hairyfeet]

The problem is like in X86 there isn't any real competition and I'd say its worse than in X86 because at least AMD, which I've been building exclusively for the past 5+ years, the performance is "good enough" for the vast majority of users including the gamers but in the HDD arena the competition is making such piss poor products that I'd be afraid to buy them.

You see pre-flood we had 4 players in the game, Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, and WD, but now there is only WD and Seagate and ever since the Maxtor buyout Seagate quality has really gone down the shitter so there isn't really any choice but WD. Pre-flood I was buying Samsung EcoGreens at $35 a TB but since the buyouts I've found anything that Seagate makes over 500Gb to be Russian roulette with your data while the WDs have a MUCH lower failure rate, at least from what I've seen in the shop.

So I'd say what they are doing certainly isn't illegal, although why they allowed Seagate and WD to buy out the competition to make it a duopoly I'll never know, but since Seagate seems unable to fix the serious failure rate of their over 500Gb drives you have WD charging 40%+ over what Seagate is charging and they'll get it as nobody wants to risk losing their data. Just go look at any of the BF and Xmas sales and you'll see what I mean, the Seagates are selling for $60-$70 for 1Tb, $70-$80 for a TB and a half, while WD is selling for $100 a Tb, $150 for a 2TB and they can't seem to keep them in stock whereas the Seagates have been on sale for weeks and they appear to have plenty of stock left.

Its not the market itself keeping the prices high, its the fact you really only have one supplier worth buying. Like I said you can take an AMD quad or Hexa and even the gamers will be happy with the performance but NOBODY is happy when they buy that cheapo Seagate 1.5TB and it craps itself in 3 months and takes their data with it. WD knows this so they keep their prices high, knowing that all it takes is getting burned by Seagate for a time or two for the customers to see its better to spend the money than lose their stuff. This is just a perfect example of "you get what you pay for" where someone who makes a better product charges more than the guy making cheap shit and this is why the prices remain high on the WD side of the aisle, they know their competition just can't seem to make a good product ATM.

Re:Can't wait

[WuphonsReach]

RAID is generally still a very bad idea with SSDs. The RAID controllers and software don't know how to communicate properly with the SSD.

Best bet with SSDs is to buy one, then buy a 2nd large hard drive along with setting up automatic weekly/monthly backups using some sort of disk imaging software (Acronis, etc). That way if the SSD does die, you can just restore from last week's or last month's backup.

Restoring from an Acronis backup usually takes 30-40 minutes, even over slow USB 2.0 speeds (20MB/s).

Re:Can't wait

[washu_k]

Doesn't cache writes, so it's only barely faster than a normal mechanical drive.

Re:Can't wait

[Beardydog]

Is your sig a Google Voice transcription?

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[RajivSLK]

Bad at Math and English. I thought he was using some kind of insider industry shorthand.

Re:Can't wait

[jbolden]

Which is really sad. WD used to be an innovator and Seagate used to sell high end SCSI drives. Oh well. Good info though.

Let's keep in mind who the customer is

[justthinkit]

The article is written to sell SSDs. We are the eyeballs needed by the SSD manufacturers. Telling us SSD prices are closer to 50 cents a gig will keep us away from anything more expensive than that. So they cook up some inflated price (like the MSRP) and will you look at that, I can find it a dime a gig cheaper! I'm buying one right now!!1!

Re:Can't wait

[Hes Nikke]

Yes.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[mattack2]

Woah, where are you getting a 3TB drive for $90? I saw 4 TB drives in a Fry's ad a few weeks ago for $199, but it hasn't repeated.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[slashmydots]

Don't post if you don't know what you're talking about. The 1-3 vertex and agility drives sucked. A TON of vertex 4's were returned because for the first 6 weeks after newegg got them, they shipped out with firmware that didn't work worth a crap. It would randomly remove the SSD from the BIOS detection test regularly. Now that 1.4 is out, Vertex 4's work absolutely perfectly. They can take 3x the write cycles of a normal drive, run an internal firmware-based TRIM command while the drive is idle, and come with a 3.5" adapter tray. There is no better drive for that price. Out of the 15 or so I've used for builds over the last year, I had no problems. Even the 4 laptops I put them in had no problems (except one didn't work because it isn't supported by Nvidia SATA controllers)

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[slashmydots]

And the Vertex and agility 4's aren't in there. 3 on down was beyond crap but 4 just had initial firmware problems. Now they're shipping with 1.4 and it's all good. Btw, everyone's precious little 330 Maplecrests from intel cannot be flashed. They refuse to show up under any conditions in the bootable flashing utility on SATA 2 or 3 connections with any chipset in any computer using any drive in any state of data holding. So those are out.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[slashmydots]

It's a "rate" not a count. But they barely even sell 1-3 or petrol or octane anymore so all those numbers are somewhat pointless. I wouldn't touch OCZ before 2012 and tada, they released something actually good. This is the 2nd and 3rd generation controller after buying the maker of the controller and now they have all the bugs worked out. Their earlier models didn't even use it in the first place so it's basically a different drive. Even Symantec finally released a version of Norton in 2012 that was actually good. That's the first time in like a decade! But past history doesn't change current facts and the fact is, OCZ 4 drives are awesome.

Re:Can't wait

[Rockoon]

I dont want the hardware to attempt to minimize the time that I am waiting for it via a guess about when I am waiting for it.

I am not waiting at bootup, for instance.

SSDs are kickass

[ripnet]

I have a 2011 macbook air, with the malware bundled with it (macos something or other) removed and replaced with win 8, and its by far the fastest computer ive ever used.

I blame the SSD.

Apps open instantly, visual studio doesnt take forever to open a project, explorer is responsive, and even the start menu search thing (supplied by a start menu emulation app) can do searches instantly (as could built in win7 start menu search), which makes opening apps, docs etc easy and useful.

SSDs are defo the future for desktops, with NAS hard drives for large stuff that doesnt need loads of random access (mpgs etc).

Re:What's the big deal with SSD?

[dfghjk]

You sound really educated on the subject.

Re:Can't wait

[DigiShaman]

Aside from the whole "death star" (Deskstar) fiasco awhile back, I only ever trusted IBM/Hitachi. As far as I'm concerned, they've always been the gold standard by which to judge a spindle by. Rock solid and reliable. For the most part anyways.

WD is a hit or miss. Either the drive last forever, or fails within the first year.
Maxtor = Crapster. Total shit!
Seagate = Depends on the year. It's as though it's just a brand name tossed back and forth under the management of either IBM or Maxtor like a game of hot potato. I'm guessing employment is a revolving door or something with both good and bad engineers coming and going.

just my 2 cents.

Re:WTF?!?!?!

[DigiShaman]

I only recently became aware of the whole OCZ SSD saga after having a Vertex 2 go tits up on me. However, the price/performance of the Vertex 4 was too tempting for me not to buy it. Because it used a newer controller with firmware, I decided to gamble thinking the bugs effecting V2 are not in V4.

So far after six months of use 24/7 on a shared desktop (Win7 Fast User Switching feature), we haven't had any problems so far. **knock on wood**

Re:Can't wait

[jbolden]

Oh I see didn't realize the management was switching that dramatically.

Re: WTF?!?!?!

[dropadrop]

That return rate is measured by a retailler so it will also seem lower for a manufacturer who takes direct RMA's from European customers vs ones that prefer you go through the store. I believe OCZ accepts direct returns.

Re:Can't wait

[hairyfeet]

Well all I can tell ya is what I've seen in the shop and what I've learned from fellow shop owners and the consensus is that Seagate over 500Gb = Shit. Its a combination of really cheap shitty ARM controllers that overheat and fuck up combined with really piss poor firmware but frankly I've dealt with so damned many dead Seagate 1TB and up drives that I honestly would be afraid to use 'em. in fact I'd trust a refurb Samsung or Hitachi over a Seagate new, yes they are THAT bad. We are talking click death in weeks, sometimes in days, and once it goes it just trashes the data, the firmware just totally fucks up the drive geometry so good luck recovering squat.

So I'll tell ya like I tell my customers, there is a REASON why you are seeing Seagate 1TB drives for as little as $50 on sale while the WD drives are starting at $100, its because so many have lost their data thanks to the Seagates shitting on themselves that the companies just can't move 'em. Go look at the feedback for ANY Seagate drive above 500Gb, especially their 7200RPM 1TB and 2TB drives and you'll see page after page of "It borked after a month, I lost everything. won't buy again" because they really are just trash. Before the Maxtor buyout Seagate and WD were both decent, not superb but decent, now as I said I'd take a refurb from anybody else before a new seagate, they just aren't trustworthy.

Hell I just had to walk a guy online through building a clean box because his less than 3 month old Seagate 1.5TB took a shit and the only copies of his family photo album went with it, if that don't tell you what kind of junk they are I don't know what will.

Re:Can't wait

[MightyMartian]

Don't, but there was little price saving in smaller SSDs.

Re:Can't wait

[complex_pi]

You forgot to add the mandatory closing:
e) Profit!

Re:Can't wait

[highphilosopher]

I've never had an SSD, and had a very bad experience with a first gen one.

How does that work?

Revodrive

[elucido]

Agree! Currently I'm using a Corsair F120 for my SO and main games and apps. The rest of my stuff goes to normal, run of the mill HDD. This SSD was probably the most effective upgrade I've ever done, both in terms of value for money (payed around 120 € more than a year ago) as well as pure performance. I think that having a main SSD drive (a 120 GB one will be enough for having the SO + some stuff), along with one or more additional standard HDD should be next "unofficial" mandatory config any new computer nowadays.

I don't bother with HDD except external storage. The Revodrive works great and uses the PCI x16 port.

Re:Can't wait

[mgcarley]

Interestingly, I'm having problems with both brands at the moment. About 4 years ago I switched almost exclusively from Seagate to WD but as of this moment I have 3 out of 3 of my personal collection of 1 & 2TB WD disks sitting in cold-storage awaiting recovery along with what was my last remaining Seagate 1TB disk (that actually came out of an external case I'd purchased, so I didn't have a choice of HDD manufacturer)... and 4 Seagate 250/320GB disks that have been waiting for recovery for about 2 years now but which I'm less worried about now.

All 3 of the aforementioned WD disks failed after 9-12 months (3 or 5 year warranties I can't remember, but I need to get the data off them before I RMA them) so now all bets on hard-drives are off, and right now I'm trying to find better ways of storing my large media (but my small/important documents are mirrored on 8 USB devices and 3 cloud-based backup services) before I decide whether to bother with another mechanical disk or just buy the biggest baddest SSD I can find - or maybe a bunch of MicroSD cards as they're decent enough value right now.

Bad luck? Perhaps. But still annoying.

Re:Can't wait

[stoatwblr]

I can already buy SSD DOM (disk on module) only slightly larger than the SATA connector in sizes up to 128Gb. They aren't particularly cheap but they're a great solution for diskless setups (fewer cables) where the main requirement is a read-mostly device and most storage is on the LAN.

Re:Can't wait

[hairyfeet]

Want some advice? hunt the net for some Samsung EcoGreen drives, I don't care if you have to take refurb but of course new would be better and BUY THEM. I have put those drives in some truly hellish places, we're talking construction trailers and warehouse floors where the dirt and the grime makes everything just gross but they take insane amounts of abuse and keep on coming. I was so impressed i yanked the drives on my personal systems and replaced them with EcoGreens across the board, even the boot drives are 1TB Ecogreen. And I have to say that after running some benches that the 32Mb cache on these drives actually give them better throughput than the 500Gb Seagates they replaced while running a good 30 degrees F cooler. If you can't find the EcoGreen the Hitachi pre-buyout are also quite good, but those 1TB and 2TB EcoGreens were frankly built like tanks.

And you do NOT want to use an SSD for data storage, you REALLY don't, the reason? I have found the controllers can fail at ANY time with ZERO warning and when it does unless you have the skills to desolder the boards and rebuild the data from the chips its gone forever, poof! Hell I don't even know of any data recovery services that will attempt it with a dead SSD controller, its pretty much considered a lost cause.

I'll treat you just like you were my customer and just give you the straight dope just as I would them. if you came into my shop with this problem? I'd tell you a combination of BD and a Samsung EcoGreen for long term storage. At $1 for each 25GB disc Blu Rays actually make a pretty economical storage solution right now and as long as you keep them out of heat and sunlight it looks like they'll last as long as burned DVDs, which is on average at least 5-10 years. When you combine this with a nice 1TB or 2TB EcoGreen you'll have your data safe, if one fails you have the other, and frankly its economical at the same time as an external case is less than $15 and you can find an Ecogreen online for less than $100.

Re:Can't wait

[mgcarley]

I'll take your advice on the EcoGreen drives and see what I can find (couldn't find them in India, may have to resort to Europe or the US as I'll be on both continents over the next couple of weeks)... but the BDs... maybe not - simply *because* I travel, and GB for GB, they're kinda heavy (not great for travelling)... and living in India, keeping them out of heat is... not the easiest (so not great for storing, either... at least unless I store them in the server room, but that would defeat the purpose of having them ready to access "at will").

I suppose maybe having 2 copies (1 on BD, 1 on HDD) might be a good compromise so that I can keep the BDs in the server room and the HDDs on my person... which seems to be what you've suggested... hence... yeah, I'll probably do that. Combine with having my boot drive as an SSD (so it's fast but data is easily replaceable) and I... neato. Problem "solved". Sort of. I guess. Thanks.