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Crucial Launches MX100 SSD At Well Under 50 Cents Per GiB

Posted by Unknown on from the cheaper-better-faster dept.

MojoKid (1002251) writes "Crucial has been on a tear as of late. In the last few weeks alone, the company has released a couple of new series of solid state drives, one targeting the enthusiast segment (the M550) and the other targeting data centers (the M500DC). Today, Crucial is at it again with the launch of the brand new MX100 series. The Crucial MX100 series of solid state drives is somewhat similar to the M550 in that they both use the same Marvell controller. The MX100, however, is outfitted with more affordable 16nm NAND flash, and as such, the drives are priced aggressively at about .43 per GiB. However, these MX100 series of drives are still rated for 550MB/s sequential reads with 500MB/s (512GB), 330MB/s (256GB), or 150MB/s (128GB) and random read and write IOPS of 90K – 80K and 85K – 40K, respectively. The drives carry a 3-year warranty and are rated for 72TB total bytes written (TBW), which equates to 40GB written per day for 5 years. Performance-wise, these new lower cost SSDs, are on par with some of the fastest SSDs currently on the market but starting at $79.99 for the 128GB drive, they're relatively rather cheap."

68 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Ye Gods, an Ad by debatecoach · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is this supposed to be informative, or an ad? Has Crucial purchased a stake in slashdot?

    1. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by debatecoach · · Score: 1

      And bonus points to anyone who can correctly point out the literary reference in my post...

    2. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by mcrbids · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Perhaps it's an ad, but it's one that interests me. I come here to find out the latest developments in tech, and the continuing advances of SSDs is something I find interesting.

      HDDs have become so huge that the biggest problem isn't storage capacity, or even bandwidth: it's IOPS. It's pretty lame that I can store literally many millions of documents in a hard disk cluster that can only delivery a few hundred IOPS per second. Do the math. It takes forever to get your data out, especially if they are small documents!

      SSDs don't have this problem. 50,000 IOPS is "no big deal" for an SSD, meaning that even if you have 40 million tiny 10k documents, you can still saturate your 6 Gbit SATA interface with sweet, sweet data.

      We switched our DB servers to SSDs and saw over 90% reduction in average query latency. Next up is our file stores, which use ZFS. Our next step is an SSD cache for ZFS, and then as prices continue to tumble, we'll switch to all SSDs everywhere.

      --
      I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
    3. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by timeOday · · Score: 1

      If this goes much further I could imagine seeing articles about the iPhone 6 on news sites someday!

    4. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by justthinkit · · Score: 1

      The Music Man...

      --
      I come here for the love
    5. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by fnj · · Score: 1

      No, sorry, you couldn't get a million amps out of your wall socket if you turned the voltage down to 0.0018v. First, a million amps would incinerate your #14 copper wire and set fire to the house. Second, IR losses in #14 wire at such an absurdly low voltage would prevent the current from reaching anywhere near that high.

      Similarly, you obviously don't understand how IOPs relate directly, for example, to database performance, and how pretty much any SSD is 100 to 1000 times the speed of any rotating disk drive for that kind of application.

    6. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by mcrbids · · Score: 5, Informative

      IOPs are anything but meaningless. For any kind of performance computing, they are one of the most commonly unrecognized bottleneck.

      IOPS is simple: how many random seeks can your storage device perform? If you can scootch your heads to the starting sector once per second, you have 1 IOP. Divide the rotational speed of your drive by 60. EG: 7200/60 = 120. That's the literal maximum number of seeks you can get out of your hard disk heads assuming that there is no seek time.

      The "k of operations" is irrelevant when discussing IOPS.

      How an idea so simple could be so commonly misunderstood is beyond me. It's true that IOPS won't matter if you are streaming a single, large media file. It's equally true that you can't serve more than about 120 random seeks in a second on a 7200 RPM drive. This is disguised a bit because your OS will try to minimize the seeks and aggregate seeks that are similar and/or close together.

      SSDs are now only about 5x the cost of HDDs in many cases. In past years, it's typical to have, multi-disk arrays solely to improve performance. In these cases, a single SSD can be not only dramatically faster, but significantly cheaper to boot.

      --
      I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
    7. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by bjwest · · Score: 2, Funny

      Dracula. Stake is referenced quite often in that story.

      --

      --- Keep the choice with the user..
    8. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by Martin+Blank · · Score: 2

      I know a number of people who make use of virtualization on notebooks, and SSDs help dramatically there. I switched to an SSD on my home system and since then, it's become painful being on any system with an HDD because of the latency caused by the drive. I'm trying to talk my boss into letting me get an SSD for my work notebook as I usually have at least one VM running and often two, and the competition for the hard drive is killing me.

      It's not a necessary thing for every person who has a notebook, but it's a much larger fraction than car owners who have a Ferrari in the garage.

      --
      You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
    9. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by mcrbids · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Fair enough. You are still orders of magnitude worse off than a decent SSD, which is the relevant point.

      --
      I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
    10. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by arth1 · · Score: 1

      Errata: s/\(mostly-\)write/\1read/1

      (But I guess everybody understood that from the context anyhow.)

    11. Re: Ye Gods, an Ad by asliarun · · Score: 1

      If you are looking for an even bigger performance jump, upgrade to pci-e based ssd. Works very very well for databases and for certain types of workloads. Fusion-io, Intel, and dell sell enterprise versions, but many other vendors are rapidly getting into this segment as well.

    12. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by dougisfunny · · Score: 1

      I think maybe the idea is that in 5 years when it wears out the new tech available will be so much better you'd want to replace the drive anyway.

      --
      This is not the funny you're looking for.
    13. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by larryjoe · · Score: 1

      IOPS is simple: how many random seeks can your storage device perform? If you can scootch your heads to the starting sector once per second, you have 1 IOP. Divide the rotational speed of your drive by 60. EG: 7200/60 = 120. That's the literal maximum number of seeks you can get out of your hard disk heads assuming that there is no seek time.

      Hmm, if you assume there is no seek time, then ideally IOPS will be 120 if your request size is exactly a full track, which is almost never the case. IOPS will be 1s / (seek_time + rotational_latency + access_time + overhead). How many IOPS you can get from a 7200rpm drive depends on a lot of factors. Are the requests uniformly randomly distributed? Is NCQ enabled? What is the max track span of the requests? If the max track span is narrow and on the outer part of the disk, then you can get a lot IOPS, quite a bit more than 120.

      SSDs are now only about 5x the cost of HDDs in many cases. In past years, it's typical to have, multi-disk arrays solely to improve performance. In these cases, a single SSD can be not only dramatically faster, but significantly cheaper to boot.

      Whether or not an SSD is worthwhile depends on the use case. I just put a low-end SSD in an old desktop to replace an HDD. The performance difference was basically negligible. I was quite disappointed. The system bootup was a bit faster, but application startup wasn't any better. And, since I always put my machine to sleep instead of shutting down, bootup times are unimportant. Fortunately, I could live with the dramatically smaller storage capacity because my main storage is on another machine. In contrast, I doubled the DRAM on my other machine, and the performance boost was amazing. The $30 I spent on the DRAM was a much better investment than the $70 for the SSD.

    14. Re: Ye Gods, an Ad by debatecoach · · Score: 1

      Ok I'll give it to just think it. I was thinking of "The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss but apparently the colloquialism exists beyond my experience. A great read by the way. Which is ironic, as I criticized the ad and included an ad for my favorite series...

    15. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by AlterEager · · Score: 1

      SSDs don't have this problem. 50,000 IOPS is "no big deal" for an SSD, meaning that even if you have 40 million tiny 10k documents, you can still saturate your 6 Gbit SATA interface with sweet, sweet data.

      SATA. Bleurgh. How do you do multi-initiator with SATA?

      If it's not SAS I can't see any use for it.

    16. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by danknight48 · · Score: 1

      How an idea so simple could be so commonly misunderstood is beyond me. It's true that IOPS won't matter if you are streaming a single, large media file.

      You really need to consider fragmentation is a major issue on spindle drive performance.
      SSD's have no issue with fragmentation simply because their IOPS is so high and seek time is near 0ms~.
      IOPS does kind of matter :)

      Wonder how much of 2 minutes can be cut for loading up a VS2013 project, on one of these bad boy SSD's.

    17. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Are you sure about that? It is in random writes SSD has it's STRENGTH compared to HDD, simply because of the lack of seeking. I would have absolutely no issue with putting a write-heavy DB on SSD, but transaction logs would go to single spindle HDD, which gives better sequentual writes, and does not meet the wall when the SSD has used up all of it''s "erased" space. SSD's don't really write directly, first, they have to erase, then they write. Only when it is completely saturated, and there are no more free blocks to use, will writes times go bad.

      Oracle databases do not actually perform random writes that impact the response times. When Oracel DB writes, it is either to data files, undo , or redo logs. undo and redo are strictly sequential writes. They do impact reponse times. Data file writes (checkpoint) do not impact response times. These are run in the background, either self started early, or upon log file switch. On a HDD, DBWR writes however indirectly affect response time because they increase load on the spindle, that is also used for reads. So if your DBWR adds 60 random writes per second to your HDD and your session try to read 60 randon blocks per second, you're all maxed. On an SSD, you're not even starting to sweat yet, they can customarily do 5k reads/s and 2k+ writes/s.

      15krpm HDD is only a marginal improvement over 10krpm HDD, and these days, disks come with such insane capacities (> TB), that the DBA or unix admin has to be bvigilant to prevent the users from thinking they can actualy use all that space. To scale a HDD based database for high performnce, you might need to buy 10 TB of HDD to service teh IOPS of a busy 500 GB OLTP DB. Then the HDD is not so cheap anymore.....

    18. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by nabsltd · · Score: 1

      Consumer grade SSD not quite there, but 5 years at 40 GB per day is not too shabby. That is 40 GB writing. Spread that across 5 drives in a raid, and we have 160 GB writing per day, far beyond what most consumers need.

      Although I agree that even consumer SSDs don't really have any issues with write endurance in the real world, any RAID level other than RAID-0 doesn't increase the overall endurance.

      This is because all other RAID levels require every drive to be written whenever there is any write.

    19. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by larryjoe · · Score: 1

      The goal of the upgrade was an easy performance upgrade, i.e., pop it in and enjoy the speed.

      What my experience shows is that DRAM costs less, yields a better performance increase, and most importantly is plug-and-play. Obviously, different machines and operational workloads will affect results, but if SSD performance is not plug-and-play, the value proposition for many users is greatly diminished.

    20. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      What my experience shows is that DRAM costs less, yields a better performance increase, and most importantly is plug-and-play. Obviously, different machines and operational workloads will affect results, but if SSD performance is not plug-and-play, the value proposition for many users is greatly diminished.

      It's really in knowing where the bottlenecks are in the system.

      In an old PC, or even a recent one using say, an old Atom processor, SSDs don't increase performance because the CPU is the bottleneck - the entire system is slow to begin with so the CPU is basically chewing through code while the disk is busy fetching data.

      In more modern systems, the CPU is fast enough that there's not enough extra work for it that it ends up waiting on the disk.

      DRAM is always the best fix especially if the main reason the system is slow is thrashing (in which case the CPU is basically idle because it has to wait for the data to come off disk and any runnable tasks don't run for long periods because they too need to swap in). An SSD can hide this issue because swapping does a lot of small I/O, so IOPS saves the day.

      DRAM, of course, fixes the root cause - the system is doing too much for the memory load.

      Of course, if your doing something that hits the disk a lot, an SSD helps because most apps pause and block while doing disk I/O, so having the SSD respond quickly makes life a lot more bearable. Especially if the disk cache starts ballooning and forcing apps to swap out.

    21. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by WuphonsReach · · Score: 1

      That 50k iops were measured in what? 4k operations? 16k? What? I could claim I can pull 1 million amps out of my house socket, which would be true... as long as the voltage is 0.0018v. IOPs are just as meaningless.

      In general, real-world usage, a good rule-of-thumb is 100:1 speed up for random seeks when comparing SSDs to 7200 RPM drives. Maybe only 50:1 for 15k SAS drives.

      Since enterprise SSDs are only about 2x-3x the cost of the equivalent sized 15k SAS drive, you have to ask whether that 50x-100x improvement in seek speed is worth the 2x-3x drive cost.

      (Rough cost of enterprise SSD is $1.50-$2.50 per GB right now.)

      For a lot of use cases, where your drive spindles are 100% busy frequently, SSDs are a good solution. They're cost-efficient if you were having to short-stroke a bunch of 15k SAS drives in order to get enough performance. If you were short-stroking your SAS drives and only using 1/3 of the drive space, why not use 3x fewer SSD drives of the same size and save space / money / power in the rack?

      --
      Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
    22. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by doccus · · Score: 1

      Could be.. since the "special pricing" seems to be on par with all the rest...

    23. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      They already last very long. Enterprise SSD drives for the most part has longer expected life times than HDD, and are less prone to failure. They just put in extra capacity, and use clever controllers. Consumer grade SSD not quite there, but 5 years at 40 GB per day is not too shabby. That is 40 GB writing. Spread that across 5 drives in a raid, and we have 160 GB writing per day, far beyond what most consumers need.

      Yes, I know all this, BUT... they are not cost-competitive with hard drives, except perhaps for the enterprise.

    24. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      Although I agree that even consumer SSDs don't really have any issues with write endurance in the real world, any RAID level other than RAID-0 doesn't increase the overall endurance.

      They have always had issues with write endurance, since Day One. It has been their Achilles Heel. In fact, the MLC chips have less endurance than the older SLC chips. They partially get around that with extra capacity and better controllers. But it's still their sole weak point.

      I have 7- and 8-year-old hard drives with nary a problem. Not all last that long, but many do. And when they fail it's usually mechanically, not due to limited life of the platters.

      The fact is, we don't even know if these new units will live up to their rated endurance. They use estimates and statistical methods to come up with those figures. They haven't been around long enough to know. But if the earlier models are any indication of real life vs. rated life, a lot of people are in for a nasty surprise.

    25. Re:Ye Gods, an Ad by nabsltd · · Score: 1

      They have always had issues with write endurance, since Day One. It has been their Achilles Heel.

      Not according to real world testing.

      Those are 240-256GB drives that have all had 600TB written to them, and many haven't even started to dip into the protected sectors. That's already up to 2400 P/E cycles on drives with 3000 or less on their specs. To put it into real-world terms, that's the equivalent of completely erasing the drive every day for 6.5 years. I think they'll last the same 7 to 8 years as your hard drives when used more realistically.

  2. Function Not Working by Oysterville · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have the Disable Ads box checked. Technical glitch?

    1. Re:Function Not Working by lexman098 · · Score: 1

      I thought they removed that feature. Maybe my karma isn't good enough anymore...

    2. Re:Function Not Working by mysidia · · Score: 1

      I saw an ad in a floating box Contrary to Google AdSense policies. I came back to the page later, and couldn't get a good sample again to screencast, but i'm almost positive something uncool is going on here....

    3. Re:Function Not Working by Jahoda · · Score: 4, Funny

      It's due to be fixed in the next beta release.

    4. Re:Function Not Working by nctritech · · Score: 1

      I've never seen such a thing. Adblock Plus and all that rot.

    5. Re:Function Not Working by John+Bokma · · Score: 1

      Example of a floating ad on slashdot: http://toxicice.com/images/sla... What's the point of being allowed to disable ads and still getting this crap? IIIRC it started to show up last week. At first I just got an empty rectangle (Flash content?) but now it "works". Very clever, this will just move more people to adblock et al.

      --

      Perl Programmer for hire
  3. Re:Well under $.50 per GiB? by mythosaz · · Score: 3, Informative

    The 512 is $224, which is $0.43

    http://www.amazon.com/s/?_enco...

  4. wwooo by binarylarry · · Score: 1, Funny

    I'm going to go buy 100 of these right now because I read this on slashdot, who Okolona buddy!

    --
    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
  5. Good prices, not spectacular by Guspaz · · Score: 2

    The prices are good, but they're not much cheaper than existing drives; the Samsung 840 EVO 1TB goes for $450, or $0.45/GB.

    Micron's advantage is that they're using MLC, while the 840 EVO is using TLC.

    1. Re:Good prices, not spectacular by fnj · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Also, the MX100 has data protection capacitors to ride out power fails without corrupting data. The Samsung 840 EVO has none. That means one hell of a lot to me and is much more important than comparative raw speeds.

    2. Re:Good prices, not spectacular by jon3k · · Score: 1

      EVO is TLC flash.

    3. Re:Good prices, not spectacular by Guspaz · · Score: 1

      Umm, yeah, I kind of said that in my post. The one you replied to.

  6. Re:Flash manufacturer. by TWX · · Score: 1

    You mean that SSD that I bought from the scruffy-looking fellow in the parking lot might not be legit?

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
  7. Re:Flash manufacturer. by Krishnoid · · Score: 1

    Toshiba also belongs to this club, but they only recently seem to be making SSDs available to the masses.

  8. Re: Can I trust 'em? by binarylarry · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You should never trust any drive and always backup your data.

    --
    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
  9. Re: Can I trust 'em? by Aryden · · Score: 1

    +1 if I had mod points.

  10. Re:Can I trust 'em? by gman003 · · Score: 1

    I have a laptop with both a Crucial M4 and a regular hard drive. It's been going strong for two years now (well, the display is dying but that's not really relevant). Going off history, I expect the hard drive to die first, but I admit that's a completely unscientific prediction.

    You were right to be cautious, though - back in the early days of SSDs, there were many that were absolute crap (OCZ drives had horrible failure rates, and JMicron controllers were rubbish performance-wise). Intel was really the only one worth buying from. Nowadays there are plenty of good companies to buy from. Intel and Samsung are probably the best, but Crucial is up there in the lists.

  11. Re:Flash manufacturer. by vux984 · · Score: 1

    Intel, Samsung, Sandisk, and Micron.

    I've had nothing but success from Mushkin SSDs; and they generally seem very well reviewed; Is there something wrong with them I should know about?

  12. meh by epyT-R · · Score: 1

    I wouldn't want to depend on this as my usage patterns tend to kill ssds prematurely. It's nice they're getting cheaper though.

  13. I'm curious by justthinkit · · Score: 1

    I'm curious if data centers are moving to SSDs.
    Also, what about hosting companies, for high traffic web sites they host. I could see this as a premium service.

    --
    I come here for the love
    1. Re:I'm curious by mcrbids · · Score: 1, Flamebait

      Yes Yes yes! SSDs are a God-send for performance issues!

      Database servers? Check!

      Caches? Check!

      Session Managers? Check!

      Load Balancers? Check!

      As stated by Reddit: Think of SSDs as cheap RAM, not expensive disk.

      --
      I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
  14. I routinely get new 550MB/s 120GB SSDs for $60 by nctritech · · Score: 1

    Newegg routinely discounts the Kingston V300 120GB SSD to $60 if you watch out for it (currently at $75 as of this posting). Why pay $80 when you can pay $60 for the same size and performance? If this post is an ad, it kinda sucks.

    1. Re:I routinely get new 550MB/s 120GB SSDs for $60 by PRMan · · Score: 1

      I have a Kingston and other than the time that the room got up over 110 degrees F (and it lost all its data) it's been fine. Great, actually.

      --
      Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
    2. Re:I routinely get new 550MB/s 120GB SSDs for $60 by BradMajors · · Score: 1

      Because $79.99 is the list price before Newegg discounting.

    3. Re:I routinely get new 550MB/s 120GB SSDs for $60 by citizenr · · Score: 1

      Scaminston V300?

      http://www.anandtech.com/show/...

      Half the speed at same price? count me in!11

      --
      Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
    4. Re:I routinely get new 550MB/s 120GB SSDs for $60 by nctritech · · Score: 1

      Thanks for that, it was interesting. It also explains why one of the V300 SSDs I bought in a batch for a set of desktop builds tested out at half the raw read speed when the standard hard drive diagnostic was performed. (Still pretty darn fast though.)

    5. Re:I routinely get new 550MB/s 120GB SSDs for $60 by harrkev · · Score: 1

      Kingston 480G is $250 right now on the Egg. The 512G crucial is $225.

      Sorry, but the Crucial drives have good reviews from the hardware sites, and are actually quite cheap for the capacity. 1/2 terrabyte of solid state for well under $250? Yes, please.

      --
      "-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
  15. Re:Flash manufacturer. by Krishnoid · · Score: 1

    Mushkin is a pretty reputable name, but if they ended up going with a less-reliable source, they could blame SSD failures on the flash manufacturer.

    A large well-known flash manufacturer trying to point the finger for SSD failures would damage the reputation of their own flash memory and SSD divisions, so my assumption is that they wouldn't release a consumer product at all if it would put them in that position.

  16. Marvell? Ugh. by Gondola · · Score: 1

    Have had terrible experiences with Marvell. I know, anecdotal. YMMV.

    1. Re:Marvell? Ugh. by SeaFox · · Score: 1

      Have had terrible experiences with Marvell. I know, anecdotal. YMMV.

      That stands for "your Marvell may vary" in this case, right?

  17. Re:Well under $.50 per GiB? by eddy · · Score: 1

    Very disappointing. So it's almost exactly the same price as the products that are already out but using 2x nm NAND. Oh well, I guess it's my fault for thinking Crucial would actually make a move here.

    --
    Belief is the currency of delusion.
  18. Re:Flash manufacturer. by petermgreen · · Score: 1

    They also recently bought the SSD part of OCZ which had a reputation for being one of the shittiest SSD makers around. I'd want to hold off for a while to see if they can turn that around before buying their SSDs.

    --
    note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
  19. Flash by ThatsNotPudding · · Score: 1

    I still have a conventional disk in my desktop rig. I also frequently end up with a web page with Flash that nearly brings the entire comp to it's knees, due to near-constant disk activity. It's bad enough my electro-mechanical drive is being worn down by garbage software; not sure I could live with an SSD being literally consumed by the same indefensible cause.

  20. Re:GiB by AlterEager · · Score: 1

    For all you Euro computer idiots....

    Computers don't operate in decimal, they operate in binary.

    Oh really?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1620

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICT_1300

  21. Re:GiB by rwise2112 · · Score: 1

    For all you Euro computer idiots....

    Computers don't operate in decimal, they operate in binary.

    Oh really?

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1620

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICT_1300

    I think those use binary coded decimal like the 6502/6510, which means it's still binary.

    --

    "For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
  22. Re:GiB by Eunuchswear · · Score: 1

    If you count to ten on your fingers are you working in unary or decimal?

    Both the 1620 and the 1301 worked in decimal, store was available in 10's, 100's or 1000's of words.

    Anyway, if insist on claiming that those decimal machines were "really" binary.

    What about ternary machines? Where each "bit" position could have one of three values. E.G. Setun.

    --
    Watch this Heartland Institute video
  23. Re:"at about .43 per GiB." by Abstrackt · · Score: 1

    GB = 1000 megabytes.
    GiB = 1024 megabytes.

    Basically, GB is how the users and hard drive manufacturers see it and GiB is how the computers (and computer people) see it. So no, they don't mean GB in this case.

    --
    They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
  24. Re:Can I trust 'em? by jon3k · · Score: 1

    Dumbest question of the year - "Should I backup my hard drive?"

  25. not going to be suckered into reading the ad by chstwnd · · Score: 1

    but here's my observation .43 * 128 != 79.99 so, right off the bat, whatever this drivel is may be assumed a lie, garbage or both.

  26. Re:Well under $.50 per GiB? by BRGeek · · Score: 1

    The $0.43 is for the larger verisons. The 256 gb is $109.99(.429) and the 512 gb is $224.99(.439). The summary is misleading though for not including these prices.

  27. Re: Can I trust 'em? by lsatenstein · · Score: 1

    You should never trust any drive and always backup your data.

    Can you trust the backup drive?

    --
    Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
  28. Re:GiB by rwise2112 · · Score: 1

    If you count to ten on your fingers are you working in unary or decimal?

    Both the 1620 and the 1301 worked in decimal, store was available in 10's, 100's or 1000's of words.

    Anyway, if insist on claiming that those decimal machines were "really" binary.

    What about ternary machines? Where each "bit" position could have one of three values. E.G. Setun.

    Good point!

    I'd argue that fingers are actually binary as well: two states, either counted (1) or not (0).

    I never heard of the ternary computer before, that's interesting!

    --

    "For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"