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Laptop SSD Capacity To Remain Flat As NAND Flash Dearth Causes Prices To Rise (computerworld.com)
Lucas123 writes from a report via Computerworld: Laptop manufacturers aren't likely to offer higher capacity standard SSDs in their machines this year as a shortage of NAND flash is pushing prices higher this year. At the same time, nearly half of all laptops shipped this year will have SSDs versus HDDs, according to a new report from DRAMeXchange. The contract prices for multi-level cell (MLC) SSDs supplied to the PC manufacturing industry for those laptops are projected to go up by 12% to 16% compared with the final quarter of 2016; prices of triple-level cell (TLC) SSDs are expected to rise by 10% to 16% sequentially. "The tight NAND flash supply and sharp price hikes for SSDs will likely discourage PC-[manufacturers] from raising storage capacity," said Alan Chen, a senior research manager of DRAMeXchange. "Therefore, the storage specifications for mainstream PC [...] SSDs are expected to remain in the 128GB and 256GB [range]."
They're still using 5400 RPM HDDs in their low-end-yet-too-expensive Macs.
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I had to load my ASSEMBLER programs from carved rocks.
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Is it more reasonable to assume that the markets have legitimately drained the supply, or that the whole industry is keeping a lid on it? SSDs seem to have become nigh ubiquitous on the convertible laptop/tablets, and an extremely common upgrade for even low-end laptops... Also, older news on this (i see things dating from Q4'16) offered the suggestion that relief might be coming by now. https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
At any rate, let's just hope that as many manufacturers as possible survive as long as possible to avoid establishing one of them as the WD of NAND. Hopefully things will stay competitive for a while longer.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
I've had SSD's exclusively for 8 years now. No failures. Of course I never bought OCZ pieces of shit.
When any hard drive fails you can lose everything immediately and all at once. That's why you have backups. You have backups, right?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
When a spinning disk fails, you usually get some auditory clues beforehand.
I had hard drives that failed immediately and without warning after five years of 24/7 service. SMART alerts can indicate when a failure is likely months before it happens. I routinely replace the HDDs in my file server every five years.
Plus they wear out all too quickly.
My coworker told me that his six-year-old 120GB SSD that he got for $200 finally gave up the ghost. He got a replacement 240GB SSD for $75.
SSD's are great. I usually buy cheap refurb and fairly low-end laptops for personal use, and putting a cheap SSD in them is a cost-effective way to get them to perform fairly well.
All drives are ticking time bombs, that's why you need backups if you don't want to lose data and RAID if availability is important.
HDDs suddenly fail sometimes. And although it is a less common failure mode than on SSDs, you can't rely on auditory clues. Also, you are unlikely to ever hit the wear limit on SSDs with a normal workstation or gamer type usage. Something else will break before that.
When I first started to buy SSD's for my school, I tried to do some research and quickly became confused about the differences between TLC, MLC, and SLC. I found various sites like this one that gave a good overview, but I didn't find very many that really analyzed the performance differences.
I settled on the Kingston V300 series of disks, an MLC unit that seemed to get decent reviews. It's been treating us well, but I always wonder whether the MLC was worth the extra money over the UV400, a slightly cheaper TLC variant.
Has anyone ever used both MLC and TLC drives and care to comment about whether the differences in performance justify the cost?
lucky you. I have had multiple failures. 1 Sandisk, 1 Intel and 3 fucking Samsung EVO's (which I will never buy again). never tried OCZ but hard to imagine they are worse than Samsung and of course I have backups.
The price of a Mac includes an Xcode license. If you don't need Xcode, consider buying something other than a Mac.
Well, today's 5400 RPM drives are not the same as yesterday's. Increased density makes them much faster than they used to be
An increase in density increases throughput, not latency. It still takes the same amount of time (up to 60000÷5400 = 11 ms) to spin a particular sector toward the head, plus however long it took the head to move to the appropriate cylinder.
let's just hope that as many manufacturers as possible survive as long as possible to avoid establishing one of them as the WD of NAND.
I thought SanDisk was the WD of NAND since May 2016
Correction, you cannot rely in auditory clues at all in consumer grade hardware. Server grade at least give you some clues.
All drives are ticking time bombs, that's why you need backups if you don't want to lose data and RAID if availability is important.
Amusingly late last year I had that exact same discussion with my wife about her 12 month old Mac, explaining that all drives eventually fail. She laughed saying she has never had a problem and said I was just doing my usual anti apple thing, so I shrugged and let her have her way. She was in tears the following weak when her drive did fail and she lost a heap of photos and I got some suspicious looks wondering if somehow I had something to do with it. I avoided the "I told you so" line and simply got the drive replaced and showed her how to backup to my RAID backed storage server which also does scheduled backups.
My Pr0n collection is > 34 TB (archiving all downloads since ~2006).
It's a great Big(Binary)Dataâ, storage platforms and heterogeneous metadata test environment!
Dialectician. Archology.
A decent Steam account can push 10tb, no problem.
Unless you're buying a lot of drives, if you went through that many, you might want to replace your power supply because something is wrong.
Like Dunbal, I've had a slew of them (well over a dozen) and put them in a lot of customer systems with very few problems.
Processing your work is not actually something you turn on and off, yet people treat it that way.
How the hell is an HDD in a server, sitting in a data center, in a rack with another dozen units, all with fans going at full speed, going to give auditory clues to the people who aren't anywhere nearby to hear them?
SSD failures should usually be repairable by swapping controllers. Though I can see a possibility for the NAND itself to be damaged.
They don't build them like they used to as they are true commodity parts now. SSDs should live for decades in a low-data-writing system.
I find it almost unbelievable that people are still sold computers with old-fashioned HDDs. At the coffee machine, a secretary told me they bought a spanking new iMac. "But it's so slow", she asked, "is that normal?"
I told her to bring it back and get a model with an SSD. She didn't know what it was. I find it unbelievable that salespersons still sell this shit to consumers.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
It is across 4 machines and over 7 years, so in total I have 5 active SSD's, each machine has had one die and one machine has had 2 die and no there is nothing wrong with powersupply in any of them. currently using Sandisk ones as I would not touch the piece of shit Samsung ones again if you paid me.
You weren't backing up your wife's data and you have a RAID storage server at home?
Can't you tighten it again?
I'd agree with you if HDDs didn't have any advantage over SSDs like price per byte...but since they do it's fair to think that someone may prefer the larger storage offered by HDDs
I had similar issues, except I stopped buying SSD after too many failures on totally different machines. Several Kingston, several Patriot, several Trancend, one Mushkin. Sure, none of the highly praised Samsungs. This was - of course - over 5 years ago, so I suspect they really had issues by being too new. Early adopter tax. I fell for it again. It put me off from SSDs for a long time. It's not that I lost any data, but the time lost was significant.
Only in November last year, I've gave them a try again. I got myself a Crucial MX300 275G which had excellent capacity/price ratio back then (something like 75EUR). I decided to give it a hard time and do LUKS full disk encryption. Since I had no problem with it, I decided to upgrade another laptop but the prices had soared significantly. Decided for a 128GB AData SU800. It also will be full disk encrypted. Installed it yesterday, can't say how reliable it is.
Neither of these machine will hold any significant data, because all SSD failures I had in the past were basically "sudden refusal to work at all". One day they worked, the other day: dead.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
And cheaper prices for those bigger sizes. It is easy to fill up those tiny cheap SSDs. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Unless your wife doesn't let you touch her machine, you have not much of an excuse.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The other AC was saying there's something wrong with the house's power lines, not each individual computer's power supply. A house can have poor quality wiring or lots of noise on the line. I'm not really sure how you get line noise, but from my experience from using devices that communicate through the power sockets, you can certainly have sockets in a house that are worse than others.
It doesn't matter if you have a HDD, an SSD, floppies, Zip disks, cassette tapes or stone tablets. Whatever you store your data on, if you dont have suitable backups your data is at risk.
Just because certain models of HDD may make noises in certain situations prior to failure doesn't mean HDDs are better than SSDs. I have had several HDDs go bust over the years without even the slightest hint that something was going to fail.
I have OCZ pieces of shit. 8 years, no failure.
Generalisations are fun. But you touch on something interesting: with firmware problems all but resolved now the failure of SSDs fall under predictable flash error rates. HDDs with moving parts however have their reliability defined by a roll of a dice in terms of random failure modes.
Actually unlucky you.
The GP's example sounds more like the norm. Also the aggregated failure rate of Samsungs is nothing to write home about, except for one Linux bug. Have you seen if you're PC is doing something specific that is causing it to trash drives? For the most part there is no general uproar about SSD reliability and other than one bug, nothing spectacular about Samsung. This is quite different to OCZ who sank their own company on their poor reliability and utter shit firmware.
Server grade at least give you some clues.
I am extremely skeptical about that. "Server grade" and "enterprise grade" are mainly marketing terms used to sell the same drives at triple the price. Several large scale longitudinal studies, by Google, Backblaze, and others, have found no reliability advantage to using "server grade" drives.
However, wouldn't that reflect in odd behaviour in all electronics? That would stand out, no?
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Clearly, we need a "100% opaque" upmod.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Usually the difference is in the firmware, not the reliability of the drives (though some older, primarily SCSI, server drives had lower capacity because they stored more error correcting information). Server drives are usually configured to report errors rather than remapping sectors, because they expect something at a higher level to handle the problems. This is especially true for drives expected to be used in a RAID configuration, where if there's a bad sector you'd rather mark the same sector unused on all drives than have them doing different head movements (your performance is limited by the slowest drive, so variation will make things slower).
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Hopefully this story has a happy ending, because you'd configured Time Machine to automatically back up and so after she learned that, yes, drives do fail, you were able to restore all of her data and she only lost at most a few hours of recent work. Or did you intentionally leave her in a configuration that you knew would fail so that you could look smug and superior later (and, if this is the kind of thing that you do, why is she still married to you)?
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These days, when people call a computer "slow" they mean that it takes a while to load web pages -- usually Facebook. Most web pages take a long time to load these days because of all the JavaScript and ads on them. It probably has nothing to do with the disk.
I don't trust SSDs. They always seemed like a ticking time bomb. When a spinning disk fails, you usually get some auditory clues beforehand.
When an SSD fails, you loose everything immediately and all at once. Plus they wear out all too quickly. You can only write to the same region hundreds of times before it fails.
I don't have SSDs, but as a former flash memory guy, I'm fine w/ them, although am skeptical about MLC flash. Nonetheless, I nowadays have OneDrive enabled to back up all my data for my Windows laptop. For my PC-BSD laptop, I have a 500GB drive that I can back up to.
Anyway, the way the semiconductor industry works, things happen in waves. Right now, there's a shortage, prices are rising, that will create a glut in the market as manufacturers try to make money of that demand, bringing down prices, thereby causing them to pull back, lather, rinse, repeat. In other words, SSD prices will drop again, and you'll see 2TB and 4TB SSDs.
For me, I've found 64GB to be adequate, so any laptop that has even 128GB of anything meets my needs. I don't download a ton of movies
I guess it depends on what you're doing with it. The full install of Visual Studio Community 2017 was up around 50 GB when I checked all the boxes. I ended up unchecking a few because I didn't want to use the space, and bringing the install somewhere close to 15 GB. Just the base install of Windows can get quite large once you add in things like the paging file and hiberfile.sys, and assuming your laptop has about 8 GB of RAM, you've already used up a significant portion of that 128 GB. If you just use your laptop for office and web browsing, then 128 GB will probably suffice anyway, but it's amazing how fast that space can get used up once you start using the space for a few other things.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Shortage of NAND flash?
Did we have a bad crop this year? How can you have a
sudden "shortage" -- or is it that no one bothered to expand capacity in a growing market to meet demand? Is that normal market strategy?
(maybe it is, but having paid $60 for an optical drive that cost $40 about 5 years ago and $25 for a comparable about 5 years before that, AND seeing big BluRay drive manufacturers had to pay large fines and 10-30$? rebates to end-buyers of computer manufacturers like Dell for illegal price fixing, I was surprised to see such a large price tag on the retail market.
Maybe the price fixing remedies only address manufacturers of computers and not retail sales?
Now how long before we get a 30$ rebate for flash price fixing?>
Your problem was that you were using Kingston, Patriot, etc... all third-rate SSD vendors who use whatever flash chips happen to be cheapest. Crucial (aka Micron), Samsung, and a few others are first-line vendors.
SSDs can certainly fail, but its kinda like PSUs... some vendors are first-line, most are not.
-Matt
I am price conscious and I did the same with disks. No problem whatsoever.
Sorry, it's just really a bad argument.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Why do people make this so hard? Replacing platters? Controllers? JUST BACK UP THE DATA.
Geez.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Don't you watch movies? ALL server / starship / government installation hardware fails with earth shattering kabooms, sparkles and smoke.
You can't miss it.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Video (there are other things besides porn).
High end digital photography (there are other things besides porn).
Both take up metric shitloads of space.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I also agree with you. At this point, it's kind of crazy that you would be buying an computer with an SSD. Of course SSD can't really be summed up with a nice big number. When they see one laptop with 1TB storage, and another laptop with 240 GB storage, most unaware users aren't going to really understand just how big the performance difference is between the two, but they will grasp the difference between 1 TB and 240 GB.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Shit? When you can get an 8TB SDD for $300 then come back and tell us that HDDs are shit.
Frankly I'd be more concerned if the consumer choice was no longer available.
How does one swap a controller on an SSD? The entire unit is a single solid chip board with everything soldered together.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I didn't say that 128 gigs is enough for everyone. Not even close. What I said was the following: 1) For the majority of your storage needs, use a networked drive. You very well might need to have access to 700 terabytes of storage, but you can access all that through a networked drive just fine. 2) Visual Studio Community 2017 fit's just fine on a 128 gb drive. The majority of the data you need access to on-the-go will likely fit within the remaining storage. What you don't need on-the-go you can store on a networked drive. 3) The very rare person that really needs access to MORE than 128 gb of storage on-the-go should simply consider a traditional hard drive.
Not necessarily the case. I have taken apart multiple desktop and enterprise/server grade drives to remove platters.
Every enterprise/server grade drive I've taken apart has slightly different construction inside - circuit boards are a different design, and the magnet/head assembly is MUCH beefier in the enterprise/server drives. It is, however, disheartening seeing over the last decade or so how cheap the manufacturers have become in construction of these drives.
"no there is nothing wrong with powersupply in any of them"
Did you actually test with a proper multimeter on every power rail or are you just talking out of your ass?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
With a heat gun. It's called reflow soldering, you should give it a try sometime, it's fun.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"If you need more, then you should be using a networked drive."
Yea, using a networked drive when playing an open-world game is such a smart fucking idea...
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I'm guessing the industry is in a transitional phase from the old to new fabrication (lithography) with no overlap in production.
Life is not for the lazy.
I'm not a big gamer. How many Open world games consume more than 120 Gigs of storage space?
I like that reason ... sounds almost truthy! :-)
Your 120GB HDD is currently 100GB due to OS and other pre-installed shit.
To boot, IOPS on a network-attached drive is Marianas Trench low, pretty much any modern game will suffer from performance issues.
Star Citizen alone when it launches will be 100GB. X-Plane 9 clocks in at 70GB install. Most open world games clock in starting at ~40GB now days, so at best you get three to install before you're right out of space with your 120GB drive.
Let me look at my steam library... I don't even have a hundredth of my collection installed, and yet my 500GB games drive is nearly full.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Unlike you I am not a douchebag arsehole and I do not impose my will on my wife, happy to inform her and do anything technical for her but she is her own boss so no I don't touch her machine nor do I even have access to it except when asked. I have repeatedly explained the importance of backups and offered her assistance to perform said backups but sadly until this incident it fell on death ears. Had been having the same problem getting her to backup her iPhone, thankfully this incident also got her to finally start doing that too.
Not as much as you would think, most things in the home are bit less fickle about power and few people really pay attention to the signs even when they are there.
One of the easier I've found is Light bulbs that last less than expected, which is something few people really pay attention to, the compact fluorescent bulbs I bought lasted about 5 months in our home, I believe this was less than half the expected lifespan. Bad power may not be obvious all the time either, at my house (midwestern US) we get a very slight dip as the local generator switches on and off lat at night, sometimes it's obvious, other times not so much. They also relaxed the frequency modulation laws in some places (to test it's effects), so our older clocks can sometimes run fast or slow. While this isn't supposed to effect computers it can effect old microwaves and wile legal, I can't imagine a company proud of their power generation doing such a thing(our old co-op certainly wouldn't and we had excellent power from them).
All of this is on op of the fact that you may have bad wiring, something noisy on your line something or causing power dips, such as a laser printer warming up, fridge or a/c kicking on., etc. One of the best things you can do to extend the live of your computer is an uninterruptible power supply with a built in line conditioner because there is a ton that goes onto power lines you don't want.
As for TV's and things, most (especially older models) are simply not as vulnerable as computers are, though newer tv's are getting there.
While I don't think it necessarily applies here (in total) since Samsung is known to make good drives, in general it's not as bad an argument as you think.
Your HDD is built by Seagate or WDD, etc and meant for a very cut throat, well established business... They work very hard to maintain quality control.
SSD manufacturers on the other hand are contracting it out to the lowest bidder and it's a free for all. Sandisk was even found to be using two different chipsets in the same part #, one fast one slow, and I'm sure many of us remember OCZ. Companies can easily be using cut rate components and third party programmers, while others are using binned top end memory and in house software engineers. Never put anything past Chinese manufacturing.
Good point. I didn't consider that.
However, wouldn't that reflect in odd behaviour in all electronics? That would stand out, no?
The only way the power line could be affecting the SSDs is if the computer was losing power which most SSDs are intolerant of. The ones with internal power backup should handle power loss fine but in practice even some of them do not.
Power loss while programming Flash can be fatal to the drive do to corruption of the Flash translation layer. Unlike a hard drive, it can result in more than just an incomplete write; it can result in data corruption.
How many of those games are you playing on an Ultra portable laptop that needs an SSD?
Quite a few. Mobile GPUs have been more than capable for quite some time.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Makes me even happier about my recent purchase!
A lot of mac haters and people saying SSD are unreliable, etc. Guess what, even the touch bar is way better than I would have expected based on the flames on Slashdot.
Well I have lost 1 or 2 files in the past on my 2009
MBP 17in which I loved, despite the weight, until the HDD errors started piling up. I use Windows and run some linux servers too. The price was quite high but I configured the best model I could since I expect to get 5-10 years of use out of it. I know 500gb was not enough to hold 5 years of cruft and VMs. This is my first SSD and surprised to hear how brittle people find them, so will do some research and set up some local storage. I remember a video studio that often had HDDs fail so thought SSD would be more reliable.
It would be more useful to me to hear what mac users recommend for backups - a tethered drive set up for time machine? Or one set up as a bootable backup with Carbon Copy Cloner? Or a local linux box and rsync? Ideally I'd like a fine granularity versioned backup that combines these worlds.
Which boils down to: Don't buy SSDs on a budget. HDDs are fine on a budget. Confirms that i've been doing it right.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Obviously....
Maybe she didnt want it to be touched with in the first place no matter what.
But personally I think all mac people are stupid because they trust apples icloud crap shit, when you can backup 1tb photos to flickr, or unlimited to google.
iCloud, fuck, what a joke , 5gb, pile of shit.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
ever use a ps4? it needs 1tb min to hold all the downloads.
the average photographer needs 1gb a day.
musicians use gigs per day too.
the people using the least data are boring fucks with no hobbies and just browse facebook.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Not to mention the temp folder that is anything but temp, but perm, and fills up forever.
also every Chrome update, and iTunes updates keep the last few versions and at least two copies somewhere incase malware infects it - taking gigs.
Dont forget to purge it with diskcleanup
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
nothing wrong with the power in house. every electrical cable outlet, light and appliance etc was replaced 3 years ago due to a direct lightning strike on my house (no I did not include all the machines that died from the lightning strike in my count) and I have had failures both pre and post that event. I have a lot of electronic gear and much of it far more sensitive than SSD's which haven't failed. I know others that have had nothing but perfection from SSD's, just my bad luck I guess. We live in a place with very reliable power supply, I think the last unscheduled outage was maybe 4 or 5 years ago during a major storm.
yes I did, well actually my brother did as he is the electrical engineer as he wondered the same thing as my luck was just too awful to be believable, and it is not like they are low end cheap power supplies anyway, mix of seasonic, corsair and ANTEC.
connecting to abc.xyz.adsvr.adcorp.com ....
Fucking ads, they wont render the rest of the page if that one img/vid isnt loaded.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Don't need to convince me. I've been very wary about SSDs the last years. I just store my stuff on my server now, which has spinning platters and a spinning-platter backup.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I'm generally sticking with HDDs, too, because of when the last SSD died suddenly I lost a lot of valuable work with it due to "sudden refusal to work at all". Maybe SSDs aren't unreliable, but they certainly need a better failure prediction to give you enough time to backup your data. Something like "yo, I'm gonna die tomorrow, better make a backup or else". With HDDs you can in most cases still save your data somehow unless the motor dies, and even then you could retrieve the valuable data if you pay some money to some pro company that does this. With HDDs your data is never really lost. Unless you really ruin the HD physically, and I mean the platter. So I do use SSDs but I don't consider them additional storage but temporary, fast and a bit unreliable storage, that needs to be backed up from time to time to avoid losing valuable data suddenly. It's a shame, but it is how it is. One day SSDs will be better and more reliable than HDDs, I'm sure of it, but for now it's better to be careful with SSDs, unless your data is of disposable kind. I'm into music production and we handle some valuable data that costs loads of money to recreate.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
My clients and I use Furman power conditioners to filter the electricity, and expensive PC power supplies, yet SSDs still die a sudden death.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
It depends on your usage. SSDs usually durable, but apps and usage matters. Did you hear that Spotify (for PC) was caught killing SSDs?
ps. Here is a SSD life calculator for the 30+ SSDs (based on real tests):