Hi

I'm Dava, I have been blogging about tech for around 10 years for a hobby.
I started blogging on ZDNet UK then moved to Overclock.net, which I am proud to say, one of my articles (2012) caused a minor stir in the industry:
Realworld Performance and What It Means to You…
I'd like to draw attention to something that I hope you too will feel passionate about..

Over the last 3 years I have slowly saw drive capacities grind to a halt. I mean we are already on to the next drive technology with M.2 PCIE and things like.. games and (for YTbers) editing video files are regularly what? 50 GB each? And I have to spend HOURS managing drives to fit everything in.. and it's ridiculous, I have 9 drives* .. to be frank and francine; we are using 8 year old tech with SSDs, and still paying through the nose for a terabyte or under.. where are the 50TB, 100TB+  and 1 Petabyte drives we have been needing so badly for so long now?

'HOLDING THE WHOLE INDUSTRY BACK ..AND OTHER FABULOUS TALES.'

Welp not really as far fetched a statement as it may seem.. let me explain:

1. It starts with game designers, they have a .. responsibility.. Q.Q .. to keep file sizes small, they are conscious of this when making games and so we don't get as good a textures as we possibly could, as texture file size is the largest consideration about space management.

2. AMD/NV don't need to try as hard to develop as high performance cards as they would because the textures loading are smaller than they would be.

3. AMD/Intel CPU performance to keep up with the graphics cards (this one hasn't happened because of different competitive reasons) but could have in a different world. AMD and Intel WILL fight it out like Cat vs Dog regardless.

We have 4K TVs now.. so we need 12K+ textures to fill that*. What do we get? I would guess around 3K upscaled.. and we all go WOW..

Micron, Samsung, Toshiba, SK Hynix, Renesas and Hitachi are dragging the whole industry down by selling us gramophones. SSD's are nice everyone gets that.. but the capacities are *so* small, so stingy.

1. I realize the price has fallen for SSDs.
2. I realize there was a shortage of chips (I know this was ram but I'll assume this also affected SSDs)

But even that given, being understanding towards these manufacturers, is there any *real* excuse for not giving us decent size storage? It's 2018.. not 2010. We should have PB drives by now.. and imho those manf. are being lowrez tramps* not giving us a decent cost effective option, and by not doing so holding the whole industry back^. It's a low thing to do, to keep us paying for tiny capacity old tech.

I mean if they said 'hey it's not financially feasible because we use the latest lithography'.. is anyone really bothered if they started stacking older style chips to give us the capacity.. flip even if it was 300MB a second.. at least that would be *something*. But no.. some companies still have the cheek to sell us 8 year old tech for 1GB = 1 £/$/E .. it boggles the mind!

With the news that WD is winding down one of its HDD manufacturing plants.. I gotta ask: it's 2018.. what on earth is going on? Why am I using 20 year old technology in my PC? HDDs are whatever came before gramophones.. those cylinder record player things... phonographs! 

Why are we treating them with such respect, as they parade old tech in front of us and ask for money? Am I the only one who sees this?

Something is broken in the PC drive/storage industry.. and peeps are so caught up with AMD/Intel/Nvidia no one's asking the above manuf. hard questions.. where are the capacities we NEED?.. they slipped under the radar of tech enthusiasts and journalists alike..

why? because they are quiet. because the storage/chip manuf. don't like change. That's not acceptable.. you are in the tech industry. things change. it's its nature to change.

Someone needs to call them out.

peace

Dava




----------------------------

*(2 HDD,4 SSD, 3 M.2 PCIE)
*I don't like swearing. back to the future reference.



*see Perspective of Correct Distance; POCD:
A Tree! A Rock! A Bush! 20 Answers on the misconceptions of distance in games

Intel and Micron releasing 'Enterprise drives' SSD's of higher capacity
https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-microns-first-ever-qlc-nand-flash-cheaper-denser-ssd-storage-is-coming/

1 point 92 Terabytes and 7 point 68 terabytes.

IMHO this should have happened years ago..

Will we be getting 50TB for £100/$130 and 100TB drives for £180/$210? probably not.. I very much see it as a strange price gouging.

Bit of background..the drive manuf. are the part of the industry that is always dragging their heels to go anywhere.. it took them 40 years to a develop new technological breakthrough from HDDs to SSDs (1970s-2010s).. AMD, Intel and NVidia are dragging drive manuf. along the floor backwards just to keep the industry profitable as far as price/performance goes.

It's a total joke.


It might be hyperbo'le but I imagine; some nand engineer having the bright idea of hooking a USB drive up to the SATA protocol for fun and goes 'oh wow' around 2008, and if he/she didn't do that .. we wouldn't have SSDs at all.

UPDATE:

I have researched drives sizes more thoroughly since writing this article, and it seems the Nand drive manuf. are struggling with capacities themselves. HOWEVER.. profit margins are still high on SSD which are 8 year old tech.

High capacity drives are STILL possible, if you made SSDs the 3.5" format and size of the old HDDs with 512GB chips, 5x4x512 = 30TB Drives/ times three 5x4x512 boards = 90TB Drives. With QLC next year coming this can only increase.

See here: https://ftr-ceu.blogspot.com/2019/03/drive-capacities-return-or-drive-is.html

A cooling solution would need to be employed three small quiet fans pushing air front to back out of a vent would probably be ideal. However remember around 40C is the optimal temperature for Nand, unlike other tech if it gets too cold it won't work as well.We see this the most clearly with M.2 PCIE drives. It enjoys to be around 35-40C ..even 20C can see a loss in performance and if too hot (60C) also a loss in performance.

I remember Steve from Gamers Nexus pointing this out in one the GN shows some time ago, coincidentally the same week I read about it on a forum.