HDD's not worth it ?!

[Eaglesnuke]

Hello

since about a year now i have developed a love for pc building and have put together a few machines with parts that i either bought new our scavanged on ebay

 

regarding storage my MO so far was to use the 120gb ssd and 1tb hdd, but as the ssds prices have come down, the prices for hdds have basically remained the same

 

my take on this is that for any work and light gaming pc you can easilly get and 40 euros for a 480gb ssd and for a budget gaming pc a 1tb 80 euro ssd is enough. not to mention the a good high end pc can benefit of an all ssd build.

 

So unless you have high volume workstation i dont see the point of getting hdds anymore.

 

[steelo]

11 minutes ago, Eaglesnuke said:

 

 

So unless you have high volume workstation i dont see the point of getting hdds anymore.

 

HDD's are still about 1/2 the price of SSD's, so IMO they are still a viable solution if you need storage for pictures and movies.

[minibois]

SSD's (especially the budget high capacity ones) are not a suitable replacement for high capacity HDD's yet and also are IMO not is good fit for fast boot SSD's. They are somewhere in-between.

 

Most of those lower price higher capacity SSD's either have no DRAM, use QLC memory or both.

QLC memory is a different way to store information in memory. 'Normally', you store a 1 or 0 in there, as 1v or 0v. Simple. But you want more storage, right? So you store 0v, 0.33v, 0.66v and 1v and now you have 4 instead of 2 states. Double the storage, from the same chip!

That's SLC vs. MLC. There is also TLC which has 8 states and now QLC with 16 states.

 

This is all great for capacity, but makes the SSD:

- slower, because the controller has to do more work reading each cell, it's not a simple 'is it approximately 0 or not'-check, but lots more states to check.

- less reliable. Over the course of using a cell. It gets weaker, 1v is not the highest state anymore, thus they need to adjust where all 16 states are...

 

These QLC SSD's usually have a cache portion, which is very fast SLC memory, but once that cache is filled the QLC memory will be as fast as a normal HDD.

 

So sure, for some people SSD-only builds are certainly possible, but those who want lots of rooms (say 1TB+) for a small price (say, 120 USD or less) will still have to look at HDD's.

 

More info on that QLC story here:

https://www.howtogeek.com/428869/ssds-are-getting-denser-and-slower-thanks-to-qlc-flash/amp/

[GoldenLag]

21 minutes ago, Eaglesnuke said:

So unless you have high volume workstation i dont see the point of getting hdds anymore.

They have their uses in low cost mass storage. 

 

And a lot of gamers and people dont like having to delete stuff

[mariushm]

1 hour ago, Eaglesnuke said:

So unless you have high volume workstation i dont see the point of getting hdds anymore.

My computer had 6 TB of data spread over 3 hard drives.

You can buy 8 or 10 TB hard drives.... 8-10TB SSDs are still super expensive.

Try recording 4K footage at 100-160 mbps (~25 MB/s) and see how much space an hour of footage is gonna take (hint.. 25 x 3600s = 90 000 MB .. add a few GB for audio and you're looking at 100 GB per hour)

Also try doing that daily on a TLC SSD which has 1-2000 erase cycles and then it's dead. QLC is even worse, the Intel 660p 512GB SSD has a write endurance of 100 TB... basically, fill the drive 200 times and it's about to die.

Mechanical hard drives still have their uses.

 

On the low capacity side, you're basically paying for the shipping, for weight of the hard drive case, for warranty... under 2TB most modern hard drives have only 1 platter inside, maybe 2 ... they simply vary the number of read/write heads inside (how many surfaces of the platters are actually used) to limit you to a capacity.

So for example a 320GB or 500 GB drive will use one of two surfaces, a 750-1TB drive will use both surfaces... for the drive manufacturer it's a difference of extra half a dollar read/write head to add to the drive.

It's not much else they can cut away, everything else is needed for the drive to function.

In comparison, with SSDs you just have a tiny ssd controller which costs a few dollars at most, and then you can simply vary the number of flash chips and their size .., the circuit board could be the same...

The flash chips are bought in volume, thousands or tens of thousands at a time... so they can be cheap... it's higher profit margins for SSDs so they can be cheaper than a mechanical drive at low capacity.