Terabyte update 2021

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ISSUE 18.22 • 2021-06-14 HARDWARE By Will Fastie The price of storage is in flux for a variety of reasons, making predictions extremely difficult. In
[See the full post at: Terabyte update 2021]

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WSGeo, jburk07, AmbularD

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Chia Coin, NAND Shortage Behind Reduced SSD Warranties

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AmbularD

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Well, that sucks as far as the warranty time goes, but I’m glad they’re pushing back against the cryptocurrency craze.  It’s getting absolutely insane.

i7-10700k - ASROCK Z590 Pro4 - 1TB 970 EVO Plus M.2 - DDR4 3200 x 32GB - GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FTW - Windows 10 Pro

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Very interesting, thank you.  I would be interested to see PCIe M.2 storge added to the table.

Nick

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AmbularD

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Do you think that an increasing price for HDD and SSD (seems like its going that way) will drive an increasing cost for on-line storage?

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AmbularD

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I’ve been using solid state storage as my primary boot AND data storage since 2013. My first SSD was a 480 GB OCZ drive back in 2013, at a price of $650, and THAT made such a huge improvement in system performance and usability that I never regretted buying even the first one at any price.

At the moment I have 5 high performance NVMe drives, 4 of which make up a 4 TB RAID 0 array that measures out at 10+ GB/second I/O throughput. Now other things besides I/O actually limit my system performance most of the time. Even the Windows OS itself can’t keep up with this kind of hardware capability, usually netting only between 2 and 3 GB/second file I/O.

Looking forward, IMO other than for external backup (I have many MyBook drives) I think it would be a bit silly to buy a computer or device to run with anything other than solid state storage, especially since it’s growing quite inexpensive.

-Noel

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teuhasn2, jburk07, Will Fastie

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To inflation and cryptocurrency mining and a shortfall in production due to the covid pandemic, I would add another effect of this pandemic: the fact that many people bought devices they needed to communicate, telework, etc. to an unusually large extent, since January of last year.

As to the advantages and the desirability of going large on the mass storage TB, yes absolutely. It is a matter of longevity in two ways: the fact that the bigger they are, the longer they last without causing problems,  and that the bigger they are, the less likely they will fill to the point where the machine becomes much slower and it’s user, much less able to do certain things with it.

In my earlier days of owning and operating my own PCs, the fact that the then HD would eventually fill to near capacity with things I needed or found very convenient to keep stored in it, to the point that I found it hard to use the machine and finally had to buy another, was one of the two main reasons why I had to buy a new one. The other main reason was the rapid change and increase in the things one could do online and that the old machine was not really up to. To avoid the mass storage problem, I then started buying the machines with the largest storage available for that model from the manufacturing company I chose on account of its reputation. I have never regretted doing that. It is a purchase where cheap could easily mean cheap and nasty, and it is always better to pay more than to fall short later in some even more expensive way.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

MacBook Pro circa mid-2015, 15" display, with 16GB 1600 GHz DDR3 RAM, 1 TB SSD, a Haswell architecture Intel CPU with 4 Cores and 8 Threads model i7-4870HQ @ 2.50GHz.
Intel Iris Pro GPU with Built-in Bus, VRAM 1.5 GB, Display 2880 x 1800 Retina, 24-Bit color.
macOS Monterey; browsers: Waterfox "Current", Vivaldi and (now and then) Chrome; security apps. Intego AV

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OscarCP wrote:

I would add another effect of this pandemic: the fact that many people bought devices they needed to communicate, telework, etc.

PC and laptop sales went up, but I don’t think it was higher end equipment. These were people who did not expect to buy a device but were forced into it given the circumstances. That’s a recipe for low-end sales.

My observations, bolstered by helping a few friends, was that a lot of HDDs got sold. That supply chain was a bit more elastic in the first half of 2020. I don’t think that was a significant contributor to rising prices.

The device that was in very short supply last year was the WebCam.

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OscarCP

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Slightly off-topic, but if you would indulge me, what’s your opinion on enterprise-level versus consumer hard drives (for storage and backup, not boot drives)?  I like the warranty and cache size on the Constellation ES.3, and have found them to be good performers and very reliable, so I’ve paid the premium for several of them in the past few years.  But they’re getting a bit long in the tooth and harder to find new, and I’m not sure whether to look for another enterprise-class drive next time I need one or if there’s a consumer drive that would be equally speedy and reliable.

i7-10700k - ASROCK Z590 Pro4 - 1TB 970 EVO Plus M.2 - DDR4 3200 x 32GB - GeForce RTX 3060 Ti FTW - Windows 10 Pro

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For what it is worth, I spoke to a Western Digital employee with many years of experience a while ago and he told me he himself used the enterprise-class RE2 in his personal setup for reliability because he found them better than the good consumer Black models.

I used WD Black for mirrored storage in our workstations because they have been very reliable in general and they come with a 5 years warranty. On the rare occasion they had issues with the volume I bought, usually I saw them after less than 2-3 years and then nothing until the computer went out of service after 8 years or more.

There is a compromise between performance and reliability. For example, at the time, the Black had a very slow spin-up time which made getting out of sleep painfully long if you used Intel Raid for mirrored drives. Today, I use ReFS mirrored drives so I don’t have this issue and performance doesn’t matter as much if you use the HDs to store long term data like I do but work on the SSD. The drives made for recording video have different specs and they are not tuned for performance. I always found odd that drives made for NAS didn’t come with the 5 years warranty, but I guess the idea is you can replace them. I used Black because it seemed like the best performance/reliability compromise in the PC itself and I didn’t used enterprise class drives except in servers where they break quite regularly every few years because they run at 15k maybe, but they are so easy to replace with hot swapping.

However, I would tend to think that now, the ideal setup for me at home would be a very fast SSD only and long term storage on another machine repurposed as a NAS with mechanical HDs to avoid any downsides to having mechanical HDs to slow down your machine waking up from sleep or for other reasons, plus for the peace of mind of never having any second thought about often putting your computer to sleep when not used for a few minutes and having it almost instant on when you need it without stopping and starting your mechanical hard drives many times a day. I should have done that a while ago, but I didn’t like the idea of having another machine on constantly when I could be fine with just one and I didn’t have the time I wanted to devote to learn how to configure and maintain something like FreeNAS.

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teuhasn2, Noel Carboni, AmbularD

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I have often wondered how ReFS would work on a solid state drive… It seems to me NTFS has gotten significantly slower in recent history.

-Noel

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AmbularD wrote:

Slightly off-topic, but if you would indulge me, what’s your opinion on enterprise-level versus consumer hard drives (for storage and backup, not boot drives)?  I like the warranty and cache size on the Constellation ES.3, and have found them to be good performers and very reliable, so I’ve paid the premium for several of them in the past few years.  But they’re getting a bit long in the tooth and harder to find new, and I’m not sure whether to look for another enterprise-class drive next time I need one or if there’s a consumer drive that would be equally speedy and reliable.

Prior to only buying solid state storage, i.e., up to about 2013, I had transitioned from “consumer” grade drives to only Western Digital “RE” model drives. They lasted longer and had few to no data errors over their entire useful (defined by size) lives.

Why would you want to trust your data to anything other than a high-end drive?

-Noel

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AmbularD wrote:

what’s your opinion on enterprise-level versus consumer hard drives (for storage and backup, not boot drives)?

Hard drives from the well-known manufacturers are incredibly reliable. The technology and manufacturing processes are highly refined after four decades of work. This is true even for “consumer” grade devices.

I thus recommend simply limiting the lifetime of the drives. Don’t use spinning media for more than five years. Then get out while the gettin’s good.

That doesn’t mean going nuts. The D: drive on my daily driver is a pair of 3TB drives in a mirror. I’d rather have this mirror of consumer drives than a single enterprise-grade drive, and I think the reasons are easy to deduce – lower initial cost and an infinitesimal chance that both the mirrored drives would fail at the same time.

I find my RAID 1 mirror, something not everyone likes, a great comfort. If one of the drives fails, that’s like a siren alerting me that I need to refresh the drives. It’s so comforting that my 3TB drives are now over six years old, way past my own recommended lifetime. I’ve been meaning to do something about that.

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Noel Carboni

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I have 3 external WD drives (3TB, 5TB, 8TB). The WD 3TB My Book (WDC+WD30EZRX-00SPEB0+3000.5+GB)
is ON running 24/7 (read/write) for the last ~6 years without a problem.

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Noel Carboni

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Alex5723 wrote:

I have 3 external WD drives (3TB, 5TB, 8TB). The WD 3TB My Book (WDC+WD30EZRX-00SPEB0+3000.5+GB)
is ON running 24/7 (read/write) for the last ~6 years without a problem.

Me too, in my case Western Digital MyBook 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, 6TB, and 8TB drives. All have been great – what a value! The 1 TB drive, though noisy and kind of too small to be useful by modern standards, was still working fine when I retired it in 2019. In about 2013 I formatted that 1 TB drive to ReFS when that file system first appeared in Win 8, and I never had a lick of trouble with it.

ReFS was a good file system, but unfortunately not as well-supported as NTFS, so perhaps not the best choice for a backup drive all in all. I did not set it up on any other backup drives. Not bad for a spare standalone file backup device (e.g., fed data by scheduled ROBOCOPY commands), but it could be extra trouble in a pinch.

-Noel

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Will Fastie wrote:

ISSUE 18.22 • 2021-06-14 HARDWARE By Will Fastie The price of storage is in flux for a variety of reasons, making predictions extremely difficult. In
[See the full post at: Terabyte update 2021]

Thanks for this, Will. (though I’m a little late, admitted)

That’s valuable info.

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