OT: Cluster Size in the 21st Century

[Sean McCoy]

Not to take the thread OT, but this reminds me of my early adoption of SCSI hard drives. I bought two of them for $1k each for a grand total of 8 GB. Yep, that's 4 GB each!! So I suppose we can assume that if we all live long enough we'll be buying huge SSDs for peanuts at some point. Can't wait.

Oh yeah, one other thing; one of those drives catastrophically failed after a few months' use!! Ugg.

Yep, I remember my first 1.2 GB SCSI hard disk: $1,500. And 32 meg of RAM for my EMU E IV: $1,500. But I have to say I've been surprised at how slowly the cost of SSD's has come down. Either they really are expensive to make, or the manufacturers are just lining their pockets. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

[Dave Labrecque]

SSD's are fine for audio storage and playback, they just cost a lot more per megabyte. Still in the 5-10x cost factor.

I can by a good quality fast 8 terabyte spinner for around $275. A 4 terabyte SSD will run you $1500.

Even though SSD reliability has improved a lot over the last 5 years, there is still a downside. SSD's pretty much always hard fail, meaning when they do fail there is almost never any chance of recovering data off the drive. Traditional spinners generally soft fail. They will usually start throwing errors or have difficultly spinning up, long before they are completely unreadable.

The big advantage to SSD though is definitely going to be speed, particularly if you move away from the SATA interface and get to the faster direct interface connections.

M.2 Drive Throughput by Connection	Theoretical Maximum Throughput	Est. Real-World Maximum Throughput
SATA III	6.0 Gb/s (750 MB/s)	4.8 Gb/s (600 MB/s)
PCI-E 2.0 x2	8 Gb/s (1 GB/s)	6.4 Gb/s (800 MB/s)
PCI-E 2.0 x4	16 Gb/s (2 GB/s)	12.8 Gb/s (1.6 GB/s)
PCI-E 3.0 x4	32 Gb/s (4 GB/s)	31.5 Gb/s (3.9 GB/s)

By comparison a 7200 RMP SATA III standard hard drive will get read speeds in the 200MB/s range.

M.2 PCIe Gen3 x4 SSD drives will see data rates around 3500MB/s read and 2100MB/s write

That is a 10x performance factor

Wow. Cool info. Thanks.

So I guess my thinking about using SSD for audio being a bad idea outside of the cost issue is outdated, eh? I'm always late the party.

[Dave Labrecque]

Dave,

SSD's and Video...

Thanks for the link, Dell, but I'm starting to like the whole border wall idea trying to read the bad English. Donald Trump in 2020! (not)

He also goes into way more detail than I need. What's his point, do you know? So video capture requires sequential writes (apparently). Is that a problem?

The thing I thought I remembered from a couple years back was about individual memory cells on an SSD dying sooner because of the way audio or video reads and writes. This is all layman's terms, of course. Wasn't there something about that back then? Or am I delusional? (again)

[cgrafx]

The thing I thought I remembered from a couple years back was about individual memory cells on an SSD dying sooner because of the way audio or video reads and writes. This is all layman's terms, of course. Wasn't there something about that back then? Or am I delusional? (again)

The key word is "back then". Technology marches on.

Its not really something that you'd have to worry about at this point, just remember that you still need to make real backups.

All of this fantastic new technology is extremely reliable until its not.

[Dave Labrecque]

The key word is "back then". Technology marches on.

Its not really something that you'd have to worry about at this point, just remember that you still need to make real backups.

All of this fantastic new technology is extremely reliable until its not.

Well, that's good news, then. In theory we prepare for the worst, anyway, right?

[Richard Rupert]

<SNIP>

All of this fantastic new technology is extremely reliable until its not.

And that is why I hate loving technology.