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Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

I've been following the news and it's amazing how SSDs are still progressing, a bit slower but similar to Moore's Law. Prices for Samsung SSD 1TB external USB products:

- 2015 $600: Samsung T1 http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/samsung-portable-ssd...

- 2016 $430: Samsung T3 https://www.storagereview.com/samsung_portable_ssd_t3_review

- 2018 $200: Samsung T5 https://www.androidheadlines.com/2018/12/samsung-t5-portable...

Another incredible exciting point is the amount of competition coming up, it's not just 2-3 large vendors anymore.

If things continue at this pace it seems sensible to expect a 10TB SSD consumer drive for under $1000 within a couple of years.

Note: not afiliated at all, just a happy consumer.

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Meanwhile Apple is charging $1,200 for a 1 TB MacBook upgrade. Hoping this year we see a significant jump in consumer availability of these drives. I’ve been using a 512gb laptop since 2010 at least. Would be nice to start seeing multi-terrabyte drives in devices besides after market or external drives.

What would consumer availability have to do with the $1000 apple tax?

1tb SSD are already significantly cheaper than what they are charging. They don't seem to base their pricing on cogs.

This is the new Apple RAM surcharge — remember back when Apple let you swap out DIMMs, they would charge 3-5x market rate betting you wouldn’t. Now they’re doing it on SSDs but you can’t get away :) If you follow the r/buildapcsales it’s pretty eats to get a 1TB 2.5” SSD from a top manufacturer for under $120, and M.2 for $20-30 more. I just got a Crucial MX500 1TB for $114 all in.

I would counter that the SSD's aren't entirely the same. The most comparable consumer NVME M.2 would be the 960 pro and it's still around $300. Definitely cheaper than Apple, but it's also not in the $150 range for the same performance.

99% of the time SSDs are a boolean: "Do you have a SSD? Yes/No" and performance between different SSDs is basically unnoticeable. Change my mind

Definitely relative to a hard drive.

Relative to each other what really matters are your 4K random read/write IOPS and some measure of reliability. Back in the day there were in fact huge differences between certain SSDs (Samsung controllers vs. Indilinx Barefoot [1] back in the early '10s). Today it's a non-issue.

SSDs years ago saturated the SATA III bus with respect to peak transfers. We're talking an order of magnitude these days, with SATA capping out at 550-600MB/s burst (my MX500) vs NVMe's 3GB/sec (970 PRO). That doesn't paint the real picture to a large extent because 4K random IO is still <<100MB/s in either case.

Large DRAM buffers vs. unbuffered can make a big difference too. Reliability these days from any of the big players is usually very good, since their NAND only comes from a handful of big players -- ditto for the controllers. I guess if you buy shady "Kingston" knockoff SSDs with recycled NAND that's a different matter.

tl:dr; yep, you're right. Any modern SSD from a big player is a good bet, beyond that it's just gamesmanship.

> performance between different SSDs is basically unnoticeable

Spinning rust drives will likely give you up to ~110 MB/sec.

A SATA SSD will likely give you to up ~550 MB/sec, a 5x increase.

An NVMe SSD will double the write and quadruple the read speed of a SATA SSD, in 1/3 the size.

Yes, any SSD is likely good enough for your average user to feel like a computer is fast. If anything you do is even remotely heavy on I/O, more speed = better.

Downvotes, for the speeds of various storage media?

Well done HN, just when I thought you couldn't get more ridiculous, you one upped yourself again.

Modern HDDs easily go beyond 110MB/s, but nonetheless stay well below 200MB/s afaik. It'll probably be somewhere in between. Otherwise your figures are fairly correct, if not on the conservative side for NVMe drives (a Samsung 970 Pro will sustain sequential speeds above 3GB/s read and 2GB/s write).

But focusing on sequential read speed misses the main improvement that SSDs give you over HDDs: random reads and writes ("seek speed"). Reading or writing lots of small files from an HDD will ruin your transfer speeds unless they're written sequentially, whereas a SATA SSD will do quite well and an NVMe SSD will do really well. This is the cause of the noticeable speedup when you upgrade to an SSD.

Generally, yeah, but the exceptions are pretty significant.

Whether or not these use cases are common enough to disprove the "99% of the time" claim is debatable (these kinds of use cases may be far less than 1%) but regardless, check these out:

https://www.storagereview.com/samsung_970_pro_1tb_review

- 10x latency improvement in SQL Server stress tests between slowest and fastest SSD

- 3x rendering time improvement from slowest to fastest SSD

Now, for anything I do in my daily life as a software engineer? Yeah, SSDs were fast enough years ago. Only time I even scratched the surface of their performance was when I copied a VM from one drive to another.

You are definitely right, an NVMe SSD is going to spank my MX500 in bulk throughput. That is still 3-5X market -- 4X specifically :) in today's market there's no way you can justify a $1200 uncharge from a 500GB to a 1000GB SSD. Of course, Apple doesn't have to, though.

970 Pro is faster than the Apple Macbook SSDs and about 1/3 the price. $349.99 direct from Samsung for 1TB with 3,500MB/s Seq. Read and 2,700MB/s Seq. Write

To be fair, the $200 1TB SSD linked above is just a standard 2.5" SSD where the Apple SSDs are M.2 with triple the I/O speeds. These Apple(s) can't be compared to the list of oranges above.

No it is not, I linked to the external Thunderbolt SSD (last one) so there are many more pieces involved in the Samsung SSD. But it's true that the Apple one is a lot faster since it's internal.

Sure, it connects via thunderbolt, but it's still just a SATA style SSD (max speeds around 550MBps). I'd love to find an external M.2 to get 1200MBps via external, but this seems to be a unicorn still. Although, I'm still happy to have 550MBps on a SATA SSD vs 110MBps via platters.

Here you go, 3412MBps (read) and 1884MBps (write) for the Samsung X5: https://www.techradar.com/reviews/samsung-x5-portable-ssd

Granted, it's a heck lot more expensive at 1TB for $700. It seems the only reason for this drive to exist is actual transfer speed because in any other way seems worse than the T5.

If you want USB, forget it. The best you'll get from a USB 3.1Gen2 > NVMe case is about 1GB/sec.

If you're willing (to pay) and able (to plug it in) to use Thunderbolt 3, there are several commercial products that use an NVMe internally and boast up to 2500MB/sec.

I have one of those drives - it's not Thunderbolt, just USB 3.1 gen 2.

It's also not a 2.5" drive since it's obviously smaller.

Oops, that's on me :)

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-970-PRO-Internal-MZ-V7P1T0BW/... -- $439, 1TB.

Things really have changed over the years. I used to shop in the US and bring everything back with me to Europe because computer parts were half the price. Now I'm thinking about doing the reverse[0] (240€ for the same NVMe SSD over here).

[0]: https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B07CGJNLBB/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_...

It's not the same product: 970 PRO vs 970 EVO.

Another shop:

https://www.alza.de/samsung-970-pro-1tb-d5319060.htm

276,47 EUR w/o VAT, 329 EUR with VAT. Currently, that's some 377 USD.

On Samsung's US website it's $350 (free s/h):

https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/solid-st...

Yeah, that link I posted isn’t sold by Amazon but some random person. It’s probably marked up a bit.

NVME, not M2. All Macbook drives are now soldered straight to the motherboard.

Thanks. I confused the M.2 form factor with the NVME chips.

> Meanwhile Apple is charging $1,200 for a 1 TB MacBook upgrade.

This is specifically one of the reasons I ended up switching to a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Yoga, even though I'd planned to buy the new MacBook Air. The Thinkpad's SSD is officially user-replaceable and I bought a 2TB WD Blue SSD for less than a third of the cost of Apple's upgrade. Even an NVMe SSD would have been half the price of Apple.

One caveat is that although Lenovo has excellent official repair videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqrspYc21PY), I must be doing something wrong, the Phillips & JIS heads in my iFixit Mako toolkit don't seem to fit/grip the Thinkpad's SSD screw. I'm worried I'll strip the screw if I keep trying, so I guess I'll take it to a Lenovo repair shop for some help.

Sometimes manufacturers put a bit of blue Loctite on the threads... makes the torque needed to initially 'break' the threads/unscrew a bit higher. I wouldn't be that concerned, buying a replacement screw kit for the HDD caddy will be a couple dollars on Ebay if you really do strip the head.

I just bought the X1 Extreme with 256gb ssd and 16gb of ram because I can upgrade it later.

How long have you had it /how do you like it so far? I've been considering getting the 4k version but I worry about battery life. Seems there's a bios/driver bug that keeps the Nvidia GPU running always

Just bought, waiting for it to arrive.

There's update bios to fix that issue according to reddit.

Thus, one of the many reasons why you'll pay less for non-Apple computers.

At the end of the day if you're buying apple for the hardware you were doing something wrong to begin with. MacOS is one of the few good reasons to get apple products, otherwise it should be a given that you get an alternative device. Combine this with the fact that Apple has made it impossible to get stuff repaired, and what you've just said, I don't see why anyone would buy an apple laptop for the hardware alone.

For a long time, Apple had the best laptop hardware on the market. Since the web revolution and fewer people needing Windows to work, its no wonder that Mac sales have exploded. I believe that's coming to an end though. Macbook Pros have gone too far into the direction of compromise for the sake of design and are on the road to nichedom again.

Agreed I’m still using my late 2013 MBPro with 1TB ssd 16gb Ram, because it feels to me that Apple prices for the 1TB ssd have not reduced at all, I want to upgrade and I can afford it, but I hate being ripped off, so I’m stubbornly waiting for a price drop. I like 1TB because I need to run Windows 10 and MacOS. Apple makes the most reliable windows pc according to some stats (a few years ago) I saw from Microsoft and I believe them, runs Bootcamp Win 10 Office 64 bit Excel v heavy workbooks better than any other machine I’ve tried

I'm surprised how quickly prices are falling.

I purchased a 500GB EVO 860 only 7 months ago for $139.99.

Just checked and it's currently $82.99.

For only $8 more than I paid for that 500GB SSD, I could now get a 1 TB SSD.

(Naturally, I've barely used that drive, which was slated for secondary storage, and now I wish I had waited.)

In June 2015, I found the price of a 1 TB SSD was 400 USD, and in December, the price had fallen to 300 USD. In June 2017, I checked the price again and found it was 250 USD. I've put the numbers in my calculator to perform a curve-fitting using the exponential function, and it suggested that "I'll be able to purchase a 1 TB SSD for ~140 USD in 18 months", and I left the number a future note. Now, it turned out the regression analysis was almost correct (only for unnamed cheaper brands for now, I expect more reliable products are coming soon). The "Moore's Law" is really working.

I'm seeing $135 for a Crucial MX500 1TB or WD Blue 1TB (and lower during the recent holiday sales), so we've already hit your target with name-brand drives from major retailers like Amazon and Newegg.

It's pretty much there —- the Samsung EVO 860 1 TB is $147 at Amazon.

I wouldn’t worry about it. If you barely use it, what are the odds you’ll ever fill it up? And if you do fill it up, SSDs will be even cheaper then.

I await the day I can fill my NAS with SSDs. Might save on power usage as well.

Not sure if it's a good idea though. SSDs tend to fail without warning. I guess that's why we have RAID but still I wouldn't want my backup storage to be so volatile.

You think HDD can't fail without warning? OK, I get that SSD don't implement S.M.A.R.T but..

> I get that SSD don't implement S.M.A.R.T

Despite the S.M.A.R.T data is less predictive on SSDs, they do have it, at least for SATA disks...

In which case, even less reason to hate on SSD for home storage in RAID shells.

I have a spun-down RAID farm as longterm. It's worrying me that the unit the disks are in is a SPARC based motherboard now over 10 years old. Those caps don't last forever.

and the magnetized bits on an HDD have an expected livetime of 25 years. Unless read-and-rewritten every so many years

NVMe drives have it as well, at least the Samsung ones.

You can read it on Linux by running:

"nvme smart-log /dev/nvmeX"

smartmontools can grab most of that info too, even on Windows.

SSDs do implement smart and usually do give an early warning.

I've destroyed a few Samsung 840 Evo drives in a few servers and didn't lose a single byte. Failure condition was a very degraded read speed. It took a few hours to copy the 120GB to a fresh SSD

SSDs consume more, not less power, to comparable spinning HDs, especially in always-on scenarios. Once started, the amount of power required to keep a platter spinning is miniscule.

I don't think that's true

https://techreport.com/r.x/wd-red-4tb/power-idle.gif

Those HDDs have more than 10 times more capacity. This means you need more than 10 times as many SSDs. Even with the most efficient 0.5W SSD that means all 10 of them would consume 5W which HDDs still manage to beat. In reality that 0.5W SSD is an outlier and they consume 1W so in truth the power consumption is closer to 10W for the same amount of storage. That's above the least efficient HDD. Perhaps bigger SSDs enjoy similar "economies of scale" but what you linked tells a completely different story.

No. Actually the image I posted before is outdated. Modern 1TB/2TB SSDs consume a lot less. Milliwatts.

https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph9451/75923.png

Full article:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9451/the-2tb-samsung-850-pro-...

I had planned on doing this but even with gigabit wifi, and half gigabit transfer speeds for the SSD, NAS encryption algorithms seems to cap the transmission speeds to around 100 megabytes per second

I have all the parts I just haven't formatted my SSDs to go into the NAS yet and I'm not sure if I will

Even if the throughput is no better, SSDs will have much better latency and IOPS.

Not to mention sheer storage density that has already far outpaced spinning disks (just not at an affordable price, yet): https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/2/20/17031256/w...

This thing is 30TB in 2.5" format, while the largest capacity HDD I can remember hearing about is 15TB, and that's in a 3.5" format, which is about double in physical volume and weight.

I can't wait for the day when something like this becomes economical, so I can stick two of them in a compact portable NAS for 30TB of redundant storage that I can bring with me anywhere.

Not to mention, SSDs on average seem to have more predictable failure modes that scale based mostly on usage, and tend to be overall more reliable than HDDs that can often suddenly die on you with no warning.

100 megabytes per second sounds more like the limit of a gigabit connection than an encryption algorithm. Most NAS boxes of the last 5 years should be doing encryption offload on the CPU via things like AES-NI instructions which should be hitting ~500 MB/s per core.

Figured someone would say that

I can get 400 megaBYTES per second on my iphone from external sources

Inside my network I can get faster

Dont want the NAS to be a bottleneck for my wireless convenience

edit: still megabits

iPhones "only" support WLAN with a theoretical max of 867 Megabit per second (802.11ac with 2x2 MIMO), so no, you don't get 400 Megabytes data transfer to it.

Youre right, lets keep dividing by 8

The point is that I am trying to avoid bottlenecks and Im not sure my NAS with SSDs does that

I wouldn't use external SSDs as the price benchmark, since they had a big price premium over an equivalent mSATA SSD back then.

For example, I bought a 1TB samsung mSATA SSD in 2015 for about $320 and it's enclosure for $15. The equivalent SSD today is about $150. So instead of a 3x price decrease in the past 3 years, it's more like a 2x price decrease.

mSATA SSD's are so rare these days

True, but Samsung is still making them. A 1TB mSATA 860 EVO is currently only $3 more than the M.2 SATA version of the same, so it's still a reasonable comparison against drives from several years ago. (However, both mSATA and M.2 SATA versions of the 860 EVO are more expensive than the 2.5" version that faces far more competition.)

I agree, there is more overhead. But since I'm interested mainly in external SSDs I'm tracking those :)

Please feel free to create a similar list with 2.5", mSATA or m.2 drives, it probably is even more shocking.

The other awesome thing about those 3 I linked is that the interface also has changed: Micro USB 3.0 => UBS-C Gen 1 => Thunderbolt.

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