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Comment by Einherji | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, as someone with a 512GB SSD, and only using about 20% of that, does anyone actually need this sort of capacity? The obvious answer is if you want to keep a lot of media on the drive but in that case the benefits over an HDD are insignificant, and in my opinion not worth the price premium. Maybe this is mainly for the enterprise space and servers?

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While I agree that it seems a bit excessive, one valid potential use case would be people who need to keep a lot of VM's around. I don't personally have nearly enough to require that kind of space, but I can imagine some people might; for example, having a large set of Windows configurations for application or website testing.

I guess that makes sense. We can at least all agree that having options like this on the market is a good thing, as this will most likely also drive down prices on smaller capacity drives.

Yep, it'll be great to see the prices keep coming down. My main workstation has a 128GB SSD which is split between Linux (for work) and Windows (for Blizzard games); in this situation a 256GB would be a lot more comfortable.

Perhaps for individuals/companies in need of a ton of local storage for graphical rendering. This is going to be a godsend for the visual editing industry.

My steam account would sadly fill a 1TB ssd quickly. I also use them at work for a shared development Cassandra cluster which runs awesome but uses a lot of space (albeit we use 512GB drives)

I filled up my 240GB in a week with software alone (Shogun 2, for instance, takes up 25GB).

Shogun is a game, not software ;)

"Computer software, or just software, is any set of machine-readable instructions (most often in the form of a computer program) that directs a computer's processor to perform specific operations."[1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software

Joke detector not working today?

We at Hacker News do not have a sense of humor that we're aware of.

I'm laughing at that :)

Life pretty much sucks without some jokes and a little laughter.

We are not amused.

It's not that HN is anti humour. It's that by upvoting jokes and the like, you encourage everyone to toss in their oh-so-clever jokes and the level of discussion runs even further downhill. Reddit's there if you want that; HN _tries_ at least to avoid some of the bottom-level commenting.

Anyone who works with large datasets for machine learning, image processing, robotics, science data processing can use this capacity.

Video editing.

This is, in a very real way, relevant to my interests, as someone who has just run out of space on his existing edit SSD.

I have a 512GB SSD, a 128GB SSD, and a 128GB mSATA all in the same laptop - and I use all of them. With Steam, documents, code, VMs, and so on, I find a way to fill it up.

For most people storing media, a large (~3TB) spinner is ideal, paired with a 256GB or 512GB SSD. But for some people, especially in the content creation business, a 960GB SSD is quite alluring.

It's probably mainly targeted towards servers but there's a healthy market for it among consumers. After all, there are a lot of people out there with specific needs or wants that call for storage - it may be a 'niche' product at the moment, but even now the niche is pretty big (even 1% of a ton of people is a ton of people).

My personal (developer machine) calls for around 400gb for VMs and databases. Useful install media (which, sure, is largely optional) adds another ~30gb. If I want a few games on the machine, that's an extra ~20gb. Already, that's around 450gb of space used, and that's being pretty space conscious.

Huge drives like this provide convenience. If I want to back things up locally (full VM snapshots, database backups), there's enough space to do that without having to worry / shuffle things off to a NAS (which may or may not be an option if it's a laptop and you're on the road), and HDDs don't cut it performance-wise.

>does anyone actually need this sort of capacity

Anyone using a laptop with a single drive and lots of photos or videos will. Photos and videos are the real drivers of most people's HD needs.

The benefits over a spinning disk are in no way insignificant. You might not see them, but they exist. I am at 80% utilization of a 512GB SSD in my rMBP, so any new capacity is welcome.

Video editing is probably a good target. When we do any kind of HD video editing you are looking at raw video upwards of the 60gb range just for one video. Especially if you are building out renders being able to access those on a local harddrive instead of over firewire/usb would be a godsend. With that said when you are using files that large, complex backup systems are necessary so internal ssd probably wont even meet that need.

Or plain video capture for pro / pro-consumer.

The local cable access station in Portland, Oregon[3] uses a mix of Aja Ki Pro [2] and Cinedecks[1]. The Cinedecks use SSDs like cartridges, and will record 1080p 4:4:4 ProRes.

The Cinedecks are real nice to be able to use a couple of 512GB SSDs like a cartridge and pop them in and out to record anything from a City Council / School Board meeting or for public use of recording a 3 camera shoot of a live performance.

The Ajas not so much since they use a proprietary shaped cartridge which has SATA connector to dock into the unit. They also have a FW800 connector to off-load data off the drive when undocked from the Aja recorders. I believe you can swap the drives in the plastic housing, but it's not as slick as just using a bare SSD.

[1] http://www.cinedeck.com/ [2] http://www.aja.com/en/products/ki-pro/#overview [3] http://www.pcmtv.org

I have a 128GB SSD, and it's constantly almost full. My photographs and music collection takes about 30GiB, WoW takes 30-40 GiB, my dev projects and school work about 7 GiB, OS and software takes 34 GiB (8GiB of that is reserved for future use), and rest 20 GiB is various miscellanous things that add up. I need 10 GiB free space to download and watch a movie, too.

I said the same thing about my 2TB iMac hard drive. Then we had a baby. All of the sudden, I have thousands of pictures and videos.

I would strongly consider putting this in a computer, only to make tasks like video editing faster. Using tablets all of the time makes my tolerance for poor performance very low ;)

Scientific applications. Large data sets. Huge databases. Samples for musicians.

However, I think the most important reason for me is my huge collection of Steam games. Currently I have Steam installed on a HDD instead of my SSD, because my SSD is only 256GB and Steam is over 800GB. Heh. :P

I'm definitely a minority, but plan on building a durable array (for on and off-road travel). Until now, a redundant terabyte was pretty hard to swallow.

Now I'm just looking for a nice 2.5" enclosure with a built-in RAID controller and eSATA or USB 3.0.

I'd love to have one of these in a 13" notebook to use as main system while doing extended travelling.

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