More seriously, I'd expect the $/GB ratio of hard drives to SSDs to stay about the same until the Moore's Law-type scaling for one or the other of them breaks down. But at some point, SSDs will simply have enough storage space, and being able to get a lot more capacity for the same price in a hard drive simply won't matter.
Today, you can get a 60 GB SSD or a 2 TB hard drive for about the same price. A lot of people can say that 60 GB isn't enough capacity, so you'd either need both an SSD and a hard drive or a larger and far more expensive SSD. Maybe in four years or so, it will be a 240 GB SSD or an 8 TB hard drive for about the same price. 240 GB will be plenty of capacity for a lot of people, and getting the 240 GB SSD and no hard drive will be a perfectly viable option for many, without needing to get one of each or a larger and more expensive SSD. Some people will still need a lot more capacity than 240 GB, though, and face about the same choice as today. Maybe a decade from now, we'll be comparing a 1 TB SSD and a 20 TB hard drive, at which point, the SSD will be the better choice for a large fraction of people, though some people will still need more storage. As time passes, more and more people will find that SSDs have plenty of capacity and there's no need for a hard drive.
-----
A single device to replace both mass storage and system memory? I wouldn't count on that, or at least not in the near future. Even the fastest solid state drives have access latencies about three orders of magnitude too slow to be a serious option as system memory. DRAM is volatile, and therefore not suitable for mass storage: you don't want every brief electricity outage to wipe your hard drive. It's also far too expensive, at around ten times the cost per gigabyte of NAND flash.
There are some things in the pipeline, but those are a replacement for one or the other, not both at once. DDR4 will become common for system memory in a few years, but that's only a new form of SDRAM to replace DDR3. The phase change memory that Intel is working on and hopes to bring to market in a few years might someday replace flash memory (or might not, as there's no guarantee that they can make it work well enough to be commercially viable), but will be far too slow to use as system memory. But I'm not aware of anything suitable to replace both with a reasonable chance of coming to market in a few years.
I remember when a 1gb flash stick cost 30$ now it not even a quarter of that price well have too see where the market and quality goes first if they make it cheaper but less durable scrap that!
Since this build Im working on will mainly be for gaming
Mainly for gaming is a long way from solely for gaming. For example, I see that you're browsing the Internet right now. ("Now" meaning as you read this, not as I type it.)
Yes it will mainly be for gaming. I do download music and movies but keep those mostly on a external right now. Intention was to get a 1TB HD for storage. Is there much of improvement in gaming w/ using a SSD for it?
Games played:Warhammer, Atlantica, Vanguard, Tabula Rasa, Guild Wars, DDO, City of Heroes/Villians, Aion, and Global Agenda... Games playing: Age of Conan & EVE Games waiting for: SWTOR
Is there much of improvement in gaming w/ using a SSD for it?
Again, that depends tremendously on what games you play and what you would regard as an improvement. Badly coded games sometimes have hitching caused by waiting on information from the hard drive. An SSD will fix that, but it's a problem that most games don't noticeably suffer from.
Everything will load really a lot faster on an SSD. Your computer will boot faster, games will launch faster, you'll go through zoning screens faster, and so forth. Opinions about whether that matters vary wildly. Some people on this forum go on extended rants about how much they hate loading screens. Others don't see a point as they don't mind constantly having to wait 5 seconds here and 10 seconds there for the computer to respond.
But it's really a question of what you'd regard as an improvement. It's like that for a lot of other hardware, too. To mix in mostly things that SSD's can't do:
If you could reduce your ping times by 100 ms, is that an improvement?
If you improve your frame rate from 30 frames per second to 40, is that an improvement? How about from 60 to 100?
If you can go from flawlessly smooth frame rates at low graphical settings to the same frame rates at high graphical settings, is that an improvement? How about going from high settings to really max settings?
If you go from getting disconnected once per hour to not being disconnected at all, is that an improvement?
If the time spent waiting for your computer to respond whenever you try to load anything is cut by 2/3, is that an improvement?
If you go from a given level of performance with really loud fans in your case to the same performance with a pretty quiet case, is that an improvement?
If you go from one blue screen of death per week to never crashing, is that an improvement?
If you go from a 5% chance of losing data that matters to you in a given year to 0.1% chance, is that an improvement?
Opinions vary, and so hardware choices should vary. If you're often annoyed that you try to do something on your computer and it sits there for a while thinking before it gets around to doing what you want, then you really should get an SSD. That will greatly reduce how long you have to wait, and hence the annoyance. If you don't feel like you're ever having to wait on the computer at all, then you'll still notice that things are faster with an SSD, but won't think it was worth the money.
A 30GB hard drive is not large enough for the average person these days. I do not have many programs on my computer, however, 66GB are used by the OS and installed programs, and I have system restore shut off and the recycle bin set at a very low number, so, not a lot of wasted space there. And, I ran Disk Cleanup & defragmented the hard drive late last night.
In addition, Windows XP, Vista, 7, requires a minium of 15% hard drive space be kept empty or defrag will not work.
If an SSD or RAID is too expensive for you yet you still want to reduce game load times and zoning load times, as well as have programs launch faster, simply purchase two Western Digital Black 640GB hard drives. Partition the first drive so that C: drive has 100GB and the rest left for the other partition. This drive will have the operating system and the second partition can contain back-up files, pictures or whatever you very seldom access.
Do the same with the second drive. Partition 100GB, and use what is left over as a second partition. The 100GB partition will be used to install programs to, including games. The second partition on the second hard drive can be used for music, movies, or whatever. [Use a larger drive if you have a lot of movies.]
This arrangement will have two hard drives working at the same time and will cut down on time required for certain functions. In addition to having two hard drives running at the same time, the outer portion of the disks will be used, which move data much faster than the inner portion, the heads do not have to cover so much area to read and write, and defrag takes less time to complete.
7200 RPM Harddrives are utter-crap. They have the highest failure rate, the weakest warranties...The greatest bottlenecks and are the slowest part to your computer. However, 7200 RPM HDDs are good for test drives...since so many people use them as main drives.
7200 RPM Harddrives are utter-crap. They have the highest failure rate, the weakest warranties...The greatest bottlenecks and are the slowest part to your computer. However, 7200 RPM HDDs are good for test drives...since so many people use them as main drives.
I noticed this esp in larger drives like 1TB when im watching some video and try to install or copy something the whole video starts to stutter this dosent happen with smaller slower drives
7200 RPM Harddrives are utter-crap. They have the highest failure rate, the weakest warranties...The greatest bottlenecks and are the slowest part to your computer. However, 7200 RPM HDDs are good for test drives...since so many people use them as main drives.
Well, that is true but the failure rates are still acceptable during normal use. And if you are scared for failures just get 3 small cheap ones and raid them instead (but see that you have a motherboard or PCI raid card that supports it). 3 x 250 GB drives raided in RAID 5 will give you 500 fast and safe GB for a rather small price.
Of course is a SSD together with a large media drive better but it cost a lot more.
Originally posted by Shinami 7200 RPM Harddrives are utter-crap. They have the highest failure rate, the weakest warranties...The greatest bottlenecks and are the slowest part to your computer. However, 7200 RPM HDDs are good for test drives...since so many people use them as main drives.
I have been using Western Digital Black 640GB hard drives for years and have had no issues. And, if you do not know it, the 640GB Black series are 7200 RPM.
It is best not to lump ALL hard drives together. I am not sure what company you have been purchasing hard drives from. It might be time for you to make a change if you have a high failure rate.
And, yes, there has been a higher failure rate among the higher areal density drives, above 640GB, as was stated in another post. Even so, not ALL of those drives fail. However, there have been enough failures that I have not yet let go of my WD 640 Black 7200 RPM drives, and still order them. I want to have enough of the drives setting on the shelf for other computers that I will build.
It is my hope that SSDs will become larger, faster, and less expensive by the time I am ready to make the switch.
Intel Core i7 7700K, MB is Gigabyte Z270X-UD5 SSD x2, 4TB WD Black HHD, 32GB RAM, MSI GTX 980 Ti Lightning LE video card
The failure rate is the in construction quality. MTBF is the time rate of failure. 7200 RPM HDDs are not "designed for 24 hour use." They are designed for 8 hour work sessions. The temperature tolerance is lower. The applied is.. "For every 10C above threshhold, the MBTF gets cut in half, while the MBTF doubles for every 10C under threshold. 7200 HDDs are great for basic computing and can last a long time....but we who play "heavy games" and "Demanding Games" are not the "Regular users", we push our systems under stress and load for 8 hour periods or longer...so naturally we need better hardware.
10K RPM HDDs have a higher tolerance and are designed for 24 hour operation. Their tolerances are always +15 - +20C higher than 7200 RPM HDDs as failure means manufacturers have to answer to the IT and Server World, who is more powerful than the Consumer World. Also the heat radius of a top end video card pushes the temps of parts up while the system is stressed.
Solid State Drives are a mixed bag due to their controller programming. I am sure they will become mainstream one day and replace mechanical drives altogether.
Oh yeah here is a screenshot of a test I ran yesterday
There are enterprise class hard drives designed for heavy duty 24/7 use. Those tend to have higher RPM, too, but that's not exactly the same as higher RPM drives.
Probably the bigger factor in hard drive durability is that internal desktop hard drives aren't designed to handle a lot of jostling around while in use. That's because they don't need to be, as very, very few people drop a desktop case while the computer is running. Laptop and external hard drives are built to take a lot more such abuse, but even those aren't in the same league as solid state drives in physical durability.
Im sure you mean the SCSI HDDs...that were very special. They had their own Cards that had an independent controller on them and literally had good read/writes...There was also RiGi drives for those who were hard core...^_^
oh yes and quoting "Believe what you want, I've been using comps since the 80s line"
What bearing does that really have? I remember when In order to play a game I had to enter the code and execute it back then...Not to mention my friends who were alive in the 70s only required a fraction of college credits for a comp science major. When I majored in Computer Sciences, it was 21 computer science courses, 4 computer science electives, 6 math courses, then came supporting courses from other majors........and that was just for a B.S....
The cool thing about people like you is that we can go back to the same time frame and at least talk about it. People really take things for granted today and have it extremely easy. I remember the days of playing around with 8008s and 8086s and how happy I was when I got a 386. ^_^
GDDR5 (Graphics Double Data Rate, version 5) SGRAM is a type of high performance dynamic random-access graphics card memory designed for applications requiring high bandwidth. Unlike its predecessor, GDDR4, GDDR5 is based on DDR3 memory which has double the data lines ("DQ" lines) compared to DDR2 but GDDR5 also has 8 bit wide prefetch buffers like GDDR4.
So I think you can use DDR5 MB on your DDR3 GPU....
GDDR5 is rather different from DDR3. DDR3, like DDR2, DDR, GDDR3, GDDR4, and so forth is double data rate memory. That is, it can send two bits of data per bit of bus width per clock cycle. GDDR5 is quad data rate, so it can send four bits of data per bit of bus width per clock cycle. Thus, 1 GHz GDDR5 memory is twice as fast as 1 GHz DDR3, GDDR3, or whatever.
Comments
Must be really old then.
-----
More seriously, I'd expect the $/GB ratio of hard drives to SSDs to stay about the same until the Moore's Law-type scaling for one or the other of them breaks down. But at some point, SSDs will simply have enough storage space, and being able to get a lot more capacity for the same price in a hard drive simply won't matter.
Today, you can get a 60 GB SSD or a 2 TB hard drive for about the same price. A lot of people can say that 60 GB isn't enough capacity, so you'd either need both an SSD and a hard drive or a larger and far more expensive SSD. Maybe in four years or so, it will be a 240 GB SSD or an 8 TB hard drive for about the same price. 240 GB will be plenty of capacity for a lot of people, and getting the 240 GB SSD and no hard drive will be a perfectly viable option for many, without needing to get one of each or a larger and more expensive SSD. Some people will still need a lot more capacity than 240 GB, though, and face about the same choice as today. Maybe a decade from now, we'll be comparing a 1 TB SSD and a 20 TB hard drive, at which point, the SSD will be the better choice for a large fraction of people, though some people will still need more storage. As time passes, more and more people will find that SSDs have plenty of capacity and there's no need for a hard drive.
-----
A single device to replace both mass storage and system memory? I wouldn't count on that, or at least not in the near future. Even the fastest solid state drives have access latencies about three orders of magnitude too slow to be a serious option as system memory. DRAM is volatile, and therefore not suitable for mass storage: you don't want every brief electricity outage to wipe your hard drive. It's also far too expensive, at around ten times the cost per gigabyte of NAND flash.
There are some things in the pipeline, but those are a replacement for one or the other, not both at once. DDR4 will become common for system memory in a few years, but that's only a new form of SDRAM to replace DDR3. The phase change memory that Intel is working on and hopes to bring to market in a few years might someday replace flash memory (or might not, as there's no guarantee that they can make it work well enough to be commercially viable), but will be far too slow to use as system memory. But I'm not aware of anything suitable to replace both with a reasonable chance of coming to market in a few years.
I remember when a 1gb flash stick cost 30$ now it not even a quarter of that price well have too see where the market and quality goes first if they make it cheaper but less durable scrap that!
Yes it will mainly be for gaming. I do download music and movies but keep those mostly on a external right now. Intention was to get a 1TB HD for storage. Is there much of improvement in gaming w/ using a SSD for it?
Games played:Warhammer, Atlantica, Vanguard, Tabula Rasa, Guild Wars, DDO, City of Heroes/Villians, Aion, and Global Agenda...
Games playing: Age of Conan & EVE
Games waiting for: SWTOR
Again, that depends tremendously on what games you play and what you would regard as an improvement. Badly coded games sometimes have hitching caused by waiting on information from the hard drive. An SSD will fix that, but it's a problem that most games don't noticeably suffer from.
Everything will load really a lot faster on an SSD. Your computer will boot faster, games will launch faster, you'll go through zoning screens faster, and so forth. Opinions about whether that matters vary wildly. Some people on this forum go on extended rants about how much they hate loading screens. Others don't see a point as they don't mind constantly having to wait 5 seconds here and 10 seconds there for the computer to respond.
But it's really a question of what you'd regard as an improvement. It's like that for a lot of other hardware, too. To mix in mostly things that SSD's can't do:
If you could reduce your ping times by 100 ms, is that an improvement?
If you improve your frame rate from 30 frames per second to 40, is that an improvement? How about from 60 to 100?
If you can go from flawlessly smooth frame rates at low graphical settings to the same frame rates at high graphical settings, is that an improvement? How about going from high settings to really max settings?
If you go from getting disconnected once per hour to not being disconnected at all, is that an improvement?
If the time spent waiting for your computer to respond whenever you try to load anything is cut by 2/3, is that an improvement?
If you go from a given level of performance with really loud fans in your case to the same performance with a pretty quiet case, is that an improvement?
If you go from one blue screen of death per week to never crashing, is that an improvement?
If you go from a 5% chance of losing data that matters to you in a given year to 0.1% chance, is that an improvement?
Opinions vary, and so hardware choices should vary. If you're often annoyed that you try to do something on your computer and it sits there for a while thinking before it gets around to doing what you want, then you really should get an SSD. That will greatly reduce how long you have to wait, and hence the annoyance. If you don't feel like you're ever having to wait on the computer at all, then you'll still notice that things are faster with an SSD, but won't think it was worth the money.
A 30GB hard drive is not large enough for the average person these days. I do not have many programs on my computer, however, 66GB are used by the OS and installed programs, and I have system restore shut off and the recycle bin set at a very low number, so, not a lot of wasted space there. And, I ran Disk Cleanup & defragmented the hard drive late last night.
In addition, Windows XP, Vista, 7, requires a minium of 15% hard drive space be kept empty or defrag will not work.
If an SSD or RAID is too expensive for you yet you still want to reduce game load times and zoning load times, as well as have programs launch faster, simply purchase two Western Digital Black 640GB hard drives. Partition the first drive so that C: drive has 100GB and the rest left for the other partition. This drive will have the operating system and the second partition can contain back-up files, pictures or whatever you very seldom access.
Do the same with the second drive. Partition 100GB, and use what is left over as a second partition. The 100GB partition will be used to install programs to, including games. The second partition on the second hard drive can be used for music, movies, or whatever. [Use a larger drive if you have a lot of movies.]
This arrangement will have two hard drives working at the same time and will cut down on time required for certain functions. In addition to having two hard drives running at the same time, the outer portion of the disks will be used, which move data much faster than the inner portion, the heads do not have to cover so much area to read and write, and defrag takes less time to complete.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136319
These drives are a little long in the tooth regarding areal density, but they are still a good option for a gamer.
EDIT: Clarification - regarding partitions on second hard drive.
Intel Core i7 7700K, MB is Gigabyte Z270X-UD5
SSD x2, 4TB WD Black HHD, 32GB RAM, MSI GTX 980 Ti Lightning LE video card
7200 RPM Harddrives are utter-crap. They have the highest failure rate, the weakest warranties...The greatest bottlenecks and are the slowest part to your computer. However, 7200 RPM HDDs are good for test drives...since so many people use them as main drives.
I noticed this esp in larger drives like 1TB when im watching some video and try to install or copy something the whole video starts to stutter this dosent happen with smaller slower drives
Well, that is true but the failure rates are still acceptable during normal use. And if you are scared for failures just get 3 small cheap ones and raid them instead (but see that you have a motherboard or PCI raid card that supports it). 3 x 250 GB drives raided in RAID 5 will give you 500 fast and safe GB for a rather small price.
Of course is a SSD together with a large media drive better but it cost a lot more.
I have been using Western Digital Black 640GB hard drives for years and have had no issues. And, if you do not know it, the 640GB Black series are 7200 RPM.
It is best not to lump ALL hard drives together. I am not sure what company you have been purchasing hard drives from. It might be time for you to make a change if you have a high failure rate.
And, yes, there has been a higher failure rate among the higher areal density drives, above 640GB, as was stated in another post. Even so, not ALL of those drives fail. However, there have been enough failures that I have not yet let go of my WD 640 Black 7200 RPM drives, and still order them. I want to have enough of the drives setting on the shelf for other computers that I will build.
It is my hope that SSDs will become larger, faster, and less expensive by the time I am ready to make the switch.
Intel Core i7 7700K, MB is Gigabyte Z270X-UD5
SSD x2, 4TB WD Black HHD, 32GB RAM, MSI GTX 980 Ti Lightning LE video card
The failure rate is the in construction quality. MTBF is the time rate of failure. 7200 RPM HDDs are not "designed for 24 hour use." They are designed for 8 hour work sessions. The temperature tolerance is lower. The applied is.. "For every 10C above threshhold, the MBTF gets cut in half, while the MBTF doubles for every 10C under threshold. 7200 HDDs are great for basic computing and can last a long time....but we who play "heavy games" and "Demanding Games" are not the "Regular users", we push our systems under stress and load for 8 hour periods or longer...so naturally we need better hardware.
10K RPM HDDs have a higher tolerance and are designed for 24 hour operation. Their tolerances are always +15 - +20C higher than 7200 RPM HDDs as failure means manufacturers have to answer to the IT and Server World, who is more powerful than the Consumer World. Also the heat radius of a top end video card pushes the temps of parts up while the system is stressed.
Solid State Drives are a mixed bag due to their controller programming. I am sure they will become mainstream one day and replace mechanical drives altogether.
Oh yeah here is a screenshot of a test I ran yesterday
http://www.smashmybrain.com/screenshots/games.jpg
I did this initial test under a 7200 RPM HDD
I told you that 7200 RPM is ok for Test drives for things....
Believe what you want. I have been working with computers since the 1980s.
Intel Core i7 7700K, MB is Gigabyte Z270X-UD5
SSD x2, 4TB WD Black HHD, 32GB RAM, MSI GTX 980 Ti Lightning LE video card
There are enterprise class hard drives designed for heavy duty 24/7 use. Those tend to have higher RPM, too, but that's not exactly the same as higher RPM drives.
Probably the bigger factor in hard drive durability is that internal desktop hard drives aren't designed to handle a lot of jostling around while in use. That's because they don't need to be, as very, very few people drop a desktop case while the computer is running. Laptop and external hard drives are built to take a lot more such abuse, but even those aren't in the same league as solid state drives in physical durability.
Im sure you mean the SCSI HDDs...that were very special. They had their own Cards that had an independent controller on them and literally had good read/writes...There was also RiGi drives for those who were hard core...^_^
oh yes and quoting "Believe what you want, I've been using comps since the 80s line"
What bearing does that really have? I remember when In order to play a game I had to enter the code and execute it back then...Not to mention my friends who were alive in the 70s only required a fraction of college credits for a comp science major. When I majored in Computer Sciences, it was 21 computer science courses, 4 computer science electives, 6 math courses, then came supporting courses from other majors........and that was just for a B.S....
The cool thing about people like you is that we can go back to the same time frame and at least talk about it. People really take things for granted today and have it extremely easy. I remember the days of playing around with 8008s and 8086s and how happy I was when I got a 386. ^_^
GDDR5 (Graphics Double Data Rate, version 5) SGRAM is a type of high performance dynamic random-access graphics card memory designed for applications requiring high bandwidth. Unlike its predecessor, GDDR4, GDDR5 is based on DDR3 memory which has double the data lines ("DQ" lines) compared to DDR2 but GDDR5 also has 8 bit wide prefetch buffers like GDDR4.
So I think you can use DDR5 MB on your DDR3 GPU....
ltl carriers
GDDR5 is rather different from DDR3. DDR3, like DDR2, DDR, GDDR3, GDDR4, and so forth is double data rate memory. That is, it can send two bits of data per bit of bus width per clock cycle. GDDR5 is quad data rate, so it can send four bits of data per bit of bus width per clock cycle. Thus, 1 GHz GDDR5 memory is twice as fast as 1 GHz DDR3, GDDR3, or whatever.