PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic SSD pricing no where to go but down

If you have held off purchasing an SSD then you are a winner. The size will go up and prices are just going to keep falling, which has been the trend since 2014.

Here is an article from last year, but, 2 points are important. 1) the size of a HDD is limited to about 10TB with the current technology. The upper limit of SSDs will be closer to 30TB within 2 years. 2) New manufacturing techniques add years to the lifetime and reliability of SSDs.

http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage/ssd-prices-free-fall/1147938888

I was talking to a friend of mine who has built PC's for 25 years and he says the last half of 2016 is going to be a good time to look into purchasing SSD because manufacturers are looking to dump the smaller sizes. Any size Less than 1TB will be cleared out, because in 2017 1TB SSDs will be the standard size actively installed in new PC and sold in the aftermarket.

The end of magnetic memory is on the horizon.

I've been around computers long enough to remember huge 8" floppy disks.

My pre-PC TI/99 microcomputer had a cassette tape connection for memory storage and my first "IBM Compatible" PC had a 5.25" and a 3.5" disk with no hard drive. (Band-in-a-Box was DOS only back then)

Then I got a 40m "Winchester" hard drive that was as big as an old phone book, sat under the computer, and you could hear whir as it slowly accelerated to speed.

I had Zip and Jaz drives too.

Now it seems the CD-RAM is going the way of the dinosaur as well.

Those little flash drives are a welcome replacement to removable media, and the flash SSD will replace the Winchester and its descendants pretty soon.

I am not sorry to see magnetic memory die. It was a great tool, but flash memory is more stable and more compact.

I do like CD and DVD RAM for archival storage though. They are big enough to write info on and can be stored on a shelf.

Insights and incites by Notes

Yes, but I have made the experience that some CDs and DVDs lose their ability to have data retrieved, some after one year others later. SSD memory and magnetic memory are much more stable in this case; and they also can be stored on a shelf.

If you want to safely save CDs or DVDs then you must use gold archival CDs/DVDs and burn them very slowly. I have had ordinary CDs die after a couple of months to a couple of years, even when using a slow burn. Gold CDs/DVDs are quite expensive but worth the price If you want to really save something like songs or pictures. I have used gold CDs for a number of years now and they still are OK.

Gold archival CD/dvd also have their limitations which is file size, stacks and stacks of DVDs to hold, 1 TB of data, and if large files that have to span several disks, 'oose one in the set any you are dashed.

If we're veering off to archive storage, Cloud storage for the win.

Dropbox, Google Docs, etc offer fairly large free storage and are replicated (very little risk of loss of data due to hardware of any kind)

A $10/month (approx) hosting package at 1and1.com can easily be negotiated to unlimited storage (again replicated by them; no worries).

Many options. Having a copy off-site is safer anyway. Add in replication and backups as part of the deal and it is a very easy to have plenty of backed up and redundant storage space.

Then you can look into Rackspace and the slew of other actual Cloud services and make up your mind.

I haven't burned a DVD or CD backup in years, unless it was for a temporary transfer (give Joe Doe a copy of his website in current state).

I do have access to (and help support) Enterprise Cloud/backup systems, and understand the value. I also see value in 'free' for home users. Depends on your needs.
1and1 would likely notice 2 terrabytes being uploaded, but 100 gig of space on their servers has not ever been mentioned to me. Plus unlimited websites .. for about $10/month.
Maybe I got lucky, but they do have some nice packages.

Veering off the topic of SSD pricing ,but hitting right on the nose of storage pricing in general. Now I have 105GB onedrive for free right now for 2 years from the time I purchased my new HP win10 computer. They started that promotion in March 2016 and ended that promotion in March 2016. WHY because Cloud storage is actually very expensive for the host company and for the consumer. Are you speaking of LandR? Storing your music data 10 dollars a month unlimited? When you pay for the Mastering of each song as I understand it? like a studio storing your master tape, hoping you may want to remix and remaster in the future. OR some other site landl? THIS IS Loss leader pricing to gain a user base, only to up the price when rolled out to the mass market. Case in point 1 year ago SoundCLoud Pro was $69 a year for unlimited storage, now its $63 a year for double the storage of the free product, and unlimited is $135.00/year.

Are you going to pay somebody $9 a month for 10GB general file backup (industry standard, google drive , dropbox, onedrive) then pay soundcloud $135.00 year, and LandR (which is DiskMasters) $120.00 a year. Or Purchase a 10TB SSD in 2017 for roughly $400.00 and learn how to back it up to another 5TB SSD $200.00 nightly 2/1 compression. Investing in hardware will always work out better in the long run.

Don't tell me about how safe you are with say "Microsoft cloud storage backing up your files." NOBODY IS WATCHING YOUR FILES ON THE INTERNET before long there will be massive crashes and pirating of personal data, due to low priced storage offerings. My OneDrive crashed, April 1 2016 it started triangular replication as MS put it, making copies of every file I had in the cloud and putting it within a subfolder of a random folder on the drive. Eventually I ran out of space on my onedrive and the replication started going into the "cloud recycle bin." This is replicated to the local recycle bin, and it filled up my C: drive (where the local recycle bin resides.) This caused an error message "You are out of space on your System drive C:\" I was not a happy PC user. I broke the Onedrive replication and then inspected more than 20,000 files in my recycle bin moving them to the D drive one by one "until I had at least 10% empty space on the C drive at which point I shut down the computer for the night. In the morning I rebooted. Unfortunately, my onedrive had replicated from my tablet over night. You guessed it "You are out of space on your System drive C:\"another couple days cleaning out my recycle bin. Microsoft support sent me an email April 5th stating that they had detected a critical OneDrive error that could only be solved by my attention to said "TRIANGULAR REPLICATION?" 5 days after it happened, 4 days after I opened a support tick with the onedrive support team. Again nobody is watching your data on the cloud, if you think they are you are fooling yourself.

Sorry to hear about your loss DGA, data loss that is.

External storage is fairly cheap anyway. Similar to Rharv, I haven't burned a disc backup in forever.

Although this is about SSD, my back up is a portable USB HDD in the terabyte range.

I keep it in my desk drawer at work so it's offsite and take it home once a week to back up my home computers.

It's been a fairly simple and inexpensive solution.

Thanks for the CD/DVD/RAM warnings.

I for one would not trust cloud storage. I don't want my data in the hands of anyone else.

And I do know that magnetic media also has a shelf life. The magnetic field of the earth eventually erases them - not to mention speakers, vacuum cleaners, the wiring in the walls of your house (any wire carrying current has a magnetic field around it), and so on.

So how stable is flash memory?

Insights and incites by Notes

Hear, hear!

I don't know yet, but I know that if I have a regular hard drive, as we know them, stored in a place where not too many magnetic storms affect it, the time where I have to duplicate them onto another drive occurs not quite so often as with CD or DVD. Today's hard drives last a bit longer than yesterday's. The biggest problem might be mechanical failure of the read/write head.

My own procedure: I have weekly incremental backups until the backup drive is full.
I buy a new one. On the now "old" drive I consolidate all the files, I move all files, going back from the last backup to the first backup into one filestructure that represents my PC. This way older version of the same files are deleted. Also disposable work files get deleted.

When the next drive is full, I repeat that procedure. I also move all the files from the older drive onto the new drive, again not overwriting newer versions.

Now I have a drive that I can use for something else. My first backup drive now contains all my music files. Software, mp3, music videos...
Another drive contains all private photos and videos...

While this process seems to be awkward, about every two to three years I see that I can still read everything -- and I have everything of importance to me twice: 1. on the regular backup dirve and 2. on a dedicated drive for that subject.

By the way: much more awkward, more expensive, and takes more physical space is to save everything on CD/DVD. My current backup drive's capacity is 5 TB, that is more than 1000 regular DVDs.