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exdeath on 03 June 2015
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dane007 said:
exdeath said:

What's a hard drive? One of those impossibly slow primitive rotating mechanical contraptions that ancient earth cultures used to store data from the 1950s through the mid 2000s?  Those things have more in common with VHS, cassette, and stone tablets and chisels than computer components. 

I didn't know anyone still used those things let alone DESIRED using them.  I can't imagine accessing 50 GB of randomly accessed data at 100 kbps.  My phone's internet connection is faster than that!

I just wish PS4 had 3 more SATA port for SSD RAID0 or a PCI Express 16x port.  Only 0.5 GB/s and 90,000 IOPs from a single SATA port is too slow considering the main memory is almost 300 GB/sec.

To think people willingly suffer .1 GB/sec max sequential and 100 kbps sustained randoms with 3 IOs per second with some spinning hunk of metal and some cassette deck read/write head thing.  Nothing else is measured in kilobytes per second anymore.  Nothing uses read/write heads anymore. Nothing.  Just hard drives.

TLDR: I threw my 500 GB HDD away and installed a 1TB SSD before I even powered the thing on for the first time.  I don't allow magnetic stripe recording devices in my home.  It's 2015 not 1985. :D

If you have USB 3.0 than its not slow at all. Plus you can have 3tb or 4tb for alot cheaper then 1 tb SSD.  1TB ssd i can get in nz  5 3tb external HDD lol. 1tb these days is way to small. Alot of people liek myself don't like to delete and reinstall , just to play game hence why we choose HDD as you jsut plug and play and you can access to yoru entire library whenever you want. no waiting  no need to reinstall.

To me a storage device is useless if I die of old age before I can fill it back it up.  Ever timed how long it takes to fill or empty 3 TB of data over 10s of thousands of files?  It won't even saturate USB 2.0 at 25 MB/sec let alone USB 3.0 or SATA 6G. That is a realm exclusive to SSD.  

Sure I have to reinstall something from time to time but when it takes me 30 seconds to restore a partition backup instead of 30+ mins who cares.

Coping data from hard drive to hard drive reminds of recording tape to tape in an old cassette deck.

Sure you can hit 100 MB/sec if you have 1 giant 3 TB file but that isn't the real world, random access is, and you'll be hard pressed to saturate a USB 2.0 link with a mechanical drives sustained random access throughput.  HDDS suck.  It's time they just go away.  

Reel to reel, 8 track, cassette, VHS, floppies, HDDs, all the same 5 decade old "technology" of laying down magnetic tracks and only one of them refuses to die.

We just need better storage devices.  Even the 1-2 GB/sec of non SATA limited NAND Flash SSDs is still far from the almost 300 GB/sec of GDDR5 but its a still way better than 0.1 GB/sec or god forbid 10s of kilobytes per second that hard drives drop to under heavy random access loads.

I know gobs of storage is a relatively new thing to console gamers and it doesn't quite have the same impact in a console (yet) with the way images are packed for sequential access and unpacking but in the PC world HDDs are dinosaurs and no longer belong in anything.

The only place a HDD is acceptable is in an enterprise SAN where you have thousands of them aggregated together with 100s of GB of cache RAM and then the performance is decent.  But not for single drive systems.

My last desktop was a 2.5 GB/sec SSD RAID on a home LAN built on 10 gigabit Infiniband.  Forgive me if I'm an I/O snob.  But this kilobytes and megabytes per second nonsense has to stop.  And it won't stop as long as we continue to believe that passing slow moving magnetic material under a moving loop of wire is still a valid data storage technique in the 21st century all because that particular dated method allows people to hoard data they will probably never even access again.