It’s incredible how much the prices have fallen and that’s how it should be. Sure, I bought the 960 close to launch but still the difference is staggering.
The 960 Evo still chugs along albeit it’s a new one because a few months after I bought it, I had to RMA it. I guess that’s what happens when you are an early adopter. I lost a few hours of work when the original 960 Evo decided to stop working but it also taught me to be more paranoia with backups.
You young fellas sit back, I’mma tell you about the time in '96 that I bought a 1GB hard drive for a thousand doll-hairs. And then later that year got 64MB of RAM for another thousand doll-hairs, and the next month the price dropped in half. I could run two java programs AT THE SAME TIME!
Our first family computer they offered to double the HDD space to 20mb for an extra $500. “You’ll never fill it up!” they claimed. My dad, being a practical guy, couldn’t figure out why he would want to pay extra for something he’d never use.
My dad got tired of struggling so he just told me the future proof a build.
He said “Max out everything” So I did.
128gb ddr4 ram, ryzen 5600 4.6ghz 12 core hyperthreaded CPU, nvidia 2080. (He wouldn’t let me get the 40x card)
No joke though, in the 90s you could buy a HDD with a size advertised on the box and get it home to find that the drive was actually bigger than advertised. They were making advances so fast in the manufacturing that they literally didn’t have the time (or it wasn’t worth the cost) to keep up with updating the boxes.
My father went a bit nuts and bought our first family computer some time around '85. It was an 8088 Turbo XT with a 10MB hard drive. It was something like a $3,000 computer (which would be similar to $8,500 today, with inflation). That hard drive was so big, we thought we’d never fill it. The biggest game we had at the time, Star Flight took up two 360KB floppies, and both my brother and I could each have our own copies on the hard drive, without worrying about space. It was amazing.
But, tech moves on and what was once “bleeding edge” becomes old hat. I’m pretty sure there are calculators which can emulate that entire 8088. And, 10MB is a rounding error on modern drives. I also have little doubt that, 40 years from now we’ll look back at 1TB hard drives and think “oh, how quaint”.
First time I built a computer (late '97), I had to settle for the 850MB HDD. The 1GB was just outside my budget.
Ram is $50/mb, HDD $1/mb.
A blank CD-R is $10, but stores as much as 400 floppies!
A blank CD-R is $10, but stores as much as 400 floppies!
But you also need to purchase a CD drive which is another $15 making it more expensive than a 128 GB SSD.
I got excited when we got a math-coprocessor for our 386 33MHz. I tried my hardest to get a sound blaster card so I didn’t have to use PC speaker to play games (namely TFX), but it was deemed too expensive for little reward.
Your parents weren’t worried about the math co-processor doing all your homework for you? That was the GPT-387? :-)
I had typewriter classes back then!!! Homework came on “photocopies” from a handcranked machine that had a lot of rollers from memory. I have no idea what it was, but it was witchcraft!
Edit: I looked it up for curiosity sake, and the “witchcraft” machine might have been called a mimeograph.
Well To be honest java is a slug, especially on old hardware. If you wanted speed you would use some c or Assembler program…
Spinny drives are definitely going up in price. Recently did a NAS build (5x16tb in z1), and disks were the biggest cost by far. And then like a couple weeks after I pulled the trigger on the disks, I couldn’t find anything comparable that was anything close to what I paid - easily 20-30% more expensive at best. I’m very glad I bought them when I did!
If I had to guess, consumer-grade PCs are starting to shift to SSDs exclusively now that NVMe can be had dirt cheap for decent quality. I think huge old-school disks are basically being mostly relegated to data centers now, and even then, the demand isn’t what it was before (again, due to far cheaper SSDs across the board, even at the enterprise/DC tier). I would further hypothesize that the recent cliff-like price hike may have been due to retailers burning through available inventory, and now they’re dealing with major HDD manufacturers seriously scaling back production capacity.
Might be local price fluctuations or some issues with supplies. About 3 years ago I got a 14 TB HC530 for about 450 EUR; now there’s the 22 TB HC570 for about the same money and a 20 TB model for about 100 EUR less.
Yeah, who knows… I’m just glad I was able to buy a batch of NAS-optimized 16s at around $220/each :P
For over a decade I’ve been waiting for HDD prices to fall to 10 € per TB. Guess I’ll see that in SSDs first.
Yup, there’s a Linustech tip video about this. HDD prices have kinda been set in stone for a good while now
Couldn’t find it within 5 minutes of searching - therefor I accounce that such a video does not exist
So, maybe HDD can hardly get any more cheaper as there is little to non room for improvement while SSD can get higher NAND transistors density.
Just since I’ve setup a plex server (about 8 years now) midrange sizes have gone from 4->16 TBs. Personally I think the bulk of the issue is that HDD customers switched from a mix of enterprise and personal, to nearly all enterprise. Companies really don’t care if a HDD is $200 or $500, so basically all high capacity drives are priced at B2B prices, not consumer
We’re very close. 30TB HAMR drives are expect later this year, and 50TB a year or two later. I think HDDs will continue to present the best value for data hoarders.
Until you would have to replace a HDD: +23 hours of nerve racking RAID repair time for 10TB drive at 120MB/s Even with some advanced (like ZFS etc.) system you can’t go around the fact the HDDs are slow.
And when the HDD fails, you can’t read it. It’s toast. Some cheap non-volatile memory devices are like this too, but good ones go into read-only mode and you can at least attempt data recovery from them if no better option is left.
I’m liking that it is possible get cheap+good 1TB NVMe devices for less than 100€. The consumer SATA market for large SSDs (capacity over 1TB) is unfortunately quite dry. I need replacement for HDDs and even if the speed is capped by SATA bus it would be an massive improvement.
That repair time is the bear. Particularly as so many consumer grade NAS device really don’t have the horsepower for it. System works great until you have to rebuild an array. When that time comes don’t plan on doing much of anything while it’s grinding for the next few days.
https://youtu.be/5QH8Dj6g_Nk Might be what OP watched too. I was surprised they’ve gotten so cheap.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/5QH8Dj6g_Nk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
This is how hardware should work! Overtime what was bleeding edge is now the norm and as such should be priced accordingly… Looking at you Nvidia
nVidia GPUs:
970GTX was 329$ in 2014
1070GTX was 379$ in 2016
2070RTX was 499$ in 2018
3070RTX was 499$ in 2020
4070RTX is 599$ in 2023
Probably, the 5070 in 2025-6 will be 650-700.
I mean, in europe they are more expensive, 4070RTX was about 700€ (770$). Different currencies and different taxes. And greed.
Then ya got the 8800GTX in 2006, with a MSRP at a cool FIVE HUNDRED NINETY NINE US DOLLARS, or 900USD in now-money.
Granted, that was an outlier at the time, but still!
I opted for 2x7900GT cards in SLI in my first self-built monster machine, for Crysis. 330USD each. That thing was a monster. Ran Crysis at 40-50FPS!
…bought an Athlon 64x2 4400+ for some 460USD… it dropped to like 200 just a month or so later when Intel’s Core series was a smash hit.
I bought the 8800GTX because it was the first DX10 compatible GPU available, and that thing was an amazing powerhouse. No need to fiddle with SLI profiles, just raw graphical power.
its hurt i pay back in time a gtx titan x … it was 1000€. for the top of the top. and today the top line is … way fuking more…
$109 for an 840 EVO 250 GB in November 2014. Still rocking it to this day. Was absolutely thrilled to get it then. People don’t fully grasp the paradigm shift that SSDs brought in terms of boot times. For practically the first time in personal computing the average user had a quantifiable metric to judge a PC’s speed. It’s arguably the largest leap in terms of technology advancement to speed advancement in PCs.
Which is exactly why I dislike the fact that nvme happened.
The world had finally standardized on one physical size of hard drive, 2.5 inch sata. You could tell your technophobic aunt to just go buy one of these and it’ll work.
I love nvme, personally. On the board is always better, and one screw is even easier than four. Because of nvme the only thing holding back SFF in the average use case is power supplies, and bricked cords are decent enough in the meantime.
My only gripe with the NVME screws is that they are board provided, and thus, if you lose it, it is a sad day, they are not standard, and I’ve got one board that doesn’t match up with anything.
I’ll be making the leap to SSD in the near future. I picked up a couple m.2s a couple months ago and just haven’t gotten around to adding them. Well, turns out it’ll just be one because adding the second nukes all but 2 of my SATA ports and my 4x pcie apparently… At least the second one won’t go to waste in my laptop.
I had a 2010 Macbook Pro that I was about to throw away a couple of years ago because it was unusable - beach ball of death constantly. I bought a 500GB SSD for around $70 AUD, went on YouTube and about an hour later booted up; it was like a new laptop. I eventually chucked it earlier this year because the battery had it and I didn’t want to spend any more on it.
