• WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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    9 hours ago

    that’s good to be aware of, but using nvme drives for lots of storage does not seem to be economical. (I assume) in most cases large amounts of storage like this is used for archival and backups, where speeds don’t matter over what good HDDs can do.

    • Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      8 hours ago

      Oh yeah absolutely. As mentioned above I myself use spinning rust in my nas.
      The difference is decreasing over time, but it’ll be ages before ssds trump hdds in price per TB.

      The difference now compared to in the past is that you are looking at 4TB SSDs and 16TB HDDs, not 512GB SSDs and 4TB HDDs, and in my observation the vast majority has no use for that amount of storage currently, while the remainder is willing or even happy to offload the storage onto a separate machine with network access, since the speed doesn’t matter and it’s the type of data you might want to access rarely but from anywhere on any kind of device.
      Compare for example phones that are trying to sell you 0.25 or 0.5 TB as a premium feature for hundreds of usd in upmark.
      If anyone had use for 2TB of storage, they would instead start at 0.5 and upsell you to 2 and 4 TB.

      I myself have 32TB of storage and am constantly asking around friends and family if anyone has large amounts of data they might wanna put somewhere. And there isn’t really anyone.
      Even the worst games only use up so many TB, and you don’t really wanna game off of HDD speeds after tasting the light. And if you’d have to copy your game over from your HDD, the time it’d take to redownload from steam is comparable unless your internet is horrifically bad.
      My extensive collection of linux ISOs is independent and stable, and I do actually share it with a few via jellyfin, but in all its greatness both in amount and quality it still packs in below 4TB. And if you wanna replicate such a setup you’d wanna do it on a dedicated machine anyway.

      If I had to slim down I could fit my entire nas into less than 4TB if I’m being honest with myself, in my defense I built it prior to cost-effective 4TB SSDs. The main benefit for me is not caring about storage. I have auto backups of my main apps on my phone, which copy the entire apk and data directories, daily, and move them to the server. That generates about 10GB per day.
      I still haven’t bothered deleting any of those, they have just been accumulating for years. If I ever get close to my storage capacity, before buying another drive I’d first go in and delete the 6TB of duplicate backups of random phone apps dated 2020-2026.
      I wrote a paper grouping together info of tons of simulations. And instead of taking out the measurement files containing the relevant values every 10 simulation steps (2.5GB), or the data of all system positions and all measured quantities every 2 steps (~200GB), I copied the entire runtime directory. For 431 simulations, 8.5GB per, totaling 1.8TB.
      And then later my entire main folder for that entire project and the program data and config dirs of the simulation software, for another half a TB. I could have probably saved most of that by looking into which files contain what info and doing some most basic sorting. But why bother? Time is cheap but storage is cheaper.

      But to go for simply the feeling of swimming in storage capacity, you first need to experience it. Which is why I think noone wants it. And those that do already have a nas or similar setup.

      Maybe you see a usecase that would see someone without knowledge or equipment need tons of cheap storage in a single desktop pc?