Meanwhile I'm still dreaming about any consumer and affordable 32TB or even 16TB portable SSD. Innovation and market for consumers are going backwards.
Funny thing is that one of the best you can get is the Crucial (Micron) 8TB one but even that one gets more expensive. I have the feeling it will be gone completely soon.
There was once a 2.5" SSD Mushkin Source 16TB SATA drive. At its cheapest it was ~1700 USD (or 1500 EUR). That was mid 2023 (like 3 years ago!).
Nowadays it feels like that this time and price region is like decades away in the future. I was hoping I can store more data in future on modern tech like SSDs and not less.
Yeah it sucks :( Almost exactly a year ago, I got a brand new 15.36TB Kioxia CD-6R (u.3 pcie4x4 drive) for $1450+tax from serverpartdeals.com - that same drive is now listed for ~$4600 (and it’s also out of stock there)
Nobody is stopping anyone from buying a USB-C powered and connected very portable 2 or 4 slot external NVMe enclosures.
The old SATA SSD form factor is dead and wont come back.
OWC ThunderBlades exist, but 32TB will set you back 9 grand.
You should be able to assemble something with USB-C for under 5k.
That's not a mass consumer market thing, but perfectly doable, if your use case warrants it.
We are stuck with 2021 pricing, but now with options of 8TB per NVMe drive at way higher speed.
36TB+ HHD external WD drive combos were always around EUR 1000 over last 5 years. With a short low end around EUR 600 in 2023
>Nobody is stopping anyone from buying a USB-C powered and connected very portable 2 or 4 slot external NVMe enclosures.
That's more expensive than buying a single large capacity drive. It's also a terrible idea. I would never trust a low cost chinese controller with terabytes of my data.
>The old SATA SSD form factor is dead and wont come back.
I will not miss the awful, half-duplex protocol that never should have won over SAS. I just wish that PCIe switches and cheaper eMMC/UFS flash on M.2 were available for more flexible and cost effective storage options.
Yeah, the problem is most consumer motherboards don't come with that many PCIe lanes. Building storage servers for home use with M.2 SSDs is just not feasible.
PCIe is a switched protocol. We ought to have had better options to make better use of the limited lanes by now. There are a few cards with switches that can give you multiple M.2 slots on x4, but that's only with gen3, which the latest GPUs won't init on, and trying to cable that is hell. Better PCIe switch options for external enclosures exist, but aren't available to mortals that I've seen.
I find it very odd that there is so much faith in "innovation" (and probably "economies of scale").
there is no sign of any impending breakthroughs that would change flash economics much.
slc-mlc-tlc-qlc was very nice but plc will not happen. layer-based flash was also nice but it is ultimately linear (more layers, more cost, lower yield). dimensional shrinks are already stalled because of a tragic electron shortage (per cell).
I guess there's no harm in pining for some other NVRAM technology (spins, etc).
The prices aren't going down for large consumer drives because the market is so small, and because the AI DC market is swallowing up everything. There's little demand from your average consumer to have 30TB of storage, let alone specifically SSDs. The average user doesn't have that much data, and if they do a HDD is fine for any practical purpose.
Despite the recent AI bubble you can still buy HDDs in the tens of TBs for a few hundred EUR/USD and you still don't see them in every computer. How high could the 30TB SSD demand be to justify the kind of volumes that drive price down?
In the DC it's the opposite, large and efficient drives are a must to save support all those fancy workloads while driving down space, power, cooling needs.
A few months ago I finished building a new media server based on UnRaid. I populated it with WD 26TB drives. At the time they were about $400 (steep, but a decent capacity/dollar buy). Now they are nearly $1000 on Amazon, a 250% increase. I just hope I don't have a drive failure.
With regards to the new Micron SSD - I wonder how they keep it cool? I don't see coolant ports on it so they must strap a heatsink on.
The product brief says maximum 30W and it looks like the whole enclosure is a heatsink, even has ribs on the back. The expected operating temp is 50C but it's probably rated to operate at higher than that.
P.S. I had to shuck 20TB WD drives that cost 350EUR on sale (now at 400EUR). 26TB drives are now ~700EUR. These external drives were the cheap option. Standalone drives usually cost more.
The average user consumes that much quite regularly. They've been taught to stream it off of someone else's computer, mostly so that the next time they stream it they can be compelled to pay for it again. It's fun going back to dumb terminals.
Consuming and needing to store are very different things. Most media is disposable, one-time consumption. How many people stored the newspapers they read?
Why would you want to store every movie or series you watch? 30TB of data is something like 1 year of uninterrupted streaming at average Netflix 4K bitrates. Even more at HD bit rates. How many people would ever store years worth of movies on SSDs no less? Enough for it to drive huge sales in the market?
It isn't. The number of books I've read again, that I've wanted to have my children read. Music. Shows. The old VHS tapes were only disposable because the format was so deteriorating. It was inconvenient because of the physical size.
But, if people realize that media could be non-disposable, how could the recording industry get rich selling you the same albums you'd already bought a half dozen times before? I've been storing everything as FLAC... it'll be good for centuries. Books already have a "good for centuries" file format. I suspect very strongly that 4K is the ultimate res for all media made up until today (no way to do 8k remasters). It doesn't need to be disposable, it just is because there are people who want to get rich off of you renting your own culture back from them.
>How many people would ever store years worth of movies on SSDs no less?
Send me a boxfull of these 245TB SSDs, I'll show you. My film count surpassed Netflix's about 12 years ago, and I haven't slowed down once.
That's a trend which is more and more common nowadays.
I wish the industry would adopt more zero knowledge methods in this regards. They are existing and mathematically proven but it seems there is no real adoption.
- OpenAI wants my passport when topping up 100 USD
- Bolt wanted recently my passport number to use their service
- Anthropic seems wants to have passports for new users too
- Soon age restriction in OS or on websites
I wished there would be a law (in Europe and/or US) to minify or forbid this kind of identity verification.
I want to support the companies to not allow misuse of their platforms, at the same time my full passport photo is not their concern, especially in B2B business in my opinion.
I'm not a legal expert/lawyer but I do think a lot of this is not the company just randomly wanting to do it, but lawyer driven development. No company wants to introduce more friction for no reason, unless somehow there's precedent or risk involved in not doing it. Curious to know what legal precedents or laws have changed recently.
The only possible non legally driven reason I can think of would be if they think the tradeoff of extra friction (and lost customers) is more than offset by fraud protection efforts. This seems unlikely cause I don't see how that math could have changed in the last few years.
I dont. I'm happy the grift economy has some controls on it. As much as I love open source and all the efforts in collective without government interference; some security is required, otherwise we'll just invite more grift based economics.
It's bad enough living in America without the rest of the world adopting the grift economy.
It's partially because the internet only grants us free storage (noun), not free compute (verb).
Which is fundamental to so many XY problems, including why cloud services are so byzantine instead of just providing isolated secure shells with full root access within them. And why distrust is a growing force in the world instead of, say, unconditional love.
I always dreamed of winning the internet lottery so that I could help dismantle the systems of control which currently dominate our lives. Which starts with challenging paradigms from first principles. That looks like asking why we only have multicore computing in the cloud and not on our desktops (which could be used to build our own cloud servers).
When we're missing an abstraction layer, that creates injustice and a power drain from the many to the few. Some examples:
- CPU -> multicore MIMD (missing) -> GPU (based on the subset SIMD instead of MIMD upon which graphics libraries could be built)
- UDP -> connectionless reliable stream (missing) -> TCP (should have been a layer above UDB not beside it)
- UDP/TCP -> P2P (NAT and other limitations block this and were inherited by IPv6 as generational trauma) -> WebRTC (redundant if we had P2P that "just works")
- internet connection -> symmetric upload/download speed (blocked for legal reasons under the guise of overselling to reduce cost) -> self-hosted web servers (rare due to antitrust issues stemming from said legal reasons)
- internet connection -> multicast (missing due to suppression of content-addressable-memory/hash-tree/DHT/) -> self-hosted streaming (negates the need for regions and edge caching)
I had high hopes for Google and even Tesla (for disrupting the physical world). But instead of open standards, they gave us proprietary vendor lock-in: Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) and NACS instead of J1772 (better yet both). Because of their refusal to interoperate at the lowest levels, there is little hope that they will do the real work of solving the hard problems at the highest levels.
For example, I just heard that China has built thousands of battery swap stations to provide effectively instant charging for electric vehicles, whereas that's something that Tesla can't accomplish because they chose to build Supercharger stations instead.
Once we begin to see the world this way, it's impossible to unsee it. It calls into question the fundamentals (like scarcity) which capitalism is based upon, and even the concept of profit itself.
From a spiritual perspective, I believe that this understanding is what blocks me from using my talents to use the system for personal gain to win the internet lottery. The people who own the systems of control don't have this understanding, and even view its basis in empathy as a liability. So we sacrifice the good of the many for the good of the few and call that progress.
I saw some non-technical people automating or creating small great tools with it which they need for their profession. These people are not programmers.
I think everybody who has basic understanding of programming and deployment better should stick to some AI coding agent like Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode etc etc.
I don't think I'm missing out by not using OpenClaw & Co.
Luckily "trust me bro" is not a defense in court - there is a thing called "discovery" when they have to prove their claims. The fact is few regulators ever use it, but class-action cases often do.
Companies have been getting increasingly aggressive with ‘destruction as a normal course of business/policy’ to help reduce the impact of that. And that assumes that the people tasked with doing the dirty work are following the policies.
It’s been pretty obvious at the federal level (Signal leaks, etc.) that the folks at the top are explicitly trying to avoid it.
Settled with SeaweedFS for replacing minio and getting a good chunk of S3 feature parity. I wonder about the problems OP is posting about. Never seen that behaviour but usually only having a bunch of smaller files.
Mac Studio waits for the Ultra chips to ship, which are always last in a generation. Perhaps the M5's chiplet architecture will help them move faster there.
The better distros have it (ZRAM) enabled by default for desktops (I think PopOS and Fedora). In my personal experience every desktop Linux should use memory compression (except you have an absurd amount of RAM) because it helps so much, especially with everything related to browser and/or electron usage!
Windows and macOS have it enabled by default for many years (even if it works a little different there).
Because it's an easy solution esp. to a rather new installer: setting up swap on disk (partition or file, if file which file system, if partition w/o encryption, ...). Zram: install one additional package and forget.
See also the "zram on Fedora" section in the article.
reminds me: Ever used Gemini API on Google Vertex Cloud API? The usage will show up like 24-48 hours later in the dashboard. So when you use Gemini's API on their Cloud me as Workspace admin cannot even track my own usage in near realtime there. Which makes me think that even Google cannot track it in realtime.
Same here on my iPhone. I didn't previously log it into my github account as I don't use github anymore, I use gitlab. So it wont find anything useful there. You actually only need to do this in order to be able to access the list of sessions. Even if you don't log into github, remote-control still works if you copy across the link that the cli tool outputs for you and just visit that on your phone. That's a bit of a pain though of course.
How about giving the user a big warning to not do that and then block the account if the user continues. This total blocks are crazy. Especially for people who use their Google account for 20+ years or something.
Google's bundling of so many services into one account is becoming a gargantuan liability for them & their users.
This "zero tolerance" policy is just absurdly mega-goliath out of touch with the world. The sort of soulless brain dead corporatism that absolutely does not think for even a single millisecond about its decisions, that doesn't care about anything other than reducing customer support or complexity, no matter what the cost.
Kicking people off their accounts for this is Google being willing to cause enormous untoward damage. With basically not even the faintest willingness to try to correct. Gobsmacking vicious indifference, ok with suffering.
Time and time again it is shown to *not* use your main account for everything. This goes for Apple and having a separate account for development work, for the App Store and your main iCloud account but this also goes for all other SaaS providers.
You are doing groundbreaking new and untested stuff with Claw? Do not use your main account. You want to access your main account's data? Sure, allow it via OAUTH/whatever possible way.
Have separate accounts, people. You don't want one product groups decision in those large SaaS corps to impact everything else.
> Time and time again it is shown to not use your main account for everything.
Good luck opening new google accounts for separation of concern. The new account is banned before the eula page finishes loading.
Google sends code via text msg to my main account phone number to unban, without me ever even filling a phone number.
After a day the account was banned again and pending automatic deletion. The appeal then took an artificial 5 days wait. I had to plead to what I presume is an AI. I had just paid $100 so it's not like I didn't show I was serious.
I am fairly certain that if they ban one account they will also ban the other anyways.
I have multiple Google Accounts and I am running them at the same time without problems. If you really want to separate things use different browser profiles per account. My work Google account never touches my private Google account in terms of browser profiles.
I never had issues with work accounts created via google workplace.
Google forbids you to have multiple identities. It's stated clear in their term of service. Any account you create must be linked to the same identity.
This means that it is trivial for them to ban all your accounts at once.
This also means that the 2factor is difficult to separate. Somebody with an unlocked access to my phone can hijack all my Google accounts by starting a password recovery.
Even though I made sure to never share my phone number to the new account, and I never loggued with it on my phone, and used a different browser session on desktop, it still forcefully sends a notification to my phone when I login because my login is suspicious it says. There is still no phone registered on the new account.
During reinstation of the banned accout I also got a scary msg essentially saying that if they denied my appeal, they might also ban my main account. Chilling.
It seems like a temp ban here would be totally reasonable, like, "we disabled your account for a day here's why, don't do it again". Permanent though, eek!
Nothing new. 10 years ago my (now 20+ year) google account was compromised for a whole 5 minutes. It was used by shady bots, and instantly banned. No warnings, no nothing. Trying to figure out what had happened was a challenge in itself.
Getting through to customer support was impossible.
5 years later I tried to get my account opened up, filled out some forms, and by some miracle it was.
My biggest takeaway from this (other than enabling 2FA) was that it is probably easier to get ahold of the scammers that control your account, than to get ahold of actual human customer support at google / alphabet.
Google will happily screw over users with 2FA as well. A few years ago I was out of state for the funeral of someone very close to me. I lost my phone and then needed to get into my email urgently. I didn't have my computer or any other devices with me and no way to get to them. Fortunately I had actually planned ahead for something like this and added my partners phone number as a 2FA method. So I tried to login with that and Google refused!
Google said that because I had more secure 2FA methods configured it wouldn't allow my to use one of the methods that I had very intentionally configured for exactly this scenario. My opinion of the company was already pretty low but I was still shocked that they would simply discard my security settings without any warning or override option. They made one of the worst trips of my life even more miserable. Google hates their own users so much.
Funny thing is that one of the best you can get is the Crucial (Micron) 8TB one but even that one gets more expensive. I have the feeling it will be gone completely soon.
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