Samsung is reportedly preparing to wind down its SATA SSD business, and a notable hardware leaker warns the move could have broader implications for consumer storage pricing than Micron’s decision to end its Crucial RAM lineup. The report suggests reduced supply and short-term price pressure may follow as the market adjusts.
HDDs have horrible random access times, so if you need to process or just copy a lot of small files, say photos, there’s a significant penalty.
Ok, but what are they doing that moves loads of random files?
Rsync, syncthing, backups, mp3s, photos, json files; idk, a lot of tasks involve large amounts of small files. I personally ran into this problem training models on millions of photos. My GPUs would only get up to 25% utilization with mirrored HDDs, so I had to switch to SSDs.
Edit: the difference is also significant when compiling large projects or just using git. I imagine some game servers need a lot of random accesses too.
Why are you doing that on a network storage as opposed to on device?
Also who got millions of photos at home?
Not enough room in the GPU machine for all the HDDs I needed.
People working on biological datasets.
Why are you doing that recreationally? How are you different from a researcher?
Why are you using a home server for that?