On Thursday, April 7, 2022 at 7:24:21 AM UTC-4, Whisky-dave wrote:
> On Tuesday, 5 April 2022 at 14:33:25 UTC+1, -hh wrote:
> > On Monday, April 4, 2022 at 11:11:38 AM UTC-4, Whisky-dave wrote:
> > > On Friday, 1 April 2022 at 20:11:48 UTC+1, -hh wrote:
> > > > On Friday, April 1, 2022 at 11:06:49 AM UTC-4, Whisky-dave wrote:
> > > > > [etc]
> > > > >...
> > > Well you can get 8TB SSD in a laptop today but I wouldn;t pay that much extra for one.
> > >
> > > I'll wait until they come down in price.
> >
> > Broadly speaking, $100/TB was my break point for more broad SSD adoption. Seems
> > that there's CoVid rises on prices, as it seems that they've rebounded to ~$140/TB
>
> But it doesn't aviod the problem and I'm betting you didn;t buy your current computer with
> a 4TB internal drive even though you say you need 4TB now.

Of course not, as my cheesegrater dates from a decade ago (2012) and the PCIe
based SSD was just 256GB at the time which cost IIRC $600-$700 for its OS boot
drive, and the second 'data' drive was 2*2TB HDDs in a RAID-0 for another ~$300.

> If you plan to take more photos than you previously took them maybe you need a 20TB
> drive in the next 4 years but problem is they don't make a 20TB internal drive today.

That's way high, but no matter, because for my current desktop, I could choose to buy
an internal **32TB** SSD today, if I were so inclined:
<https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDACL4M232M/>

If I were content with a 2-spindle HDD RAID-0 performance for a 2nd drive repository
the same as how it was originally configured, its maximum effective size for off-the-shelf
hardware today would be to pick up a pair of 20TB 3.5" HDDs from WD or Seagate. That
would provision a 40TB data repository...and I needed more at that same performance
level, there's still a couple more internal SATA bays to go to more spindles on; 100TB
is within reach on this 2012 hardware (would have to doublecheck the OS, though).

> So I'm betting you'll always need external storage an internal drive will never be enough.

Your argument would be stronger if we're assuming only a laptop configuration,
but even there, there's currently 8TB SSD equipped systems sold, and from a capacity
only perspective, that's honestly adequate for my anticipated needs (see note) for a
good 6+ years.

(note: haven't thought much yet about demands for when I probably inevitably move
up to 4K or higher video ... I'm still very predominantly stills-centric).

> > > Doubt that will ever happen to the extent that external storage will not be needed.
> >
> > I see it as that with the rise of SSDs, we wanted their I/O performance gains, so we
> > were willing to sacrifice local capacity size and go to a two tier storage system.
>
> So you don;t think SSDs or the current ones won't get any faster so people will stick to this now
> pretty old tech, and the new NVMe SSDs which I'm betting people will have to decide whether
> they want ye olde SSDs at $100 per 1TB or the newer faster ones at $300 per TB and we
> will have to make the decision just like we did with HDDs ATA, EID, SCSI, 10000RPM, SATA

Oh, I've already been moving to NVMe based SSDs, as they don't really have all that much
of a cost premium over SATA based SSDs, but give a nice bump in performance.

> > As SSDs become less expensive, the justification to use HDDs because they're cheap
> > declines, so our preference should migrate back to employing a single tier storage system.
>
> Won't happen, most still want speed over capacity as a priority, and that is what will be worked
> on as well as battery life on the laptop. I think they are probably as light and as small as laptops
> can get unless they devise a screen that unfolds like the Jame Webb telescope.

Its a trade-off that depends on use case, for how you note the trend toward small/mobile.

> > There's always trade-offs. For example, the downtime can be close to zero lost time if
> > one invested in provisioning a hot spare which gets incrementally mirrored nightly for the
> > system to do a failover to. I've already done this on my cheesegrater, as the cost was
> > just a 512GB SSD. FWIW, to go cheaper, one could choose to employ a hot-swap HDD
> > instead of an SSD, and the full capability will be retained, but performance will bog until
> > such time that one replaces the failed SSD and one mirrors it back over.
>
> So the same problems still persist.

Regardless of if it is a single- vs multiple- spindle system for the base capabilities
before additions to address backups/etc.

> Even google still use HDDs their data centres mostly use HDDs and I doubt they will
> go over to SSDs anytime soon. People are uploading vidoes at a ratev of about 1
> petabyte per day or around 400 hours of new video every miniute.

Sure, but Google also uses uses SSD in their infrastructure, plus RAM cache too.

It really comes down to paying for the faster I/O where it has the most benefit.
Notionally, if my DAM applications were able to let me select where it stores its
database vs base data, that too would probably be 'good enough' to put just the
former on fast I/O SSD and the base on slower HDDs too. I imagine that I could
dive into the weeds to look to see where each piece is stored and perhaps use
like an alias to move things around, but when the alternative is to throw a couple
of TB of SSDs at the problem for just a couple of hundred dollars, that wins out.

> > > > > > Problem I have is that my current choice of DAM for photography ...
> > >
> > > I found this out years ago when using iphoto to store photos and videos ...
> >
> > Not being able to find something that I know I have is what I find particularly frustrating.
> > That's why I'm still looking for a better DAM and workflows to compliment.
>
> I'm not sure how that would help , unless I bothered to type in the details at the time.
> I doubt there's any current system that could do such a thing for me. Although we
> do have AI and noew machine learning courses here that do look at such things
> it''s called big data , well it was a couple of years ago but names and terms keep
> keeps changing and the buzz words too.

Understood; I've spent hundreds of hours manually tagging images with keywords
and the good news is that 'Big Data' aspects of Machine Learning is starting to
become pretty decent at automating the keywording process.

[snip]

> > > We might have quantauim storge where a drive has virtually no access time.
> > Sure, and the general trend today is that SSD prices continue to fall, so even though
> > HDDs are cheaper per TB, one may decide that SSDs are "cheap enough" to use for
> > one's first tier backup for the benefit of faster system restore times...and/or options
> > like running one as an available hot swap.
>
> Apple had that with Firewire but USB was much cheaper and got faster, and now we have
> 40 GB thunderbold and 10GB ethernet.

> > > > > But as you don't seem to know how many shoes you'll have in the future
> > > > > maybe buy yourself an island somewhere.
> > > >
> > > > Eh, I know that SSDs are hovering down to around $100/TB, so I know that
> > > > whenever I need to grow my current 4TB array to rebuilt it at, say 6TB or 8TB
> > > > once that becomes needed just isn't going to be a huge hit to the pocketbook
> > >
> > > Maybe not, but for me it's needs over wants.
> >
> > When its for a hobby, its always going to be "needs over wants" <g>
>
> then there's overheads like wives, girlfriends, pets that get in the way :-)

> > > > > > > > The philosophy of media card capacity trade-offs is a whole 'nuther topic!
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > Not really.
> > > > > > > you'd never buy a camera hoping it'll still be ok in 10 years time by just adding new lenses.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Depends on what one buys...again. I find my Canon 7D from 2009 to still be fine.
> > > > > > Granted I also have a 7D Mk2 now too (2014); the main "upgrades" besides lenses
> > > > > > has been just some bigger CF cards to increase its magazine depth and reduce card swaps.
> > > > >
> > > > > So how many photos do you have that must be on an internal drive.
> > > > A tad over 2TB.
> > >
> > > What's that in number of photos ?.
> > Just queried the system (& Photos crashed afterwards): currently at 109,204.
> > Plus another 20K in old school film that's much less pragmatically accessible.
>
> Well at a rought estimate if you looked at each picture for 10 seconds it'd take you
> about 2 weeks to see them all provided you didn't take any breaks for sleep eating
> or anything else.

Sure, if a continuous, sequential slide show of every image was the use case.
I'd say that what I've found is that I just want to randomly/casually browse.

For browsing, the first barrier to that way of enjoying the portfolio is the amount
of delay to wait as the system cranks for the DAM initially opening its library.
Once that has opened, the next is that of the generalized 'scrolling' performance
without experiencing excessive lag. For both of these, going from HDD to SDD
has "sped up" to make the UI experience much improved. Because the UI is so
much less painful, I'll use the library rather than avoiding using it.

FWIW, I can recall some UI research from years ago, which quantified the
productivity losses from response time lag, finding it to be nonlinear.
I forget the specifics, but if a 1sec hardware delay results in the human
response to that UI adding +1sec (total turnaround of 2sec), when the
hardware delay is 2sec, the same human response isn't +1, but +4sec
(for a 6 sec turnaround), and progressively worse as the hardware delays grow.
-hh