News SSDs in Laptops and Desktops Cost Too Damn Much

[Deleted member 2838871]

heh, all of my comps use 250 gig drives for the C (OS) drive, and at least 500 gigs for D (games), with various other sizes as needed bases on the comps usage. i just upgraded my main C drive from a 250 to a 500 gig. so while you think those sizes are not useful, others may use them

Prices have come down so much though. 2 years ago I paid $250 each for a 2TB drive (Samsung 970 Evo Plus)... and the same drive is now $129. I wouldn't dare throw anything less than 2 TB in a build now.

 

[bit_user]

The worst part is that all the entry level SSDs wind up as e-waste after the DIY 2/4TB NVMe upgrade: there is really nothing reasonable to be done with 250/500GB NVMe drives,

They make a fine boot drive. One of my machines uses a 64 GB SATA SSD for the OS.

I know ebaying them can be a lot of effort for little money. Maybe you can find somewhere local to donate them? I'll bet schools could use them.

 

[Newb888]

Dell for sure. I just built a pair of 5950X 64GB RAM 5TB monsters each for less than the price of what they wanted for a 4TB NVME. I just smiled and will happily use that as my excuse to keep on building... (I build our company machines because its cheaper and they are more reliable). But they charge that nonsense because 99.9% of the population has no clue and probably doesn't want to. To us Tom's readers its just silly, of course.

Is someone in competition with white OJ for the biggest ego? 🤪

 

[Newb888]

Prices have come down so much though. 2 years ago I paid $250 each for a 2TB drive (Samsung 970 Evo Plus)... and the same drive is now $129. I wouldn't dare throw anything less than 2 TB in a build now.

Seriously? You're the perfect consumer. You're comparing a time when mining crypto and working from home was the norm. Perhaps you forgotten about supply, demand, and greedflation?

 

[Newb888]

I dislike SSDs which include NVMe drives. Sure, they're very fast unlike their mechanical drive counterparts. The more you write the less of a lifespan SSD have. Many will argue it'll take years before you'll need to replace SSDs, but these advocates ignote the reliability component especially if drive health keeps declining rapidly.

Of course, I'm not the privileged majority. I keep my pc for more than 10 years without upgrades. Anyway, with SMR HDD being fairly commonly now I can see the attraction of SSD.

 

[bogda]

There is one simple solution to this problem. That solution existed for 20 - 30 years and it still exists.

Never buy a laptop with soldered SSD or RAM regardless of how sexy some ultra thin laptops might look to you. It is only a few millimeters of difference in thickness anyway and it does not make much of functional difference. You get a potentially better cooling as the added benefit.
So you buy option with reasonable price and upgrade immediately if storage space is too small.
In a company where I choose what we buy, there is not a single computer with soldered ssd or ram for this very reason.

 

[randomizer]

Another weird thing about Dell is just how long it took to be able to order a Precision workstation with an i9 Alder Lake CPU. Until earlier this year, the highest they went were i7's. Probably a market segmentation tactic, trying to push people into higher-end workstations.

I'm pretty sure you could get them in Australia last year. I looked up the retail price out of curiosity after my employer ordered me one with a 12900H. To be honest, I would never buy one with such a high end CPU myself. I'm surprised the keyboard hasn't melted yet.

 

[abufrejoval]

Sounds like what I just did with the 4x 970 Evo Plus 2TB drives from my previous build. Rather than maybe get $50 each for them I just got a 4 drive m.2 enclosure for the pcie slot... and paired with the 4x 990 Pro 2TB drives gives me 8 total... for 16TB.

Could you post a link to that kit?

Are those the passive type or swiched ones?

I use passive quad M.2 boards as well to get 8TB of NVMe for cheap on Skylake Xeons which have a free x16 slots with bifuraction (also with a Xeon D-1542).

While the passive types are really cheap at €50 for PCIe v3 and €80 for PCIe v4, the required free x16 slots are an entirly different matter on typical desktops, and even on a server I can't quite imagine putting 4 250GB NVMe drives into such a precious resource.

There is really a dire need for something like a 4:1 NVMe board that connects into an M.2 slot on the mainboard and supports quad M.2 on the board. I'd even buy it if it only did PCI v.3 on both ends, If of course it could do PCIe v4/5 on the host side (or both) at an affordable price, I'd buy that, too.

 

[Deleted member 2838871]

Seriously? You're the perfect consumer. You're comparing a time when mining crypto and working from home was the norm. Perhaps you forgotten about supply, demand, and greedflation?

No idea.. I never worked from home nor did I sit at home playing video games because I was in one of those "essential" jobs according to the covid police. At any rate... when m.2 slots are at a premium on motherboards and 2TB drives can be had for $150 I don't see a point in settling for anything less. If that makes me perfect that's awesome.

 

[Deleted member 2838871]

Could you post a link to that kit?

Are those the passive type or swiched ones?

Amazon.de : SABRENT 4-Drive NVMe M.2 SSD to PCIe 3.0 x4 Adapter Card [EC-P3X4]

Amazon.com

I got the cable to avoid having to use the PCIE slot that shares bandwidth with the 4th m.2 on mobo. It's blocked by the GPU hence the need for the cable. I'm assuming it's a passive kit? I don't have to do anything... all 4 drives show up and HWinfo says they are running at 1/2 the speed of the Gen 4 990 Pros which is fine because they are Gen 3 drives anyway and I just kept them because I wanted the 8 TB extra storage more than the $200 I might have gotten for selling them.

There is really a dire need for something like a 4:1 NVMe board that connects into an M.2 slot on the mainboard and supports quad M.2 on the board. I'd even buy it if it only did PCI v.3 on both ends, If of course it could do PCIe v4/5 on the host side (or both) at an affordable price, I'd buy that, too.

So would I.

 

[CountMike]

And how many people actually need that much storage space? When the 1TB hard drive in my Dell died, I replaced it with a cheap 250 gb ssd. After installing linux, all my software and vm and images, I still have 100 gb free. I will never use all 250 gb.

That's variable and depends on your needs. My old HP laptop that came with a 500GB HDD is now happy with a 250GB SSD because it's just a spare and used in the garden or on porch just for browsing. On main desktop I kept on adding disk capacity because I kept on getting short, now at 5TB on 5 NVME SSDs. and another 8TB of external storage including multiple backups. Also keep in mind that SSDs are not happy campers when filled too much, performance and reliability can suffer greatly if not enough free space is left,

 

[J35Bowman]

I dislike SSDs which include NVMe drives. Sure, they're very fast unlike their mechanical drive counterparts. The more you write the less of a lifespan SSD have. Many will argue it'll take years before you'll need to replace SSDs, but these advocates ignote the reliability component especially if drive health keeps declining rapidly.

Of course, I'm not the privileged majority. I keep my pc for more than 10 years without upgrades. Anyway, with SMR HDD being fairly commonly now I can see the attraction of SSD.

In that case, the ideal situation is a dual-drive system. You use the SSD for booting and program installs (relatively little write activity), and a HDD for storage (lots of writing, and the speed doesn't matter as much).

 

[bit_user]

To be honest, I would never buy one with such a high end CPU myself. I'm surprised the keyboard hasn't melted yet.

Oops, I was talking about the "fixed workstations" (i.e. not laptops). It's annoying how they use the Precision branding for both laptops and fixed workstations.

 

[PEnns]

And how many people actually need that much storage space? When the 1TB hard drive in my Dell died, I replaced it with a cheap 250 gb ssd. After installing linux, all my software and vm and images, I still have 100 gb free. I will never use all 250 gb.

Just because you don't need much storage... it doesn't mean nobody else does.

And remember, adding extra storage (after purchase) to a laptop is not as easy (or even possible sometimes) as a PC.

 

[Deleted member 2838871]

Just because you don't need much storage... it doesn't mean nobody else does.

And remember, adding extra storage (after purchase) to a laptop is not as easy (or even possible sometimes) as a PC.

Exactly. I kept my 970 SSDs from my previous build because 8TB of SSD space was more valuable to me than the $50 x4 that I might get for selling them considering they retail for $129 new.

8TB of storage or $200? Easy choice even if it takes me 3 years to actually need the space.

 

[USAFRet]

And how many people actually need that much storage space? When the 1TB hard drive in my Dell died, I replaced it with a cheap 250 gb ssd. After installing linux, all my software and vm and images, I still have 100 gb free. I will never use all 250 gb.

And some people do.

In my system currently, the folder for CAD projects is 50GB, and the current size of my photo folder is ~350GB.
These live on secondary drives.

 

[randomizer]

Oops, I was talking about the "fixed workstations" (i.e. not laptops). It's annoying how they use the Precision branding for both laptops and fixed workstations.

Ah, that makes sense. Those would be fine. The laptops are way too thin to run an i9 though. They get hot enough to burn at sustained high load.

 

[bit_user]

Ah, that makes sense. Those would be fine. The laptops are way too thin to run an i9 though. They get hot enough to burn at sustained high load.

My work laptop is a Precision 7670 with an i7-12850HX. It's huge and weighs a couple tons. Maybe I'm wrong, but I could imagine having a mobile i9 in a machine like that.

 

[randomizer]

My work laptop is a Precision 7670 with an i7-12850HX. It's huge and weighs a couple tons. Maybe I'm wrong, but I could imagine having a mobile i9 in a machine like that.

Ah, the 7000 series are chunkier. I have a 5570 which has a thickness of 0.3-0.56". It can't even fit USB-A ports.

 

[Looming Dementia]

Basically, I agree. For my self-build, I am doing it a bit differently though. My "boot drive" is only 1 TB, a KINGSTON SNV2S1000G in a chipset M.2 slot, with the OS, browser, game launcher clients, and some other software on it. And then there is a faster 2TB NVMe with nothing but a number of games on it. And a 2TB SATA SSD (and two more M.2 slots left). Not sure if it is more efficient to have OS data and gaming data on two separate drives. But it works fine for me, in particular as my more expensive NVMe is idle most of the time, which I assume helps in not wearing it down too fast (my boot drive still is at 100% too though, after half a year).

But yeah, only 1TB in total for everything, including for the Pagefile when a system comes with limited RAM, difficult to imagine how that is supposed to work out when one does more than to just browse some websites.

Same here, more or less. My Alienware desktop ... the freaking RTX 4080 version of the R15 ... came with a 1 TB drive. It's a fast one, but still, 1 TB in their system with the second most powerful graphics card on the market. It's pathetic.

It's a beautiful machine with great components, on sale for $2,600. The storage is the only complaint I have. So I stuck an even faster 2 TB drive in the second M.2 slot for my game drive. Good to go.

Seriously, a 1 TB drive in an enthusiast-level gaming machine? What the hell, Alienware? They're built to be easily cracked open and fiddled with. I guess they assumed most would put their own game drive in and so only included an OS drive? Still, bleah.

 

[Newb888]

Seriously, a 1 TB drive in an enthusiast-level gaming machine? What the hell, Alienware? They're built to be easily cracked open and fiddled with. I guess they assumed most would put their own game drive in and so only included an OS drive? Still, bleah.

This is why I"m avoiding "spec" desktops. We have no choice with laptops but desktops are different story. Dell and more have to cut corners and upgradability has traditionally been an issue.

Pick the parts yourself, pay a reputable PC shop to install the parts and if things don't run well like BIOS settings or they don't install things properly, it's on them.