Sims 2, all expansions and one fun pack - no addons 10.8GB. The fun packs aren’t too big, I can’t imagine the number getting more than 12-15.
WoW, with addons (typical users have addons so I’ll include it) - 11.7GB
True, but when they were saying those things back then, they didn’t have 128GB solid state drives that use the same interface as regular hard drives already on the market.
Ooh, I hadn’t seen that one. $319 for 128GB is starting to get pretty reasonable. I looked for something like a year ago and the prices were probably double that.
And hajario, its already happening with ipods. I bought an 80 gig a year or so ago for… what? 250 bucks? Now its non-existant and the 120 gig replaced it.
After that, no more magnetic hard drive ipods. Mine will be a dinosaur in a couple years… Statistically prone to breakage due to moving parts compared to the solid state pods.
This is happening with laptops for the same reason, being portable they’re more prone to breakage. A few, I believe, are already on the market and have been since early 2006, at least.
When the cost of production comes down the reliability will make it a nice option for desktops as well. No moving parts means no breaking from physical wear out.
We’ll be saying goodbye to our magnetic drives and their laughable needles the same way we did to vinyl records.
Yup, and a 64GB SSD is only $135. Next time I build myself a computer (should be soon, as I’m still running a freakin’ Athlon 1800), I think I’m going to get one to use as my system drive. I wonder how fast one of those things boots Windows.
Actually surprised about Sims 2. I go to the store and see close to a dozen different expansions and just assume they’re like expansions for other games where it’s pretty much all new contents and objects just running on the same engine. Color me educated.
SO’s WoW is somewhere around 16.5g. That will be with all the expansions including Lich King because I bought it for her. I know she runs addons, just not which ones.
Hybrid flash. Flash doesn’t scale as well as magnetic (price per gb) at this point in time - but its really useful for accessing data quickly - so you “cache” onto the flash portion of the drive the parts of the game that require quick access - the rest sits on the hard drive. You combine fast with cheap.
I think you can buy hybrid flash drives now.
They didn’t even have 128 GB magnetic HDDs then either.
Maybe. I went to my first talk on the end of spinning magnetic disk drives when I was a grad student in a HDD industry supported research lab in 1988. I agree that today’s solid state is a way better candidate than bubble memory or optical drives of the past. I also acknowledge that I’ve been out of that industry for ten years so I’m not at all up on things.
If 1.5 TB is the current maximum and if Moore’s Law still holds we should see petabyte drives come onto the market around 2023 or so.
Moore’s law describes microprocessor density, not magnetic storage. Hard drives increase in density much faster than semiconductors, which is why I don’t see solid state storage displacing it for a long. long time.
My point was that they didn’t have solid state drives on the market that were about 1/10th the size of the largest magnetic drives.
But we will also have to consider the wrap that solid state has for limited writes.
Wasn’t the upper limit for the amount of times a specific piece of the flash memory can be overwritten before it degrades to be nearly unusable something in the low 100k ?
I don’t believe magnetic storage devices have this kind of limitation, but someone please correct me if I am misinformed.
It does a good job describing magnetic storage density too. I believe that Paul Frank first pointed that out.
I see. That does make sense.
Never mind.
If you look at the product linked to in post #22, you’ll see that it includes the total number of rewrites (1,000,000), which seems reasonable.