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.
And most are wrong or unnecessary. What movie requires SSD performance?
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.