I saw it by chance while exploring local second-hand eBay-like website.
These days, you can buy some super-cool SSD for almost 4 TB.
I was surprised by the price: only $250. By modern standards, this is overkill, because a 256 GB disk ($20) is often enough, if not 128 GB ($10-15), unless you’re doing 4K-8K rendering.
But as recently as (almost) 13 years ago (beginning of 2012) I was buying a 256 GB OCZ Vector SSD for $350 or something. And it died in a year or two. And it’s not that I somehow aggressively wore it down, it’s just that at that time these technologies were worse.
I see that there is a DRAM cache of 4 GB, that is (as I understand it) allows to significantly reduce writes. Well, it should be very durable, so that it’s not stupidly killed in everyday use.
I’m a little shocked. For example, if you take my Hackintosh, you can put 6 disks there. That is, for just 1.5K (which is not much in the context of aggressive video editing), you can get 6 disks with a volume of 23 TB and a faster speed (24 GBps). Well, I think it’s really important to haggle when ordering 6 pcs.
Not that you or I need it (right now), I’m just shocked at how accessible it is today.
In principle, it is only 2 times more expensive than a USB hard drive of the same volume (https://hard.rozetka.com.ua/ua/106473111/p106473111/).
But if anything, I do not advise you. HDD is much more reliable for data storage. SSD is more convenient only for a computer for work, when you constantly rush data back and forth, it is faster. I’m actually excited about this, but there are still very, very few use cases. I made 3 drives in RAID-0 (parallel operation, x3 speed) of 120 GB, the cheapest ones were the easiest ones — wow speed, 360 GB of space, I will have enough for years. It is easy to add 3 more disks, i.e. 2x more speed, and the same volume, +360 more, 720 GB in total. For this, I need only 1-1.5 thousand hryvnias. It could be done, but it is not easy to reinstall the system now, and in fact it is not really necessary, and everything is so super-fast.
But still, I can’t help but be happy about it, as simple as it is affordable! 😮
It is very exciting how cool and accessible modern technologies are. I want to do something about it. But the lack of understanding is very frustrating: what exactly? I looked at the mac mini. If you don’t buy M2 or M4, then the prices for other Intel products are simply ridiculous ($50-150 for a very cool configuration). So for me it’s super-overkill for everything: what’s a desktop, what’s more, a server. But even if I bought it, I don’t know how I would use it: for what? The same situation as with Shortcuts on the iPhone — well, it’s like the coolest thing, you can do so much. And what exactly to do, huh? And khz. And this is just the beginning, in the next 10 years it is difficult to imagine how much it will all advance.
Let’s say so that you understand. If I tell you, for the full picture. I can make a server on a mac mini, for example, with 16 GB / 1 TB, which can be bought for $50, well, maybe $70. Or with an SSD, it’s a little more expensive, well, at least it will be x2, for $100 - 150. This will allow hosting a website… well, I can’t even think of how much user load there should be for this server to be slow. Conditionally speaking, with a certain technological approach, onliner can be hosted (in the context of the volume of data).
Maybe there is more data, but even that is a very large resource to which information is added daily. And there is still a different arithmetic, because it earns a lot, that is, you can not count money on such equipment at all, and buy whatever you want.
If I wanted to host some private project on a mac mini, like everything I showed you, just… well, I don’t know, I’d start a super blog with videos and a billion pictures… well, I don’t know, travel -blog. I probably wouldn’t have been able to load it anyway. Only millions of simultaneous views would possibly download it, and even then I’m not sure.
How to add redundancy to take into account, for example, blackouts, and do load-balancing (when you go to the first server, and it is loaded - it sends you to the second, or to the third, etc.) - for example, to put 4 servers, mine, yours, in mother-in-law, in toi toi — this will give 4x for everything, i.e. if 1 server allows a million users, then 4x will be 4 million. And all this can cost $200! Or $400 if I’m an oligarch. Or if I am the richest person in the country, then you can buy an M4 from a store for $500, then it will be $2K (with a small difference in speed, but a big difference with light, then you will not notice at all that you have a mac mini in the house and is eating something there).
And taking into account that the main loading of a conditional travel blog is vidos (in 4K, the rest of the bullshit), which is still better to host on YouTube (not that it’s free, but you get paid for it), then in fact for a full-fledged cool site- one (or two in different locations, for reliability) mac-mini will be enough for the blog.
I really can’t imagine what needs to be done, what kind of project, so that it is necessary to invest a lot of money in it. Unless some enterprise-thing, well, like to make another Rozetka there. But even in another 10 years, I will not be surprised that such a site will be available at home on a Mac Mini.
In short, I am impressed (not only SSD, but globally)
🤯
For example, I thought there might be value in local online communities. If we take Lviv, or if we take a more complex project, it is a conditional resource where millions of people can communicate in the context of competition. That is, for example, anonymously. Ah, how it all happened in Telega, but not in Telega, but on some forum. Which is hosted on a mac mini. I think one or two would be able to simply take the whole load here. Even if the project is not for making money at all, but is entirely ideological - an investment of $300 🤨
So what do they work, well, they consume a maximum of 100 watts, that’s for us here for a month, well, I don’t know, 100 UAH maybe?
That’s what I understand. For example, I don’t understand (almost) 3D. But as I understood, even for your work a Mac Mini on M4 may be enough, unless it is not the cheapest one for 500, and there for conventionally 1.5K. But as I understood, this is enough to simply replace a gigantic computer. And it will last for many years. But how much easier it is for a beginner: it’s easy to come to the store, buy a ready-made computer, you can work easily within 10 minutes.
Well, there is also AI/ML, and there I understand the same situation, that such a computer is also enough for many things, except that the budget is a little bigger, but there the earnings are much higher, that is, in the relative budget, everything is a trifle.