IMO, the problem with storage is transfer times.
It takes hours to write a couple of TB to most HDDs.
Even writing a couple of TB to an SSD (at 500 MB/s) takes too long.
A typical HDD to HDD transfer on an average machine won't do anything like the rated SATA speed of 3 - 6 GB/s -- more like on average 100 mb/s.
So to transfer 1 TB of data = (1000 X 1000 ) / 100 secs where unit is in mbs so actually it should only take around 2.7 - 3 hrs !!! - f. For 2 TB that would be around 6 Hrs,
Even if the speed was 50 mb/s which is not unreasonable even for external USB then it STILL shouldn't take more than 12 hrs -- ok slow but internal HDD's would have to be really bad to only transfer at 50 mb/s.
(OK long enough but not desperate -- also how many times as a home user are you really suffling around 2 TB of data regularly. I've done it about TWICE when I was moving and re0aranging Music and video libraries).
You are randomly swapping between bit (b) and bytes (B).
Every time I get a new (bigger) HDD I reorganise my storage setup to take advantage of the new capacity.
Also, once I have racked up a stack of edited videos I back them up to my external HDD.
Granted this isn't something I do on a daily basis.
Recently one of my internal 2 TB HDDs started playing up (lost a bunch of sectors).
I had to backup the surviving data to an external HDD.
Luckily I was able to let it run overnight.
My internal HDDs average ~50 MB/s.
Sometimes they will sustain more than 100 MB/s for several minutes.
Regularly the speed will drop to 30 MB/s or less.
@lehnerus -- @ 500mb/s an SSD would take 1 SEC to transfer 1 GB so 1000 secs to transfer 1TB = = approx 17 mins !!! so around 30 mins for the 2 TB data transfer. I could live with that.
That should be 2 seconds (500 MB x 2 seconds = 1000 MB).
Therefore ~34 minutes for 1 TB.
I don't like to perform multiple HDD transfer operations simultaneously.
Also, various Windows services love to "strobe" my HDD too (e.g. DWM)
You never know when one of these operations will interfere with another.
As an example, TCP is supposed to detect corrupted data blocks and request new ones as necessary.
However I have had corrupted downloads.
I see threads (on SevenForums and EightForums) where the poster is having download corruption problems (or the solution has been to re-download the file).
This means that the error checking/correction routines aren't 100% effective.
Therefore, I don't trust HDD transfer error checking/correction either.
What we really need is for the BUS speed to work faster even with current HDD's -- a horrible slow SATA laptop 2.5 inch drive can have a theoretical maximum speed of 3 GB/s -- exceeding by far your desired SSD speed of 500GB sec. There's no point in spending a fortune on getting HDD's or whatever to have data transfer rates of several GB/sec if the hardware they are used on can still only deliver 50 mb/s. !!!!
I'd love to be able to transfer at 500 GB/s.
If HDDs could run at 6 Gb/s (750 MB/s) instead of 800 Mb/s (100 MB/s) transfers of large files would be much faster.
Obviously if I had the time, money and inclination, I could create a RAID5 setup, which should increase my transfer speeds.
I have an SSD in my laptop (SanDisk Extreme II) which is supposed to have a spectacular transfer speed.
It probably boots up in half the time it takes my desktop (AV scans are quick).
Apart from those items, I can't say that it is impressive as it should be based on the specs.