
SanDisk announces 4TB SSD, hopes for 8TB next year. - sc90
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9248070/SanDisk_announces_4TB_SSD_hopes_for_8TB_next_year
======
Expez
Over the last decade SSDs have increased their storage capacity at an
incredible rate. This growth has mostly been fueled by adapting better process
technology. I read a while back that the move to ever smaller scales (now
19nm) came at the costs of increased errors rates and that the limiting factor
going forward would be error correction. Has this situation changed, or is
SanDisk just throwing chips at the capacity problem, along with better
controllers, and targeting an enterprise segment willing to pay the price?

~~~
ChuckMcM
One of the interesting changes has been folks have been thinning out silicon
wafers. Typically 700 microns there have been examples of working wafers as
thin as 5 microns. If you stack 5 micron silicon you can put 100 chips in the
same place you put 1 before, assuming you can figure out how to talk between
them. Thru-silicon-vias (TSV) is the current poster child but there are better
alternatives coming. Should be interesting when that comes to market.

~~~
jacquesm
This is a precursor to the next revolution in chips, 3D. It's funny how chips
have of course always been three dimensional but the heat removal issues have
so far stopped true 3D from happening (as far as I know). But SSDs have a
completely different use pattern and likely don't run nearly as many Watts per
volume of silicon so you could probably stack them way higher even if you
didn't reduce the thickness of the layers all that much. Then it becomes a
matter of routing and placement rather than heat dissipation.

Xilinx is already doing something like this:
[https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/showwiki.php?title=Semi+Wiki:...](https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/showwiki.php?title=Semi+Wiki:Three-
Dimensional+Integrated+Circuit+3D+IC+Wiki)

Eventually this might even converge on something like a spherical shape,
that's when the sum length of the connections is minimal (the surface area of
the sphere is too, and that again is a heat removal problem).

~~~
ChuckMcM
Jim Gray was famous for predicting that the end point of computers were
"smoking hairy golfballs". His reasoning was that spheres give you the
shortest path length, there will be thousands of wires (hence the hair), and
it will be difficult to dump the heat (smoking). I loved his image of a
computer that looked like a a box of golf balls :-).

~~~
jacquesm
I read the paper you refer to, it in turn credits Frank Worrell as the
original person coining that particular metaphor in ... 1985!

The paper quoted:

"To minimize memory latency these 4B machines will likely be smoking-hairy-
golf-balls3. The processor will be one large chip wrapped in a memory package
about the size of a golf ball. The surface of the golf ball will be hot and
hairy: hot because of the heat dissipation, and hairy because the machine will
need many wires to connect it to the outside world."

With a footnote:

"Frank Worrell used this metaphor in 1985."

The paper is here:

[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/gray/papers/su...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/gray/papers/superservers.pdf)

It's very interesting reading, especially when you look at how much he got
right.

We don't quite have those smoking hairy golfballs just yet but we're slowly
getting there.

------
userbinator
With all the process shrinks, and packing more bits per cell, NAND flash is
getting to the point where its characteristics are closer to DRAM than
traditional magnetic storage; like hard drives the data will stay there for a
while when they're powered off, but like DRAM, it's not going to be there
forever. However, unlike DRAM and more like hard drives, they wear out.

For enterprise cache-like applications this makes sense, but with DRAM prices
not that far off (only a few times), I wonder if battery-backed DRAM might
actually offer better value (and theoretically could be far higher performing)
than having to replace worn-out SSDs periodically.

------
DanielBMarkham
Fun Saturday question. It's 2014. How long until we see notebooks (or tablets
or any other portable computing device) with 1PB of storage?

15 years? I'd say no longer than 25 years -- _if_ we're still carrying around
computing devices by then (and it hasn't all just been subsumed into the
cloud)

~~~
Nux
You'd think; but with all this "centralisation" trends (fb/g+/cloud/etc) there
might be no need for them.

~~~
phaemon
Everyone will need one to hold the blockchain ;)

------
jhallenworld
I'm sure they wear out quick with heavy writes. On the other hand, the killer
app for these has to be media streaming. How many more movies can Netflix
support with these new drives? I wonder if they are space limited or iops
limited.

"The drive is aimed at read-intensive applications, such as data warehousing,
media streaming and web servers. The typical workload envisioned for the 4TB
drive is 90% read and 10% write, SanDisk stated."

~~~
colechristensen
>How many more movies can Netflix support with these new drives?

Netflix doesn't do their own hardware, they use AWS. One can also assume that
the cost of the content far outweighs the cost of delivery.

~~~
latch
The AWS marketing folks don't get paid enough.

[https://www.netflix.com/openconnect/hardware](https://www.netflix.com/openconnect/hardware)

~~~
adventured
They do, however, use AWS to run most of their service:

[http://gigaom.com/2013/12/02/netflix-is-balancing-its-
stream...](http://gigaom.com/2013/12/02/netflix-is-balancing-its-streaming-
traffic-across-amazons-cloud/)

------
mkempe
What is the anticipated price/TB curve of SSD over the next five years? at
what point would most consumer storage switch from HDD to SSD?

If we start with a HDD/SSD price ratio of 1:7 (based on a quick check with
Amazon) and hope for SSDs to get cheaper/TB by 50% each coming 18 months (?)
we'd have a strong incentive to switch by year 2019.

~~~
nardi
That already happened. The biggest computer manufacturer (Apple) doesn't sell
a machine without an SSD.

~~~
redial
[http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/imac](http://store.apple.com/us/buy-
mac/imac)

I think you are being a little premature. All iMacs have hard drives by
default.

~~~
wazoox
They are hybrid drives, though. The only pure HDD option seems to be the 3 TB
drive.

~~~
redial
No, the default in every iMac is a 1TB Hard Drive.

[http://store.apple.com/us/buy-
mac/imac?product=ME086LL/A&ste...](http://store.apple.com/us/buy-
mac/imac?product=ME086LL/A&step=config)

[http://store.apple.com/us/buy-
mac/imac?product=ME087LL/A&ste...](http://store.apple.com/us/buy-
mac/imac?product=ME087LL/A&step=config)

[http://store.apple.com/us/buy-
mac/imac?product=ME088LL/A&ste...](http://store.apple.com/us/buy-
mac/imac?product=ME088LL/A&step=config)

[http://store.apple.com/us/buy-
mac/imac?product=ME089LL/A&ste...](http://store.apple.com/us/buy-
mac/imac?product=ME089LL/A&step=config)

~~~
wazoox
Weird, the product page seems to present the hybrid drive as the default
option.

------
beachstartup
just a data point: for our enterprise customers, 800GB intel datacenter 3500
series flash drives (the penultimate model good for most write-heavy
applications) are already basically the same price as 600GB 15k SAS drives and
actually cost less if you drop the raid controller which isn't that great with
ssd (in our experience).

------
neom
I wish intel was innovating a little more.

~~~
listic
Me too. But I guess Intel is not that much strategically interested in
competing in ever more competitive SSD space, with decreasing profit margins
and increasingly larger R&D budgets needed. Not that Intel couldn't afford
them, but I think it's not as attractive for them as the CPU market right now.

~~~
agumonkey
And they already have a money bleeding segment : smartphone class SoC.

------
coreymgilmore
Is it just me, or are the performance numbers a bit disappointing given the
size and price tag? I guess its a balance between size and speed.

~~~
Igglyboo
The drives are for enterprise datacenters, not consumers.

~~~
rasz_pl
Thats a cop out. Its synonymous with 'yes they suck, but we will charge arm
and a leg for them so some enterprise sucker is bound to bite'.

They also have VERY limited writes/sector count (brobably in the hundreds)
before they will start to fail, this has been handled by another PR statement
"The drive is aimed at read-intensive applications"

~~~
mikhailt
Enterprise means reliability (specific NAND quality, long validation process
at multiple levels), long term support (including warranty costs), and
firmware tailored for enterprise workloads.

Enterprise pays for SSDs that's tested throughly at firmware, controller,
memory levels. They're not paying for the fastest, just the most reliable.

Many of the consumer SSDs are not tested to this extent, that's why the prices
are so cheap. Look at OCZ as an example.

Would you as a business owner pay 100$ for 1000 SSDs that may glitch out early
and have firmware bugs or would you pay 300$ for SSDs that's solid without
having to go through firmware updates, glitches, and so on?

------
d0ugie
Wow, 8TB, that's a lot of girly pictures! For the same general use purposes,
do SSDs put out significantly less heat versus HDDs and also burn less
electricity, and enough so to, for example, help eliminate the need for fans?

For the typical consumer, not necessarily what to decide what to stuff into an
HP 980, is it now clear that cost per byte is evening out and that soon the
typical array of laptops in your local Best Buy including the cheaper of the
lot will have SSDs?

Tl;dr, are hard drives being completely phased out faster and faster?

------
bananas
It'll be 2022 before I can afford one though... (I still have a 128Gb SSD).

~~~
zanny
Well, in 2010 a 256GB ssd was upwards of $500+. Today, a TB SSD costs that. So
yeah, capacity for price increases 4x over in 4 years. So 2022 is a good
estimate for commodity 4TB SSDs.

I wonder if we will ever get nand storage below mechanical in price per GB.
Even in 2022 I can image 8 - 10 TB mechanical disks being only $100 still,
while the 2TB SSDs cost about that. Because by then we are probably hitting
some physical limits.

~~~
sitkack
3.5 years for commodity 4TB SSD or less. I have a 1TB SSD, would gladly switch
to a 2TB model for twice the price. As the Sandisk announcement shows, it is
market not physical forces that will get us to 4TB.

~~~
frozenport
RAID

~~~
kondro
In a notebook?

~~~
frozenport
Its quite common, I have one for example.

~~~
sitkack
Only the Lenovo W series supports RAID afaik.

~~~
frozenport
My laptop is an Asus g7. A college of mine did some tricks to get a RAID0 in
his macbook pro. The future is now.

~~~
sitkack
I know, I was waiting. I have the optibay in MBP15 with a rotational disk for
backups since SSDs have been so unreliable. The 1TB samsung has been amazing.
You are correct, I should swap out the 1TB rotational for another 1TB and run
RAID.

~~~
kondro
At this point you'll probably get the most increased performance by upgrading
your MBP rather than RAID its storage.

~~~
sitkack
I do want more Performance, but I really want more and faster storage so I
think RAIDing another 1TB SSD is in order. And I couldn't get this with a new
MBP. I think they only will accept a single PCIe drive.

