
Samsung crams 30TB of SSD into a single 2.5-inch drive - spacemanspiffy
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/samsung-crams-30tb-of-ssd-into-a-single-2-5-inch-drive/
======
zanny
So why have hard drives stalled out for the last 3 years? An 850 evo is still
the "premier" 2.5” drive and still goes on sale for the same lows it did years
ago - the best deals are around $240/TB. The new nvme drives are a markup from
there. 3TB has had low prices of $50-70 for over four years now but 4+TB never
creeps lower. About $20 a TB is the best mechanical storage you can get since
like 2014.

When are we going to see a $100 6TB drive? 8TB? It seems like density has just
stopped on both fronts for practical purchases. 10 years ago a terabyte cost
$200 - 2 years later it was $100, and 2 years after that $50. But now, the
8+TB drives just stay at that $200 price point. SSDs fell off a cliff in price
from 2011 to 2015 and then just completely stopped.

Its not a good feeling when it seems Moore's Law has come to a screeching halt
across and kinds of components. RAM is 3x more expensive today than 2 years
ago. CPUs might see 5% improvement year over year. There hasnt been a
substantial new GPU series in almost 3 years.

Go back and tell someone in 2006 that in 2016 the PC you build will he just as
good as the one in 2018 while bring cheaper and they'd think its impossible
progress could grind to such a halt do fast after 40 years of lockstep
improvement.

~~~
bb88
I think it's maybe three things.

1\. The industry is retooling from HDD To SDD, but they apparently can't keep
up with demand for SSD's. So the prices are artificially high.

2\. Demand for faster, denser, and lower power SSD's are coming from the cloud
providers. So rather than incremental price decreases over time, we're seeing
the prices are staying the same, and we're getting incremental technology
improvements. The V-Nand technology is the hot new thing, enabling 2TB of
storage on a single chip.

3\. There's no more serious innovation on the HDD's since SSD's will likely
eclipse HDD's in 2021.[1]

[1] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/285474/hdds-and-ssds-
in-...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/285474/hdds-and-ssds-in-pcs-
global-shipments-2012-2017/)

~~~
cm2187
Can we really use SSD for long term storage?

~~~
lev99
Long term storage (archive) of sequential data is still being done on tapes in
many circumstances. Tapes are more reliable than hard drives, cheaper, and
have a faster write speed.

Sony announced their highest density tape at 201Gbit/in^2 last year.[0]

You can use SSD for long-term storage assuming the data is stored on redundant
drives and drive health is checked. It's really only cost effective if you
need the data frequently or if you are only archiving a small (1pb or less)
amount of data.

[0]
[https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201708/17-070E/inde...](https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201708/17-070E/index.html)

~~~
Patient0
Just to clarify: you’re saying that 1pb - 1 petabyte - 1000 TB - is small?

~~~
wtallis
We're very close to being able to fit 1PB of flash in a 1U server. So yes, 1PB
is a small-scale archival project. Current generation tape libraries start
around 1PB and scale up from there.

------
jpalomaki
Performance figures given in the article are about same as those for Samsung
960 Pro NVMe [1]. Would have expected this to have an opportunity for higher
speeds by splitting the write/read to multiple chips.

40GB of DDR is pretty interesting. Add there a battery or suitable capacitor
and you could use that as a reliable write cache. With SSDs I guess you could
design it so that the capacitor would have enough power for flushing the data
from the cache to the flash chips even if external power is lost.

[1]
[http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/co...](http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/consumer/ssd960/)

~~~
IntronExon
Jesus, I remember being blown away by 16MB of HDD storage years ago. I am
older than dirt! Now it’s 30TB, and solid state... no flying cars, but the
future has definitely come through in some regards.

Edit: These responses have filled me with a really pleasant nostalgia. It’s a
pleasure to have such a simple, yet profound shared experience; the “We’ll
never fill _that_ up!...” club. Drinks are on me.

~~~
op00to
I remember my father installing a 250 MB "hardcard" into our computer at home,
and marveling at how we'd NEVER fill it up.

~~~
Dylan16807
It's an interesting thing, because it's naive in a very particular way, but
it's also more true than most people would guess.

And that's photography.

A single photograph requires a bunch of megabytes to store properly. Videos
require tens of thousands of frames.

If you were working with text, it would still be easy to fit everything you
needed in 250MB.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
There were no consumer digital cameras when 250MB drives were common. The
closest, Sony Mavicas, were still writing to analog media. Kodak was still
using bulky briefcase storage units with their own hard drives. Not something
the everyday "naive" computer user of the era would be investing in.

~~~
zimpenfish
The Casio QV-10a was released in 1995 - that was a consumer digital camera.
Although I wouldn't even call 250MB "common" then based on historical prices
and my memories.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
In '95 consumer grade computers were shipping with between 512MB and 1GB. 250
MB was common in the early 90's before the first wave of consumer digital
cameras.

~~~
zimpenfish
> In '95 consumer grade computers were shipping with between 512MB and 1GB.

Do you have a source for that? I bought a consumer grade computer in 1995 and
it only had 120MB of disk space. And the historical prices suggest that 250MB
was beyond consumer prices until ~1995.

[http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte](http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-
gigabyte) suggests 250MB would have been >$500 until 1994. Which is nowhere
near "consumer" price.

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jedberg
Given that their price for their other enterprise disks seems to be about
$800/TB, tacking on a premium for the new tech and such, I'd guess the price
will be close to $30K.

But man, if I had an extra $120K to blow, I'd totally build a 90TB NAS out of
these.

~~~
chrisper
Is there any particular reason why you'd need SSD speeds in your NAS? im
assuming this would be for home use.

If you say just for fun, then that's a valid reason :-)

~~~
wil421
With gigbit internet I realized the HDD write speed is my limiting factor.
It’s taking siginificantly longer to extract my compressed files than it takes
to download it.

Adding an ssd as a staging drive for downloads and using it for transcoding
has given me a good boost.

~~~
ben174
I just bought the Thunderbolt 3 Drobo, and realize it's completely pointless
without SSDs. It advertises 40 Gbit speeds when using an active Thunderbolt 3
cable, but only gets about 200 MB/s with normal drives. I could probably get
close to that with the USB drobo.

~~~
Bud
Yes. But you're totally future-proof now. And you can speed it up a ton if you
throw in a single fast SSD as the cache disk.

Then in 4-8 years, when the price/performance works for you, you can throw in
all SSDs.

------
fuzzythinker
With same density, it should be possible to pack a Petabyte into 3.5" drives.
Wonder why Intel went with a new "Ruler" physical format for its Petabyte
drive instead of 3.5" format.

~~~
simcop2387
Like everything silicon, I'd bet heat dissipation. As you make things more
dense and thicker like that you end up needing more space just to get rid of
the heat. Intel's ruler gives a better surface area to volume ratio to get rid
of the heat. The 3.5" form factor (and even the 5.25") makes a lot more sense
for rotating platters since those scale linearly with vertical space (or at
least close to it) because they're not dissipating heat off the platters like
you need to with ICs.

~~~
wtallis
Yep, heat dissipation is one of the big factors. The other is that 2.5" SSDs
mean you can only easily use the front 6" of your server for hot-swappable
storage. The Intel Ruler/EDSFF Long form factors let you devote much more of
the total server volume to storage that's still accessible from the front of
the machine.

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mfringel
Being able to set it up as 10TB with 3x the life would be even better, because
it makes other write-intensive applications feasible with an SSD, with the
firmware handling the wear accounting in the background.

ETA: Specifically, having the option to do so, and having it happen
transparently in firmware.

~~~
mankash666
The market doesn't want products advertised this way. Setting up a 30TB SSD as
a 10TB with 3X the endurance is an easily solvable issue in host software. But
selling a 30TB as a 10TB, while demanding 3X the price of a 10TB despite the
high endurance is a gargantuan challenge

~~~
rayvd
I dunno, we on the Enterprise side have always ponied up for the longer-
lasting and far more expensive SLC based drives.

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Faaak
I know two datacenters in switzerland that instead go "the cheap way". For
them, if a drive lasts 4 years instead of 8, it doesn't really matter, as in 4
years, drives will de better and consume less.

Your redundancy must be top notch though.

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peter303
Must brew cofee and cook toast too:-)

How many kilowatts?

~~~
pixl97
The 16TB unit says 12W when active. Probably not much over 20W under use for
this one at most. That would put it in the range of a 15k scsi hdd.

