
SSD Storage: 2018 in review - PeterZaitsev
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13752/anandtech-year-in-review-2018-ssds
======
franciscop
I've been following the news and it's amazing how SSDs are still progressing,
a bit slower but similar to Moore's Law. Prices for Samsung SSD 1TB external
USB products:

\- 2015 $600: Samsung T1 [http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/samsung-
portable-ssd...](http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/samsung-portable-
ssd-t1-review-1tb-price-speed-capacity-security/)

\- 2016 $430: Samsung T3
[https://www.storagereview.com/samsung_portable_ssd_t3_review](https://www.storagereview.com/samsung_portable_ssd_t3_review)

\- 2018 $200: Samsung T5
[https://www.androidheadlines.com/2018/12/samsung-t5-portable...](https://www.androidheadlines.com/2018/12/samsung-t5-portable-
ssd-1tb-198-amazon-holiday-deals-2018.html)

Another incredible exciting point is the amount of competition coming up, it's
not just 2-3 large vendors anymore.

If things continue at this pace it seems sensible to expect a _10TB_ SSD
consumer drive for under $1000 within a couple of years.

Note: not afiliated at all, just a happy consumer.

~~~
memco
Meanwhile Apple is charging $1,200 for a 1 TB MacBook upgrade. Hoping this
year we see a significant jump in consumer availability of these drives. I’ve
been using a 512gb laptop since 2010 at least. Would be nice to start seeing
multi-terrabyte drives in devices besides after market or external drives.

~~~
SyneRyder
_> Meanwhile Apple is charging $1,200 for a 1 TB MacBook upgrade._

This is specifically one of the reasons I ended up switching to a Lenovo
Thinkpad X1 Yoga, even though I'd planned to buy the new MacBook Air. The
Thinkpad's SSD is officially user-replaceable and I bought a 2TB WD Blue SSD
for less than a third of the cost of Apple's upgrade. Even an NVMe SSD would
have been half the price of Apple.

One caveat is that although Lenovo has excellent official repair videos
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqrspYc21PY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqrspYc21PY)),
I must be doing something wrong, the Phillips & JIS heads in my iFixit Mako
toolkit don't seem to fit/grip the Thinkpad's SSD screw. I'm worried I'll
strip the screw if I keep trying, so I guess I'll take it to a Lenovo repair
shop for some help.

~~~
WilliamEdward
At the end of the day if you're buying apple for the hardware you were doing
something wrong to begin with. MacOS is one of the few good reasons to get
apple products, otherwise it should be a given that you get an alternative
device. Combine this with the fact that Apple has made it impossible to get
stuff repaired, and what you've just said, I don't see why anyone would buy an
apple laptop for the hardware alone.

~~~
llampx
For a long time, Apple had the best laptop hardware on the market. Since the
web revolution and fewer people needing Windows to work, its no wonder that
Mac sales have exploded. I believe that's coming to an end though. Macbook
Pros have gone too far into the direction of compromise for the sake of design
and are on the road to nichedom again.

------
seanalltogether
Not sure if I'm asking this correctly but, all SSDs now have their own
internal filesystem for managing access to blocks right? Are we getting to a
point where traditional filesystems like NTFS or ext4 will simply go away? Or
will they still stick around and just act as lightweight layers on top of the
SSD filesystem?

~~~
kbuck
At the SSD level, the drives are actually doing block management, not file
management. You still need a filesystem to store metadata, manage the layout
of the data, etc.

An example of something that a SSD's controller does that the operating
system/filesystem doesn't have to worry about is managing bad blocks. If the
SSD detects a bad block, it will replace it with a working block and update
the data used by its flash translation layer to move the blocks around. This
is completely opaque to the operating system; as far as it knows its
underlying storage works exactly the same (until there are so many bad blocks
that the drive can't keep up this convenient deception).

An example of something a filesystem does that the SSD doesn't provide is
storing operating system-specific file metadata, such as permissions, creation
times, multiple data streams, directory layouts, etc. SSDs deal only in blocks
of data, not arbitrarily-sized units, nor metadata.

The reason that this behavior isn't more tightly-integrated is because some of
the details of managing the underlying flash blocks tend to be specific to
type of flash, or even different models of flash. For example, the article
mentions QLC flash becoming mainstream - we're finally getting to this point
because previously, QLC was so difficult to manage that your filesystem had to
be aware that it was writing to QLC flash to use it effectively. There are a
few filesystems designed for direct flash management like yaffs[0], but this
isn't quite as efficient as a SSD's dedicated processor and software stack.

[0]: [https://yaffs.net/](https://yaffs.net/)

~~~
amelius
> This is completely opaque to the operating system; as far as it knows its
> underlying storage works exactly the same (until there are so many bad
> blocks that the drive can't keep up this convenient deception).

Is there a way for the drive to tell the fs that a block is bad? Or does the
drive simply keep a bunch of blocks apart just in case?

~~~
wtallis
Hard drives and SSDs both keep a pool of spare blocks so that they can remain
functional after having to retire some defective blocks from use. This spare
pool tends to be much larger for SSDs. Ordinary IO doesn't convey anything
about whether a block had to be retired in the process, but there are SMART
indicators that track this stuff.

------
wtallis
Two interesting updates based on what's been announced so far in 2019:

PCIe 4.0 will be arriving in the consumer market this year, with a new
generation of AMD Ryzen CPUs providing host support, and at least one or two
consumer-class NVMe SSD controllers supporting PCIe 4.0 should be ready to
start shipping in retail products by the end of the year. (The
enterprise/datacenter storage market's transition is already well underway.)

Seagate became the first vendor I'm aware of to start marketing a SSD to the
prosumer/SMB market for NAS usage. It's a rebadge of one of their recent
enterprise SATA drives and isn't even using QLC NAND so it's probably going to
be pretty pricey, but the idea of a solid-state NAS is no longer completely
laughable.

~~~
devereaux
solid state NAS not not laughable, just expansive.

RAID 10 a few NVME and you can get decent throughput (and storage size) with
existing technology.

~~~
leetcrew
> RAID 10 a few NVME and you can get decent throughput (and storage size) with
> existing technology.

is there a good reason to do this in a consumer setup? max realistic
throughput over gigabit ethernet is only ~120MB/s, which can easily be
saturated by sequential reads or writes to/from a single modern spinning-rust
drive.

~~~
baroffoos
My NAS has 3x 1gbit Ethernet ports

~~~
sokoloff
10Gb ports are quite cheap as well especially if you're only going point to
point (the switches are still a little pricy, but the ports for a NAS to VM
host are easily under $100 now).

~~~
vetinari
Even switches like Mikrotik CRS305-1G-4S+IN are getting into 100 EUR range,
(if you are fine with running optic cables instead of metallic).

~~~
sokoloff
Thanks!

I am fine with fiber; it's cheap and for a few ports at home, I don't worry
about the power (especially as compared to the servers it cross-connects).

------
jaytaylor
Whoa, check out that Samsung NF1 form-factor [0]. Looks like you could pack _a
ton_ of small finger-sized SSD drives vertically into a small space.

[0]
[https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13752/IMGP2727_575px.jpg](https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13752/IMGP2727_575px.jpg)

This is one way in which it's a cool time to be alive. I'll never forget circa
1996 when I waited 20+ minutes for my Apple Performa 550 to read and load a
30MB file from the scsi disk into memory. All so quicktime could play a
grainy, low-resolution video clip for all of 30 seconds. At the time I was
like "That's almost 1 minute per second of video! WTF? That sucks."

~~~
woolvalley
That must get really hot, I wonder how well it cools?

~~~
wtallis
There's no backplane to get in the way of airflow, so it is quite a bit easier
to cool than a typical hot-swap bay full of 2.5" drives:
[https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13218/IMGP2722.jpg](https://images.anandtech.com/doci/13218/IMGP2722.jpg)

The new connectors between the drives and the mid-plane board are probably the
most important innovation these new form factors bring to the table, though
something similar could also be done for existing SAS/U.2 connectors.

------
rb808
The other amazing thing is size. How much smaller and cooler m2 drives are
compared to old 3.5" HDs. If you have integrated graphics, PCs can now be
tiny. The big tower cases are really for gamers only.

~~~
zanny
Even gamers don't need towers, games don't benefit much from anything > 4
cores and the only limiting factor so all you really need is a mini-itx
motherboard, 8-16GB of ram, and a beefy GPU attached. There are plenty of
console sized cases out there you can build in that can fit a 2080 or Vega
card.

Big cases are really for tons of mechanical drive capacity, > 8 core CPUs,
addin cards like network switches, or a ton of GPUs in a compute cluster.

------
reasonablemann
Why is there competition in the SSD market but not in the RAM market?

~~~
wtallis
I'm not sure. The pattern in the DRAM market seems to have been that only the
biggest, most successful manufacturers can weather price crashes while still
investing enough in R&D to stay on the leading edge. In the NAND flash market,
we may simply not have yet seen any oversupply serious enough to do that, for
all that we're in the middle of an oversupply-driven price crash.

It is probably the case that it's easier to stay in business with inferior
NAND; Samsung beat everyone else to 3D NAND by a few years but Toshiba still
made a killing off cheaper, lower quality planar NAND, and Intel/Micron didn't
seem to suffer meaningfully from their first-generation 3D NAND being so slow.
Now everyone other than SK Hynix has caught up to Samsung and the number of
players in the market is actually increasing.

------
camerondoll
I wish Intel Optane nvme sticks had more capacity. The 120gb drive turned my
i7 6500u laptop TWICE as fast as desktop AMD 1700x with regular drive. For
example Python tests on a fairly big app ran for 3 minutes on a laptop and
same tests about 7 minutes on a supposedly more powerful desktop machine.

Edit: by regular I mean 960 evo

------
alxmdev
Exciting times indeed, just type _" ssd"_ in your favorite search box. I'm
about to upgrade to a 512GB SSD that costs half what an SSD half its size used
to cost 5 years ago! Starting this year, I'm considering getting a low-end
120GB for $25 every year on January 1st to use as a write-once backup for all
my work.

~~~
sigstoat
edit: i cannot arithmetic today, or sanity check my arithmetic. sorry.

sigh.

~~~
coder543
I'm not sure how you got that $25 = 41 years of 120GB of storage on Backblaze.

Their current pricing appears to be $0.005/GB-month... which would be $295.20
for 41 years of 120GB of storage.

> i wouldn't trust a cheap SSD to still work in 41 years

I wouldn't trust almost any company to still exist in 41 years, including
Backblaze. Preserving data over that length of time will probably require
active management of the data in some form or another. DVD or Blu-ray discs
might last that long... but it's hard to trust any storage medium to last for
41 years. Modern storage technology just hasn't existed that long.

~~~
sigstoat
> I'm not sure how you got that ...

sigh. bad at arithmetic today. sorry.

> I wouldn't trust almost any company to still exist in 41 years, including
> Backblaze

as i mention in the reply to the sibling comment, the backblaze corporate
entity doesn't need to last.

> DVD or Blu-ray discs might last that long... but it's hard to trust any
> storage medium to last for 41 years

on an anecdotal note, i put a bunch of data on DVDs circa 2004-2008, and tried
to retrieve it all spring 2018. all of the inexpensive DVDs were garbage. only
the most expensive survived, and even those had a few bit errors.

~~~
ahartmetz
Don't write optical media at the maximum possible speed, reasonably protect it
from light, and it will last much longer. I always did that and haven't lost a
disk yet. I'd need to recheck a few really old ones, though...

~~~
wtmt
And don’t stack them one on top of another. I recall reading that added weight
on the disks (common when they’re stacked horizontally) can result in data
loss because of the dye changing structurally. Store then standing sideways,
and as much as possible, closer to a 90° vertical angle.

------
kevin335200
Just bought MX500 2TB in black friday for about 200 euros. Maybe it will
getting cheaper this year, but 0.1 EUR/GB is already a good deal for me

------
nimbius
surprised these are still a thing. I bit the bullet and moved to M.2 storage
across pci lanes. It makes my current SSD's feel like spinning disk.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2)

~~~
aidenn0
TFA includes discussions of all SSDs, M.2 formfactor included.

