
Seagate Introduces a 60TB SSD – Is a 3.6PB Storage Pod Next? - ingve
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/seagate-60tb-ssd-36pb-storage-pod-next/
======
benologist
In other news this week:

\- 15 tb from samsung

\- 32 tb from huawei

\- 48 tb from lenovo

\- 64 tb from someone in 3.5" form (edit: was the seagates in the article)

I'm looking forward to putting about a hundred terabytes of SSD into my tiny
little 2.5" 4 bay Synology NAS in a few years. The M.2 version will be nuts -
[https://www.qnap.com/en/product/model.php?II=222](https://www.qnap.com/en/product/model.php?II=222)

~~~
simcop2387
and 100tb from toshiba now,

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/10/toshiba_100tb_qlc_ss...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/10/toshiba_100tb_qlc_ssd)

Found at the bottom of the backblaze article.

~~~
xellisx
100TB with 100 write endurance. Definitely not a drive for caching.

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blakesterz
I really love corporate blogs like backblaze and netflix, even Amazon's has
some interesting reading.

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> Thanks! We try to keep the droll posts to a minimum
:)

~~~
Analemma_
Hey, this is totally off-topic, but I have a humorous question for you guys:
whenever I try to say the name of your company, about 75% of the time I flub
it and say "Blackbaze" or "Blackblaze". Does this happen to you too? Do you
have a swear jar for when people get it wrong? :)

~~~
Scorponok
[http://www.blackblaze.com/](http://www.blackblaze.com/)

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atYevP
Yea, as a result of -> [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a-
porn-s...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/why-backblaze-bought-a-porn-site/)

~~~
nickpsecurity
That's hilarious. Especially it ending up in your own marketing material.
Lmao. Appreciate the link. I'm aware of this kind of issue having done plenty
of customer service with disaster caused by misheard or misspelled things. So,
I occasionally suggest a title change to some OSS projects that get posted
here that might go big. Better to help them avoid the inevitable early on. :)

~~~
atYevP
> Especially it ending up in your own marketing material

EVERYTHING can be marketing materials if you try hard enough :D

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Shivetya
Impressed with the size, I need to see what size IBM is offering us for our
next move, but we go from 6 racks of 15k drives to one rack.

While the SSD cost in our setup is more expensive than spinning media IBM is
pushing it and the price has dropped immensely since first availability. The
second bonus we have is we have systems at COLOs which charge both for power,
cooling, and rack space. Needless to say those all come down and since our
processing heavily batch oriented with strong web based activity the SSD
systems will certainly boost performance and provide a good two to three year
buffer.

Fortunately Toshiba and Seagate are moving the density so fast that by next
upgrade the prices should be amazingly different (we are 60tb, but mirrored
meaning 120tb). Now I am curious if our AIX side will have fun here as they
should make for easier flash copies that would be faster too.

I guess my real concern is, that is a lot of data to lose to one device
failure. So raid/mirroring is so much more important.

~~~
atYevP
> I guess my real concern is, that is a lot of data to lose to one device
> failure. So raid/mirroring is so much more important.

Yev from Backblaze here -> Yea, we raid across different pods w/ Reed Solomon
([https://www.backblaze.com/blog/reed-
solomon/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/reed-solomon/)). With these that
would be very costly, but the benefit for us is that an entire pod or two can
go down and it's still OK.

~~~
mixedCase
How would you say your solution compares to groups of 10 drives in RAID6
configuration when it comes to safety, storage and availability?

~~~
atYevP
You can read a bit more about our infrastructure ->
[https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-
architect...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-
architecture/) \- Right now we essentially "RAID" across multiple racks - so
we can lose an entire rack and it wouldn't really affect us too much. Having
10 drives in RAID6 is great - having those 10 drives be in different physical
locations on separate power circuits is even better :D

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crudbug
The OCD bug in me always liked - 4/ 8/ 16/ 32/ 64/ 128 storage nomenclature.

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cm3
Which of these are read optimized drives? I know that the 100TB announcement
this week (forgot the vendor) was optimized for writing once and mostly
reading, kinda like for cold storage ala SMR.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Or, for example, you're recording a _lot_ of surveillance data and you
never^h^h^h^h^hhardly ever modify it.

Edit: simple math HD stream 10mbps (1MB/s) 24hrs = 86.4GB,that is nearly 2
years of uninterrupted coverage on 1 drive in HD.

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tener
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't tape drives be cheaper for surveillance?

~~~
mc32
I guess that depends on the streams and ingestion rates.

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atYevP
And "degestion" rates - as tape would typically have longer "restore" times.

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serg_chernata
These are supposed to go on sale next year. I can't wait to see what it does
to prices of current SSD's.

~~~
bisby
This was part of my thought. I'll not be buying a 100tb SSD in the next 2
years I imagine. But if they are available, buying a 4tb SSD might be within
my price range.

Im currently using about 3tb of HDDs and looking to expand. HDD seems obsolete
(for buying something Im trying to future proof with, also, drive spinning
accounts for a large portion of noise in my computer) and SSD prices arent
there yet. Hopefully these insanely huge advances push the lower end up.

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Vexs
A little unsolicited advice, but try putting some small gaskets between the
screw and harddrive, it eliminates a lot of noise.

~~~
bisby
I just got a new case, ironically my old case was near silent ( i could hear
the physical whirring of the disks and that's about it).

My new one has the little rubber gaskets on the mounting screws, but the drive
is mounted against a mounting sleeve (?) sort of thing. I pull a little
adapter out of the HDD cage, mount the drive into that (with the rubber
gaskets) and then put the adapter back into the cage. I think the noise is the
adapter on cage rattle.

It doesnt happen that often (so i think it is only 1 drive doing it), so I
havent bothered to look into it. But with moving parts youll always have SOME
noise.

~~~
Vexs
Ah, I've got the same kinda thing, the carts on my case have rubber bumpers
that separate it from the rest of the case. Maybe get some of the rubber
furniture nibs and see if you can stick em in there between the cage and case.

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joshstrange
And my entire array is 50TB of usable storage space, all spinning rust....
Still far cheaper than the $7K but disheartening haha.

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derefr
Are you sure it's cheaper in TCO, including electricity and cooling?

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joshstrange
This is a good question and I'm not sure. I don't pay electric where I live
(apartment complex) so neither of those are concerns currently :).

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walrus01
I wonder what the density could be if you were to design a 3U to 4U rackmount
thing, like the Backblaze storage pod, but designed from the ground up for M.2
format SSDs rather than 3.5" drives.

Unless your budget was almost unlimited, you'd probably run out of money to
buy enterprise class M.2 SSDs before you ran out of physical space to put
them.

~~~
benologist
You can see the huge difference it will make even with personal NAS's, you can
stack 7 of these 4 bay M.2 devices into the same space:

M.2 x4 -
[https://www.qnap.com/en/product/model.php?II=222](https://www.qnap.com/en/product/model.php?II=222)

    
    
        25 x 165 x 230mm
    

3.5" x4 - [https://www.synology.com/en-
global/products/DS416j](https://www.synology.com/en-global/products/DS416j)

    
    
        184 x 168 x 230mm

~~~
white-flame
So assuming 1TB M.2 devices, you'll get 1TB * 7 * 4 = 28TB of storage in that
stack, vs 8TB * 4 = 32TB of storage in the spinning rust solution. 40TB for
10TB spinnies.

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Fej
I use Backblaze. Fantastic service. The software could use a bit of work
though.

~~~
atYevP
Yev from Backblaze here -> We're working on it!

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jordache
how are the SSDs these days with respect to MTTF? I recall reading articles
about SSDs having shorter MTTF than traditional HDs..

~~~
daveguy
Enough to read and write over 2 petabytes. Of course these are as small of a
sample size as you can get. Also, the Intel didn't fail as much as refused to
continue in non-recovery mode out of an abundance of caution. I expect SSDs
without moving parts have well exceeded MTBF of magnetic drives already:

[http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-
experim...](http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-
theyre-all-dead)

Capacity was the last frontier in terms of benefit of HDD over SSD and it
looks like that is being squashed too.

(Edit: Cost per GB is still going for HDD, but that is probably on the horizon
too).

~~~
olavgg
Consumer SSDs can handle 2 petabytes. Some enterprise SSD's that are sold for
almost nothing @ Ebay are rated up to 25-100PB

~~~
jordache
consumer vs enterprise SSDs? Interesting.. they are not made on the same line?

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guimarin
buried the lede quite a bit in this article. Toshiba announces 100TB drive:
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/10/toshiba_100tb_qlc_ss...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/10/toshiba_100tb_qlc_ssd)

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coldcode
The subtitle says "Seagate 60TB SDD".

Solid disk drive? Hmmm best of both worlds!

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shmerl
When will cost per capacity of SSDs become cheaper than that of HDDs?

~~~
dietrichepp
If cost per capacity were your only concern, you would still be using tape.
You can get LTO-6 for $12/TB, but HDDs start at more like $25/TB, and SSDs are
more like $250/TB. SSDs keep dropping in price, but without a major
breakthrough, the crossover probably won't happen before 2020. 2020 is far
enough away (how many generations of semiconductor fabrication is that?) that
most people are hesitant to make this kind of prediction.

So the best answer is, "Who knows? Probably not for a few years, at least."
We'll continue to see hybrid fleets for a while yet.

Maybe, in the meantime, the SSDs will be cheap enough that you don't need
something cheaper.

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VikingCoder
That's 60,000 hours of Netflix Standard Def.

That's 6.85 years of 24/7.

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qaq
growing at 25PB every 3 month is impressive

~~~
jl6
That's about 10TB an hour. Do they install at least one hard drive every hour,
continuously?

~~~
walrus01
I don't doubt that they have one or two full time datacenter techs whose job
is to rack new 4U storage pods every day, cable and power them up.

