
Samsung ships the world's highest capacity SSD, with 15TB of storage - elorant
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3040208/data-storage/samsung-ships-the-worlds-highest-capacity-ssd-with-15tb-of-storage.html?nsdr=true
======
userbinator
_The 15.36TB PM1633a drive supports one full drive write per day, which means
15.36TB of data can be written every day on a single drive without failure
over its five-year warranty._

In other words, assuming good wear leveling, each bit can only be rewritten
~2K times, which is actually quite low for endurance... the capacity is high
and they're using that to hide the fact that it's low, but if this was e.g.
SLC flash with 100K endurance, you'd be able to write 50x more.

No mention of retention either, which makes me think SSDs today are more for
temporary nonvolatile not-quite-RAM storage and not for more permanent
applications.

~~~
altcognito
SLC and MLC endurance aren't much different:
[http://hothardware.com/news/google-data-center-ssd-
research-...](http://hothardware.com/news/google-data-center-ssd-research-
report-offers-surprising-results-slc-not-more-reliable-than-mlc-flash)

To reach a full rewrite a day, that's like 200Mb/s consistently over the span
of a 24 hour day. If your loads/usage looks like this, you're probably
expecting your drives to fail and are ready to replace them.

~~~
reitzensteinm
That link says they're not more reliable, which is not at all the same thing.

------
hendry
On Amazon UK, the highest capacity Samsung SSD I can find is 2TB for 620GBP.
So I am wondering when this 15TB we actually hit stores and what's the sweet
spot price wise between 1 & 15TB.

~~~
cm2187
Samsung is expected to release a 4TB consumer SSD this summer. Might be a
better bargain that this enterprise SSD.

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/9652/samsung-details-3rd-
gen-v...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9652/samsung-details-3rd-gen-vnand-
rollout-4tb-850-pro-1tb-850-evo-m2-more-in-2016)

------
Animats
It's awe inspiring to see _fifteen terabytes_ of solid state storage in that
little box.

~~~
imaginenore
It's still less dense than 200GB MicroSD cards.

(which are only $79.50 on Amazon)

~~~
jschwartzi
Does that density include the connectors and buses that would be required to
access those cards?

~~~
imaginenore
Then you have to include the connectors and buses to access the SSD as well.

And it will still be in favor of microsd, which can be read by a tiny
connector + tiny controller in a smartphone.

~~~
21
I think parent was asking if you can fit 75 microSD cards (75 * 200 GB = 15
TB) and the required connections in the form factor of this SSD.

~~~
seanp2k2
If you're just counting the flash chips on circuit boards, I would think that
you could fit many more SD innards and wire them together with some type of
controller in this space. I don't doubt however that given the use-case, it
has some room allocated for chips going bad, heat dissipation, etc inside. If
they could have made a 20TB drive instead for the enterprise market in this
form factor, they would have.

------
antocv
Samsung can try to sell me 100TB SSD, and Ill decline thanks.

Their EVO drives suffer from read degradation slowly over long periods of
time. See EVO 840, after about a year it was down to 20MiB/s of continuous
read speed. An SSD they call that thing. They refused warranty and released a
"Speed up flash warez tool now.exe" as help, which all it did was move the
data around on the SSD in the background so as to keep up the charade that
their SSDs dont suffer from manufacturing/design error.

~~~
pilsetnieks
This is a completely different category of product than their low end consumer
Evo drives, though.

~~~
antocv
Its the same company.

They marketed it as warranty so and so, speed such and such, and in fact its a
piece of shit, and Samsung does not stand by its own product.

Even their newest Samsung EVO 850 is marketed as write speed ~500mb/s, but
that is only true for the first 3gb, due to their usage of "TurboWriteCache",
which means it has some kind of DRAM or faster real flash disk, and the rest
of the disk is below 100mb/s in write speed.

Perhaps, they should not offer warranty on their "low-end consumer" drives, or
lie in marketing/product specifications?

So that we as low-end consumers can make informed decisions? I bought SanDisk
Extreme Pro instead, they are very fine disks, and did not cost much more than
the evo. Recommend SanDisk strongly.

~~~
BillyParadise
So you wouldn't use a high end Cisco router because they make the crappy
"cisco small business" line?

~~~
antocv
No I would not. Whats to weird about that?

Juniper is nice, ExtremeNetworks, Pluribus etc, its not like I have to eat
shit from a supplier just because they have labeled it "low end", "customer"
grade and so on.

------
scurvy
Why SAS and not NVMe? You can buy all NVMe enclosures/servers now.

Is this solely aimed at replacing drives in existing enclosures? Not much good
there as most of them will be SAS6. They'll still work, but not nearly as fast
as SAS12 nor NVMe.

~~~
_wmd
You're asking for 2 major tech steppings in a single product. We don't even
have many mass market NVMe drives yet, and that aside, they're undoubtedly
pushing the limits of their existing controller tech just to handle the
capacity. Has NVMe seen much enterprise adoption yet? No surprise they chose
an interface to match their intended customers' existing product lines

~~~
chime
We put a couple of Intel 750s in our primary DB server and so many of our
issues just went away instantly. Reading at 2GB/s is amazing. On a 10gb
network, our network backups now happen at 1+GB/s. Of course we optimize our
DB queries as much as possible but sometimes, you just hit a brick wall and
can't speed things up because of how the data is structured. Instead of
spending 100 developer/dbadmin hours on reorganizing our tables for some query
that runs once a week, we put $2500 of drives and solved more problems than I
imagined.

The easiest problems are the ones that go away if you throw money at them and
NVMe drastically expands the set of such problems. Most small-mid-sized
companies have DBs in the 10Gb-1TB range. If you have a single table that's
100GB in size, you can parse through every single row in just under a minute!
This means you can actually use an easy to implement O(n) algorithm instead of
trying to make O(1) or O(log n) fit your problem. NVMe SSDs are not that
advantageous for companies that are built to scale horizontally on AWS. They
are amazing when you have a monolithic DB that you can't
partition/shard/cluster easily.

~~~
rjurney
Just wanted to say that this kind of real-world experience is why I read
Hacker News.

~~~
Razengan
Me as well. Discovering HN was such a refreshing respite from the thinly-
veiled political soapbox that is Reddit.

------
NovaS1X
Impressive. First question that pops into mind is how long the rebuild time
would take if one of these failed in a RAID. I can imagine it'll take a while.

~~~
cm2187
I thought RAID and SSD were a terrible combination. As if both drives do
exactly the same writes at the same time, chances are they will fail at the
same time. Plus most RAID controllers don't support TRIM.

Has the thinking changed?

~~~
sdesol
> I thought RAID and SSD were a terrible combination

Well there are different RAID settings. My product is an indexing engine
(indexes Git repositories) and I've personally found RAID 0 reduces indexing
time by about 30% compared to a single drive. I have a machine that has 4 SSDs
running RAID 0 and I've found the performance gain after 3 SSDs is negligible.

It seems like 3 SSDs running RAID 0 is the best combination given my very
limited sampling size.

~~~
laurencerowe
An SSD is implemented a little like a RAID array internally. Higher capacity
SSDs have more flash chips and tend to be faster. So one would expect that 2 x
128GB drives in RAID 0 to perform similarly to a single 256GB drive.

~~~
eropple
Wouldn't being able to offload to multiple SSD controllers potentially help
too if that's the bottleneck?

~~~
rbanffy
It would - you'd have the aggregate bandwidth of the multiple controllers to
use. Similarly, RAID-1 is better for random reads than RAID-0.

------
dcip6s
Anyone care to take a guess how much the 15TB version will cost?

~~~
bluedino
10,000 USD?

~~~
sp332
I don't see any SAS SSD's going for much less than $1,000/TB. Some of them are
twice that! And I'm sure the density will let it command a premium by
targeting users who really need more storage in tight spaces. My guess is
$50,000.

~~~
userbinator
On the other hand, I still remember when hard drives (the spinning platter
ones) reached the $1/GB mark ~10 years ago. Now high-end SSDs are there. A
_billion_ bits of storage costing $1 is pretty amazing, I think.

~~~
robbiemitchell
Hell, I remember reading PC Mag and being SHOCKED about a 4GB HD that cost a
few hundred bucks. (Also shocked that I subscribed to PC Mag.)

~~~
ryao
I was shocked when 200GB drives were called drivezilla and cost $400.

~~~
cm2187
And I was shocked when Seagate announced a 8TB HDD for $200..

~~~
MichaelBurge
I'm shocked every time I open Newegg. Having hardware with at least 256MB of
RAM, 100 Mhz clock speed CPUs, 10Gb hard drives that works with such high
reliability is amazing. You have to think, even a single screwed up
instruction or corrupted bit could bring down the OS.

How many millions of pixels are on my two LCD screens, and they are each
individually controllable and none have failed in 8 years?

------
izzydata
I hope I can get a 1TB SSD for ~$100 in the near future. I'd love to replace
all my HDD.

------
fakename
and a 2015 macbook pro still ships with 128gb

~~~
thecatspaw
Not sure what you're talking about, mine shipped with 1tb, my work has some
with 500gb and 1tb as well.

~~~
vlasev
The maximum on the Apple site is 512GB standard but you can purchase 1TB to
make it 500 dollars extra.

------
pcunite
Bye bye mechanical ...

