Here's to hoping this PM9E1 drive makes it into the Samsung EVO 9x series drives..
I'm curious why the capacity only goes to 4TB, aren't there a bunch of 8TB NVMe's out there? When will we see consumer-grade 16TB SSDs? Capacity hasn't seemed to increase in more than half a decade.
4TB seems like the upper end for most normal consumers, I would hazard. We had 1-2TB HDDs a decade ago, and there's been little reason to go higher in the consumer space. Arguably SSDs only now getting cheap enough at those capacities might have limited it, but even so I think we're running out of things that consume that much space.
Video and pictures are the main culprit (even in games), but 4k is likely to be the upper end of consumer usage for the forseeable future, photos have been 20-40MP for a decade, and perceivable quality benefits from going higher are fairly minimal. We can always use more space, but from a practical perspective there's not the same explosion in space required from everything else scaling to use it, I'd say.
The question is if consumers are willing to pay the prices of the larger SSDs. I consider myself a pro-sumer and have not needed that much fast SSD myself.
For some reason 8TB drives are consistently a worse value. I did need that much fast SSD but ended up getting two 4TB M.2 drives because it was significantly cheaper.
Going all-flash was compelling for a while, but it seems like SSDs have failed to deliver on some important promises:
* The whole "it's SLC cache until you fill it up, then drops to pretty mediocre performance" thing is frightening because I suspect a lot of reviews aren't sufficiently battering the drive to report on this. I gather this is a bigger problem as they move to TLC and QLC and beyond and any corner-cutting they can do in the controller. TBH, I'd love to see sanctioned first-party tooling to manage my overprovision and caching strategy, so if I want to spend $130 to turn a 2Gb drive into a really overbuilt 512Gb drive, let me.
* The "we don't guarantee it will maintain data if left unpowered for 3 months" story doesn't make it a great choice for cold storage/intermittent access. If you just plug in a drive once a year to back up your tax returns, I'm not sure you want a SSD for it.
I ended up setting up a NAS with a cheap spinning-rust drive, figure that gives me a different reliability profile than the flash for that tier of backup.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41399872
Here's to hoping this PM9E1 drive makes it into the Samsung EVO 9x series drives..
I'm curious why the capacity only goes to 4TB, aren't there a bunch of 8TB NVMe's out there? When will we see consumer-grade 16TB SSDs? Capacity hasn't seemed to increase in more than half a decade.