SanDisk Announces 4TB SSD, Plans For 8TB Next Year 264
Lucas123 (935744) writes "SanDisk has announced what it's calling the world's highest capacity 2.5-in SAS SSD, the 4TB Optimus MAX line. The flash drive uses eMLC (enterprise multi-level cell) NAND built with 19nm process technology. The company said it plans on doubling the capacity of its SAS SSDs every one to two years and expects to release an 8TB model next year, dwarfing anything hard disk drives can ever offer over the same amount of time. he Optimus MAX SAS SSD is capable of up to 400 MBps sequential reads and writes and up to 75,000 random I/Os per second (IOPS) for both reads and writes, the company said."
Re: Oh goody (Score:5, Interesting)
False. Your one anecdotal story does not negate the collective wisdom of the entire computer industry.
As far as anecdotal evidence goes, here's some more worthless info: I've owned 8 SSD drives going all the way back to 2009 and not a single one has ever failed. They're all currently in use and still going strong. I have:
- 32 GB Mtron PATA SLC drive from 2009
- 64 GB Kingston from 2010 (crappy JMicron controller but it was cheap)
- 80 GB Intel G2 from 2010
- 80 GB Intel G3 from 2011
- 2x 80 GB Intel 320 from 2011
- 2x 240 GB Intel 520 in my work computer, it gets pretty heavily used, from 2012
- Whatever is in my Macbook Pro from 2012
- Just purchased a 250GB Samsung 840 Evo
Not a single failure on any of them, even the old 32 GB Mtron and the piece of crap JMicron controller Kingston.
But this evidence doesn't really matter; it's the broad experience of the industry as a whole that matters, and I assure you, SSDs have already been decided as ready for prime time.
For a recent example, linode.com, my data center host for like 10 years now, just switched over to all SSDs in all of their systems.
Not in my experience. (Score:5, Interesting)
Anecdotal and small sample size caveats aside, I've had 4 (of 15) mechanical drives fail in my small business over the last two years and 0 (of 8) SSDs over the same time period fail on me.
The oldest mechanical drive that failed was around 2 years old. The oldest SSD currently in service is over 4 years old.
More to the point, the SSDs are all in laptops, getting jostled, bumped around, used at odd angles, and subject to routine temperature fluctuations. The mechanical drives were all case-mounted, stationary, and with adequate cooling.
This isn't enough to base an industry report on, but certainly my experience doesn't bear out the common idea that SSDs are catastrophically unreliable in comparison to mechanical drives.
Where are the 3.5" SSDs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do SSD makers only make 2.5" SSDs? It seems like a lot of the capacity limitation is self-enforced by constraining themselves to laptop-sized drives.
Why can't they sell "yesterday's" flash density at larger storage capacities in the 3.5" disk form factor? For a a lot of the use cases, the 3.5" form factor isn't an issue. More, cheaper flash would enable greater capacities at lower prices.
The same thing is true for hybrid drives -- the 2.5" ones I've used have barely enough flash to make acceleration happen, a 3.5" case with a 2.5" platter and 120GB flash would be able to keep a lot more blocks in flash and reserve meaningful amounts for write caching to flash.
Re:Oh goody (Score:4, Interesting)
"In JESD218, SSD endurance for data center applications is specified as the total amount of host data that can be written to an SSD , guaranteeing no greater than a specified error rate (1E - 16) and data retention of no less than three months at 40 C when the SSD is powered off."
Re:Where are the 3.5" SSDs? (Score:4, Interesting)