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."
Oh goody (Score:5, Funny)
Now you can pay $4000 for a drive that won't last 2 years! Yeah.. sign me up.
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only 4k? probably more like 20..
Re: Oh goody (Score:4, Informative)
My primary OS is running on an SSD going on 4 years old now... Out of 5 that I have only one had had issues, which was actually it's controller catastrophically failing and not a NAND issue - could have just as easily happened to a HDD.
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I went through three different intel ssds within a year before I gave up and went back to raid spinning disks. They're fine for laptop use, and there's a place for them in data centers as caching drives, but they still suck for heavy workstation loads.
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.
Re: Oh goody (Score:5, Informative)
We have ~100 SSDs installed in our company, workstations, laptops and servers. Over five years only 3 of them died, all Kingstons. Samsung and Intel have been spotless. All of those that died had the following symptoms - if you accessed a certain sector the drive just dropped off - as if you switched off its power. The drive did not remap them as it always dropped off before it could do so. Otherwise the drive remained functional. Got them replaced under warranty.
Re: Oh goody (Score:4, Funny)
It's highly unlikely that his parents were fucking yours.
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I'm using SSDs in a compile farm that builds software 24/7 and no drive has ever failed.
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I have 2 SSDs in a ZFS mirror that more or less constantly rebuilds the FreeBSD ports tree. The reasons for doing so are silly and not important to this discussion. It may spend 2 or 3 hours a day idle, the rest of the time, its building ports on those SSDs, with sync=yes (meaning ALL writes are sync, no write caching so i can see the log leading up to a kernel panic I'm searching for). Its been doing this for over a year already.
It has never thrown so much as a checksum error.
So my anecdotal evidence be
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Agility 2 here, still kicking after 3 years of heavy use, half of that without TRIM, perhaps they had their flaws, but mine has been working fine. I've had a bunch of Seagates crap out on me in the same time (always the same thing, bad sectors). With the race for the biggest drive, reliability has gone down the drain...
Re: Oh goody (Score:4, Informative)
While I'm happy for you and your luck so far, the hard numbers don't lie, one in 20 OCZ drives were returned over a two year period. Closer to 7 percent for particular models. Compare to half a percent for Samsung or Intel.
Re:Oh goody (Score:5, Insightful)
Assuming you write an average of 100GB a day to this drive (which is... an enormous overestimate for anything except a video editor's scratch disk), that's 40,000 days before you write over every cell on the disk 1000 times. Aka, 100 years before it reaches its write limit. So no... SSDs are far from the 2 year proposition that people who bought first gen 16/32GB drives make them out to be.
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If you only write infrequently (use for image editing) and then backup storage - how many years would the SSD maintain values?
Re:Oh goody (Score:5, Informative)
If you only write infrequently (use for image editing) and then backup storage - how many years would the SSD maintain values?
If the drive is powered down, I wouldn't bet on it lasting the year. Intel only seem to guarantee up to 3 months without power for their drives: http://www.intel.co.uk/content... [intel.co.uk]
Note also that the retention is said to go downwards as P/E cycles are used up. For me, I think they make great system drives, but I don't use them for anything precious.
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Of course, in the worst case, with a suitable synthetic workload in which every 512-byte block write causes a 512 KB flash page (again, worst case) to get erased and rewritten, that could translate to only a 40-day lifespan. Mind you, that worst-case scenario isn't likely to occur in the real world, but....
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How is that the worst case? Block erasure is only necessary to free up space, not to make a write.
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If you know something about the drive's sector migration policies, in theory you could construct a worst-case amplification attack against a given drive. Leverage that against the drive's wear leveling policies. But, that seems rather unlikely.
Flash pages retain their data until they're erased. You can write at the byte level, but you must erase at the full page level. You can't rewrite a byte until you erase the page that contains it. That's the heart of the attack: Rewriting sectors with new data.
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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."
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At 400MB/sec max erase throughput and 250 erase cycles per block (conservative?), it would still take 30 days to wear down this 4TB drive.
Write amplification is a red herring when you are calculating time to failure because write amplification doesnt magically give the SSD more erase ability. These things arent constructed to be
Terabyte flash drives are 10% overprovisioned (Score:3)
Thus, the basic idea [of a write amplification exploit] goes something like this: Fill the disk to 99.9% full.
Your attack has already failed. A 4 TB drive has 4 TiB (4*1024^4), or 4.4 TB of physical memory, but only 4 TB (4*1000^4) is partitioned. The rest is overprovisioned to prevent precisely the attack you described. You're not going to get it more than 90.95% full. And in practice, a lot of sectors in a file system will contain repeated bytes that the controller can easily compress out, such as runs of zeroes from the end of a file to the end of its last cluster or runs of spaces in indented source code.
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A 4TB drive would bother with compression why exactly?
To minimize how much it has to erase when moving data around during a write. This improves the benchmark of "sectors written per second" because fewer sectors have to be erased during compaction. And because most people buying this drive aren't "trying to break the media". If you're worried that an untrusted user with an account on a multi-user system could cause too many erases in too short of a time, could you make an example of your worst case using a workload that resembles a file system's write pattern
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Like someone else already said, that's what the wear levelling algorithms in the controller are for.
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Doesn't Windows use a swap file, no matter how much memory you have? That could conceivably see any amount of traffick per day.
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Well, yes and no. Yes, by default it enables a swap file. You can turn it off, given enough memory however, so that disk cache never puts pressure on the rest of the VM system, it will not use the swap file. This is true for every modern OS however, Windows, Linux or *BSD, all of which favor larger disk cache instead of keeping unused blocks in memory.
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Actually, it's likely to be written... very occasionally. It's likely that when the OS has time to do something other than what you asked it to do, it'll start writing out dirty memory to swap, just because that means that if you do need to swap at a later date, you don't need to page out.
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Yes it does, so that it can page things out before it needs to page things in. But no, that's not really a conceivable write rate. The average home user (even with windows' swap file involved) will be closer to 5GB a day, even developers, hammering a workstation will only be around 20GB a day in the worst case.
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LOL, does that still exist?
Guess not. Ended after Windows 98. I remember using it fondly, though my dad got upset when I told him I turned it on.
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I thought I remembered that on XP. Just checked, that checkbox exists on Windows 7 as well.
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No, that's NTFS compression. Doublespace, Drivespace, Stacker and such worked at the drive level
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Now you can pay $4000 for a drive that won't last 2 years! Yeah.. sign me up.
Huh? What are you blathering on about, AC? From TFA:
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Easy there pardner. You can type "sandisk optimus max" into google and up comes an ad selling a Sandisk Optimus Eco 1.6 TB for $3,417.25.
So while it's true AFAIK you can't find pricing info on the Optimus Max, you can make book that it's gonna be on the high side of that figure. IMHO $4000 is a low estimate.
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.
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Let me guess ... you bought OCZ drives because they were cheap, and even though they kept failing, you kept buying more OCZ drives, and they failed too?
It's a common story. What I don't understand is, why *anyone* buys an OCZ drive after the first one fails.
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Buying an SSD only from Sandisk, Samsung, or Intel is a no-brainer. These are the companies that actually make flash chips..
OCZ and the various re-branders begin at a competitive disadvantage and then make things worse in their endless effort to undercut each other.
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I don't know why you got modded down for pointing out that OCZ drives are utter trash, they've consistently outranked all of their competitors combined in number of returns since they came out. They were recently sold to another brand, but the damage to the brand has already been done. It's been known for years that OCZ = ticking time bomb. Nobody has complaints about quality drives like Intel and Samsung.
Both small sample sizes, (Score:2)
and there's workload and on hours and all of that stuff to consider, too. So of course it's not scientific by any stretch of the imagination.
But we've been very happy with our Intel SSDs and will continue to buy them.
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I've had 4 (of 15) mechanical drives fail in my small business over the last two years
Let me guess... Seagate? Let me
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Mix. (Score:2)
Two Seagate 2TB, upon which we switched loyalties, then two WD Green 2TB.
The Seagates both hand spindle/motor problems of some kind—they didn't come back up one day after a shutdown for a hardware upgrade. The WD Green 2TB both developed data integrity issues while spinning and ultimately suffered SMART-reported failures and lost data (we had backups). One was still partially readable, the other couldn't be mounted at all.
Is there some kind of curse surrounding 2TB drives?
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Think of all the molecules being twisted around in spinny disk drives.
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Now you can pay $4000 for a drive that won't last 2 years! Yeah.. sign me up.
With capacity like this they could put in a RAID0 option which halves the capacity but increases the reliability by orders of magnitude. If corruption is detected you can grab the shadow copy, remap it somewhere else, mark the block as bad. The chances of two blocks failing at the exact same time is insignificant.
arrgh (Score:2)
ssd vendors should be rushing to get nvme out the door, rather than wasting time on capacity. flash does not and simply never will scale the same way capacity in recording media (including that mounted in spinning disks) does...
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and what happens when someone figures out how to make flash memory with infinite writes?
If someone can figure out how to jump a charge across the insulating layer without damaging it, flash memory will never wear out.
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Limited lifespan [wikipedia.org] is good for the Powers That Be, so even if such a technology exists, it's not for consumers like you. Your role is to run the economic Red Queen's Race [wikipedia.org] in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to keep your position in the hierarchy, all for the glory of the 1% and their masters.
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Easy. Each edit makes a copy of the video file.
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Finally the disk drive can die (Score:4, Insightful)
It is so archaic in this day and age of microization to have something mechanic bottlenecking the whole computer. It just doesn't mix in the 21st century.
For those who have used them will agree with me. It is like light and day and there is no way in hell you could pay me to do things like run several domain VM's on a mid 20th century spinning mechanical disk. No more 15 minute waits to start up and shutdown all 7 vms at the same time.
Not even a 100 disk array can match the IOPS (interrupts and operations per second) that a single ssd can provide. If the price goes down in 5 years from now only walmart specials will have any mechanical disk.
Like tape drive and paper punch cards I am sure it will live someone in a storage oriented server IDF closet or something. But for real work it is SSD all the way.
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IOPS stands for IO operations per seconds. Interrupts has nothing to do with it.
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I just bought a Samsung 840 Evo 250 GB drive for like $150. I believe that the 500 GB was under $300.
That is eminently affordable.
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Looking at Frys.com, I see 256GB SSD at $150. But at the same price, one can buy a 3 TB hard disk.
Hopefully these new SSDs will put more price pressure on the bottom. It was several years before answering machines switched from tape to SSD, too, for a lot of the same kinds of reasons. Don't judge me.
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Well if you really need 3 TB, then yeah, you have a hard choice to make.
The vast majority of people should, I believe, do just fine in 250 GB or less. I know I certainly can, and am more than happy to trade 2.5 TB of space I will never use for a drive that actually makes my computer fast instead of tying me to data storage speeds of the 1980s ...
Of course, the vast majority of people aren't even buying PCs anymore, they're just buying phones and pads with flash storage already built in.
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I still have a mechanical disk. It is for most of my programs and my profiles are stored there as I do not need acceleration to open a .docx file.
But with these coming out in 5 years it will be affordable to leave mechanical behind for just storage like tape archives are today.
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I have a lot photos, documents, and on/near-line backups. Over 15 years worth (and for this crowd, the surprising thing is that it isn't porn). Every few years I rebuild my server with a new RAID, and I buy based on the $99 range. A 6 disk RAID gives me a lot more capacity than with SSD right now. And I have a physical external backup disk.
You could say my setup is paranoid, but I've had so many disk failures, RAID failures (software/OS/filesystem), and backup failures, it's not even funny. And then there w
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I have a lot photos, documents, and on/near-line backups
You mean illegally downloaded movies and TV shows?
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Same boat - though I do have an SSD I use for the OS, and I rsync it daily to the RAID (not so much because I think SSD is any less reliable than a hard drive, but because I only have one SSD and I don't want to be stuck doing a full reinstall/reconfig/restore due to the loss of any single drive).
SSDs are really only a complete HD replacement if you don't do anything that involves video/multimedia, which generally includes gaming (unless you don't mind uninstalling/reinstalling games all the time). They st
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No, just no. Nothing hard about it. Takes me about one second to pick the 3 TB hard drive over twelve 250 GB SSDs at 16 times the price.
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Pretty much. Unless you are a niche users doing video editing or something, just buy a spinning disk about 4+ times larger than you need and effectively short-stroke it. I'm doing just this on this machine I am currently using with a 2TB disk, using about 300 GB. It is reasonably snappy. It's not SSD fast, but it is plenty fast enough for general use, was about a hundred bucks.
And I don't waste my time shuffling data around constantly due to lack of space on my SSD. SSD caching I can see being a ben
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250GB would be about good enough for a nice, somewhat sorted out music collection - not stored in MP3 128K.
That doesn't leave room for junk/unsorted/low quality music files while you built it up, nor room for a pig OS, linux isos, and whatever other kinds of data. And then you still need a hard drive to back things up.
So if presented that choice I'll gladly pick the 3TB drive. Too bad if I have to wait a couple more seconds for the music player, the web browser etc. to launch. It's worth losing that speed,
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Dude, if you have a 250 GB music collection you are in the like 1% of the 1% of computer users. Seriously. And virtual machine images? That's like 1% of the 1% of the 1% ...
The vast majority of people are not ripping CDs to losslessly compressed files on their computers and/or ripping off artists by pirating music and movies.
I stand by my claim that the majority of users would do just fine with 250 GB.
You may not be in that majority, and so for you, yeah, you're just going to have to continue to live wit
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Well if you really need 3 TB, then yeah, you have a hard choice to make..
Why make a choice? Just get both. SSD for the OS, HDD for storage. A good balance of cost and performance.
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I work all day long, on large projects, and manage just fine at work with 480 GB of SSD storage. My work is as a software developer with 6 - 8 40 GB source/build trees checked out at any one time.
So I for one don't run multi-disk systems. The headache of having to think about whether or not I should store something on 'fast' storage vs 'cheap bulk' storage is just not something I ever want to think about. I want it all fast, all the time.
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Agreed. When my work put SSD's in the developer machines, build times went from 40 minutes to 6 minutes.
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So what? I picked up a 3 TB hard drive for $110. You're paying 16 times as much per GB for the SSD. They are still pie in the sky for serious storage.
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I just bought a Samsung 840 Evo 250 GB drive for like $150. I believe that the 500 GB was under $300.
That is eminently affordable.
$300 for 500GB of SSD vs $100 for a few TB of hard drive. You're talking about a factor of 10 difference.
For a PC that doesn't need to store multimedia SSDs are both practical and to be recommended. For PCs that actually need to store any volume of data, they won't be practical for a LONG time as far as I can see. Sure, the price will drop, but the price of hard drives also drops.
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No one uses SSDs in servers? You have no clue. None.
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Re: Finally the disk drive can die (Score:2)
Word.
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No it's not.
http://soylentnews.org/article... [soylentnews.org]
Re: Finally the disk drive can die (Score:2)
I think the comparison was about functional use, not storage capacity per se. 15 years ago we worked on a hard disk and backed up to a tape. Now we work on an SSD and back up to hdd (at least i do).
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There isn't much difference between "light" and day, is there?
Apparently you haven't been to Finland.
Time to Fill... (Score:2)
How fast can data be pumped through the controller interface?
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On my single SATA3 Samsung pro with rapid mode I get about 600 megs a second.
But that is nto the real speed bump. My 270 meg a second Sansdisk doesn't boot Windows any faster?! Why? It is about latency and IOPS interrupt and operations per second. I can do heavy heavy simultaneous things like run 5 virtual machines for my domain in my virtual network with VMware workstation in about 1.5 minutes. This took almost 20 minutes to start and shutdown before!
A 100 meg disk raid will not be as fast as single drive
The utility of SSDs (Score:2)
In my laptop, I have an SSD. Upgrading the HDD cost about as much as a new laptop and cost significantly less. I've been able to buy 2+ years of time on my old laptop with an upgrade at significantly less cost.
So the numbers make sense, here!
We host a heavily database-driven app. Use of an SSD reduces latency by at *least* 95% in our testing. It's a no-brainer. Even if we replaced the SSDs every single year, we'd still come out way ahead. SSDs are where it's at for perfromance!
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For a single user doing "stuff" though, a short-stroked hard drive is about 1/4 the price and well fast enough. And yes, i had a work machine (laptop) with SSD that i ditched and went back to a momentus XT hybrid due to lack of capacity.
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For a single user doing "stuff" though, a short-stroked hard drive is about 1/4 the price and well fast enough. And yes, i had a work machine (laptop) with SSD that i ditched and went back to a momentus XT hybrid due to lack of capacity.
You keep saying that, but that doesn't make it magically true.
So you had a laptop with an SSD too small for your working set and that makes SSDs bad? No. It makes you or whoever provisioned the machine incompetent. More likely you were using your work machine for shit you shouldn't have, so you were all pissy that your working set was larger than your storage space.
I'd be willing to be a months pay that my 2009 macbook pro with SSD will out perform whatever brand new laptop you want to buy with spinning
dwarfing? Not quite yet! (Score:3, Informative)
Now if SanDisk can deliver 16TB SSDs in 2016 then they might be indeed ahead of the hard-disks but not in 2015.
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.
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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.
I doubt anybody really wants these big SSDs anyway. I mean, who buys an SSD when they need to store 1TB of data? I could see it for certain niches, such as for a cache (even an SSD is cheaper than RAM, and is of course persistent as well). Otherwise anybody storing a lot of data uses an SSD for the OS, and an HD for storage, and you don't need a big SSD for the OS. Still, I wouldn't mind a 3.5" drive just for the sake of it using the same mount as my other drives.
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In my work case the need for the larger drive is that you only have one drive, not the option for two. so when your traveling you need to take a lot with you and you want it to be fast. so larger ssd's are welcome as long as the price remains in the range of sanity
Re:Where are the 3.5" SSDs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Where are the 3.5" SSDs? (Score:5, Informative)
there are a few reasons they don't make 3.5's
1: physical size isn't an issue, for the sizes they release that people are willing to pay for it all fits nicely in 2.5
2: 2.5's work in more devices, including in desktops where 3.5's live. if noting is forcing the 3.5 usage then it would be bad for them to artificially handicap them selves.
now for your commend on larger physical drives being cheaper. Flash does not work the way that normal dries to.
Normal platter drives the areal density directly impacts pricing as it drives the platter surface to be smoother, the film to be more evenly distributed, the head to be more sensitive, the accurater to be more precise, all things that cause higher precision that drive up costs as it increases failure rates and manufacturing defects causing product failure.
Now in the flash world. they use the same silicon lithography that they use for making all other chips. there are two costs involved here.
1: the one time sunk cost of the lithography tech (22nm, 19nm, 14nm...) This cost is spread across everything that goes though it. And in reality evens out to no cost increase for the final product because the more you spend the smaller the feature the more end product you can get out per raw product put in.
2: the cost of the raw material in. It does not matter what level of lithography you are using the raw material is nearly exactly the same (some require doping but costs are on par with each other). So in fact your larger lithographic methods become more expensive to produce product once there is newer tech on the market.
No please note that in the CPU world where you have complex logic sets and designs there is an added cost for the newer lithography as it adds to the design costs. but for flash sets there is nearly zero impact form this as it is such a simple circuit design.
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My friend has terabytes of it, no lie. He just has it downloading from file sharing software in the background 24/7. Doesn't even watch most of it. Just has it "just in case he gets horny and has no internet"
For those eventualities, I recommend he tries an alternative device called a "girlfriend".
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Yeah, but the maintenance requirements are very high, the MTBF is unacceptable, and they can say "no."