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Seagate Reveals 'World's Largest' 60TB SSD (zdnet.com) 162

Posted by BeauHD from the world-record dept.
An anonymous reader writes: While Samsung has the world's largest commercially available SSD coming in at 15.36TB, Seagate officially has the world's largest SSD for the enterprise. ZDNet reports: "[While Samsung's PM1633a has a 2.5-inch form factor,] Seagate's 60TB Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSD on the other hand opts for the familiar HDD 3.5-inch form factor. The company says that its drive has "twice the density and four times the capacity" of Samsung's PM1633a, and is capable of holding up to 400 million photos or 12,000 movies. Seagate thinks the 3.5-inch form factor will be useful for managing changing storage requirements in data centers since it removes the need to support separate form factors for hot and cold data. The company says it could also scale up capacity to 100TB in the same form factor. Seagate says the 60TB SSD is currently only a 'demonstration technology' though it could release the product commercially as early as next year. It hasn't revealed the price of the unit but says it will offer 'the lowest cost per gigabyte for flash available today.'"
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Seagate Reveals 'World's Largest' 60TB SSD More

Seagate Reveals 'World's Largest' 60TB SSD

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  • Oh great, now you have a 60TB drive that will fail taking everything with it and because of the size making backups very costly to boot.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If you can't afford the baskets, stop collecting the eggs.

    • Re:Oh great (Score:5, Informative)

      by Archangel Michael ( 180766 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2016 @03:59PM (#52679987) Journal

      That didn't take long. Toshiba announced a 100TB drive (different type) SSD today.

      http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... [theregister.co.uk]

      The end of spindle drives is nigh

      • That is why Avago Technologies buyed PEX so they can start pushing pci-e based storage back planes

      • Re:Oh great (Score:5, Informative)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot@worf.ERDOSnet minus math_god> on Wednesday August 10, 2016 @04:46PM (#52680303)

        The end of spindle drives is nigh

        Is it, really?

        I mean, 100TB of spinning rust storage is probably around $3000 or so. 60TB is probably around $2000-ish.

        If Seagate and Toshiba are selling SSDs for those prices, then yes, spindle's are dead. But if we're talking about 5 figures or more, then spinning rust has a long life ahead of it.

        SSDs are great for plenty of tasks, and the largest ones on the market offer plenty of storage for most users.

        However, there are plenty of tasks that demand bulk storage (e.g., media storage, backups, etc) over sheer IOPs or throughput, and demand cheap bulk storage, at that. Spinning rust fulfills that need wonderfully (and there's plenty of demand for it, as well - I'm sure most people have at least a need to have some big bulk storage around to store their media).

        • The cost of rotational storage is more than just the drives - they need a chassis, HBA, backplane, cooling, power etc.

        • IF all you are concerned about is storage capacity, you're probably right. But there are other things to consider, such as IOPs, Energy Costs (spinning, heat/cooling etc) and MTBF rates. Actual VALUE is in SSDs, all things being equal. But if all you look at is Cost / TB, you're right ... for now. My suggestion is that is going to change, very rapidly in the next few years.

          You are already seeing Drive Denisities exceeding Spindle drives. You're gonna need eight 8TB spindle drives to match one 60TB SSD. More

      • Competing with hard drives is more than just matching their capacity. You have to come close to their $/TB too. The speed of SSDs make it attractive to replace HDDs for some data sets (boot drive, frequently accessed data, etc.). But if you are storing off-line data that is only accessed once a year, then even 2x the price is way too much. Flash has come down a lot, but it is still something like 8x the price of HDD space. Get back to us when a 1 TB SSD can be bought for $50.
        • I think capacity per disk is starting to become a bit of a factor, too. For some people (read: large companies), It might be worth spending double the price per TB of storage if it also means you need half as many servers to hold the disks. The savings in hardware costs, rack space, and electricity will make up for some of the additional cost for the hard drives.

          I've made the decision a couple times to buy 8 TB hard drives, even if they weren't the best price per TB, because it allows for the highest pos
          • That's part of the reason I use external USB 3.0 HDDs.

          • half as many servers to hold the disks with half of the redundancy.

            Now this is cool still need mon servers

            http://ceph.com/community/500-... [ceph.com]

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Bongo ( 13261 )

            As a mere mortal, I often wonder how many TB per square metre they do in a data centre. Any rough ideas? I dunno what to subtract for all the extra components.

            • I can do some very approximate math for you.

              If you have 42U racks that take up 1 m^2 each (they're about 2x4') and use 4U servers with 36 disk bays (which is the last one I got), you get 360 hard disks per m^2. If you use 8 TB disks, you'd get about 2.8 PB per m^2.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        The end of spindle drives is nigh

        Perhaps if size and price was related like with HDDs... checking my local pricewatch the cheapest $/GB is a 480GB drive leading by a hair over similar 240GB and 960GB models. Above that 2TB/4TB models actually cost marginally more/GB, probably because of less volume. When you can put 1TB in an M.2 format it's obvious you can go a lot bigger with 2.5" or 3.5" disks. Heck, make a 5.25" SSD for the DVD player bay and you'd probably be approaching the petabyte but it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars

    • If you can afford one, you can afford two.

    • Oh great, now you have a 60TB drive that will fail taking everything with it and because of the size making backups very costly to boot.

      Why does it cost more to backup 60 TB of data from a single SSD than it does to backup 60 TB of data from a dozen HDDs?

    • You do realise that SSD reliability increases linearly with capacity, right? Barring manufacturing/design defects (which can affect all products equally), this thing will be far more reliable than any HDD has ever been. A typical life span for TLC SSDs (the very worst kind in terms of reliability) is 2.25kB of write per B of storage. That means that the 60TB model will survive about 135PB of writes before it starts to fail, and the 100TB one will do about 225PB of writing.

      So yeh, the 60TB model will sust

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        That isn't right.

        One failure mode, unrelocatable sector errors goes down with capacity. Other failure modes like bad solder bonds, short circuits, etc. go up with number of chips and bonds in the system.

        Since these two curves have different gamma and slope, they have to intersect at some point, where increasing capacity decreases reliability.

        I would rather have 12x 6TB SSDs than 1x 60TB SSD. Aside from a single SAS channel not being at all fast enough for a 60TB disk, an RAIM array of SSDs is much more surv

    • Oh great, now you have a 60TB drive that will fail taking everything with it and because of the size making backups very costly to boot.

      The lengths some people go just to post some asinine negative shit. People that can afford these things can typically afford redundancy. These things aren't for stashing your pr0n.

  • woohoo (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    hurray more porn!

  • I'll buy 4 of these for $99 each on black Friday 2021 and put them in a RAID.

    • That's still not going to handle my porn, or more specifically, just the midget tranny porn part of my collection.

    • By then we will all be subscribed to MicroAppleBook on our augmented reality glasses, and refinancing our monthly payments so we can still get 16K streaming video. Personal storage will be banned by the Affordable Cloud Care Act.

  • Where is the pci-e based one? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2016 @03:58PM (#52679975)

    Where is the pci-e based one?

  • Stray neutrons flipping bits (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    More storage density meaning stray neutrons from space (and yes, that's a real 'thing'!!!) could flip a load of bits in one go!

    It'll be interesting on how the long term storage/reliability holds up over time. If you don't continually check those CRC's (guessing in idle time) then you'll never know they've been flipped to correct them.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_error (stuff relevant to this kind of thing)

    • An unbound neutron is unstable, and decays to an electron and proton (ie - a hydrogen atom) with a half-life of about 15 minutes. Unbound protons, on the other hand, are stable, and are just a hydrogen ion. When they hit the atmosphere at relativistic speeds, they unleash a chain of ionization events among air molecules, which then radiate hard gamma rays, which cause more, but less energetic ionization events, which eventually results in X-rays reaching the surface.

  • Number of whatnows? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Chmarr ( 18662 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2016 @04:00PM (#52679991)

    Why would a tech site such as slashdot ever, EVER, bother with metrics such as "number of photos" or "number of movies". We know how big a Terabyte is. We don't need it spelled out in such mundane, and ambigous terms such as "number of photos".

    • Re:Number of whatnows? (Score:5, Funny)

      by npslider ( 4555045 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2016 @04:32PM (#52680201)

      One reason: New Slashdot users

      They don't make em like they used to.

      My computer has 1.21 Gigaflops of processing power, it's as fast as a lightning bolt!

    • Why would a tech site such as slashdot ever, EVER, bother with metrics such as "number of photos" or "number of movies".

      Because it's an interesting frame of reference for the math nerds.
      60TB for 12000 movies? That's 5GB per movie. Shit I remember when movies fitted on one or two CDs.
      But for some reason the opposite has happened with the photos. 400million photos in 60TB? That's only 150kb per photo.

      So for some reason our fixed size blue-ray rips have ballooned in size despite an increase in compression ratio and quality, but where we actually have had an increase in camera file size (megapixels) the file sizes appear to have

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Malc ( 1751 )

        I was chuckling at these bullshit marketing numbers too. Perhaps Seagate are unwittingly admitting that they use technology from ca. year 2000? My phone's shitty pictures are 3-5MB normally, and my DSLR's RAWs are another order of magnitude larger. I wonder what crap they're using that creates 150KB photos? As for the movies, this sounds like a DVD rip using MPEG-2 rather than a modern AVC or HEVC encoder, which can give good movie quality at 1.5GB.

    • Why would a tech site such as slashdot ever, EVER, bother with metrics such as "number of photos" or "number of movies". We know how big a Terabyte is. We don't need it spelled out in such mundane, and ambigous terms such as "number of photos".

      Because my only use for such massive storage is for storage of shows, either directly in my Tivo, or offloaded... So a rough estimate in hours of HD storage (since obviously it does vary depending on bitrate) is a useful comparison... otherwise I'm doing to be doing

    • You have a 5 digit id, so I can't ask if you're new here, but really, you should know that Slashdot measures things in libraries of congress, or perhaps swimming pools.

  • Given their reputation, I expect that about a week after I've loaded it full of irreplaceable data (and not-backed-up), it will inexplicably start making clicking noises, and all of my data will be corrupted when read... to die an ignoble death 2 days later with a "pop" and a loud, winding-down whine.

    • ...winding-down whine.

      Quite a feat, considering this is an SSD. Although, as an anecdote, I agree seagate hard drives with those spinning disks lost any reliability years ago.

      • While my post was made (somewhat) in jest, I have heard such a whine from a solid state component (not an SSD, thankfully). Capacitors can be notoriously bad in a number of noisy ways, and typically the point of failure.

    • You have to appreciate the thoroughness of the engineering, to incorporate the electronics necessary to simulate the sounds of mechanical failure in a solid-state, no-moving-parts storage system.

      The only improvement would be including a pyro squib and a small smoke source for the complete effect.

      • Maybe it is like those electric cars that piped the sound of a ICE engine through speakers so that bicyclists could hear you coming.

  • The cost of being too lazy to back up just went 'way, 'way up.

    • No need to worry.

      The NSA has it all backed up.

      • No need to worry.

        The NSA has it all backed up.

        The problem then becomes restoring your backups.

        • Recovering data from the NSA is only slightly easier than finding Elvis with Amelia Earhart in the center of a black hole, in her plane.

      • ROFL! It would be a pain in the ass, though, having to file a Freedom of Information request just to get your own pron back.

        • Even more painful will be the discovery that all the interesting bits have been redacted.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cdrudge ( 68377 )

            How do you tell the difference between interesting bits being redacted, and the interesting bits being censored?

  • So, anyone know how many Library's of Congress a beowulf cluster of these would hold for our newly welcomed Solid State Overlords?

  • Lowest price per gigabyte? When you are talking about 60-100TB drives we are now looking at the cost per TB. And we know there are initial setup costs to manufacture but at the end of the day these are still devices made of the cheapest and most plentiful materials on earth and essentially photoreplicated. Sure start it at $10 grand for the suckers like the 2.5 for 6 months but then drop this sucker down to a sane price for the next year for enterprise sales at maybe $400 with a 5 year warranty and to early

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      IO is still the major bottleneck at this point for most workloads. Your SSD's will only go 'so fast' and your interconnects (Gigabit? 10GbE if you're lucky?) are usually what you'll end up filling. SSD's aren't going much faster than they did a few years ago, they sure have a bag of tricks to make it seem that way (computers capable of running BusyBox with 512MB-2GB of DRAM on their SSD chips). They have made some improvements (with huge drawbacks) in the latency of the fabric (NVMe) but it mainly improves

  • sooo...there are _smaller_ 60TB drives then? (Score:5, Funny)

    by 4wdloop ( 1031398 ) on Wednesday August 10, 2016 @06:00PM (#52680697)

    I know...I could not help myself.

  • ... and wait 'till it costs 30 Euros in the bargain bin.


  • A drive large enough to hold all my porn in the palm of my hand!

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