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Data Storage Hardware

Samsung Starts Mass Producing an SSD With Monstrous 30.72TB Capacity (betanews.com) 158

Posted by msmash from the enough-space dept.
Brian Fagioli, writing for BetaNews: Samsung says it is mass producing a solid state drive with monstrous capacity. The "PM1643," as it is called, offers an insane 30.72TB of storage space! This is achieved by using 32 x 1TB NAND flash. "Samsung reached the new capacity and performance enhancements through several technology progressions in the design of its controller, DRAM packaging and associated software. Included in these advancements is a highly efficient controller architecture that integrates nine controllers from the previous high-capacity SSD lineup into a single package, enabling a greater amount of space within the SSD to be used for storage. The PM1643 drive also applies Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology to interconnect 8Gb DDR4 chips, creating 10 4GB TSV DRAM packages, totaling 40GB of DRAM. This marks the first time that TSV-applied DRAM has been used in an SSD," says Samsung.
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Samsung Starts Mass Producing an SSD With Monstrous 30.72TB Capacity More

Samsung Starts Mass Producing an SSD With Monstrous 30.72TB Capacity

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  • Price? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    And how much will this thing cost?

    Yeah, that's what I thought.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sigma 7 ( 266129 )

      And how much will this thing cost?

      It's hard to find prices for these devices, almost as if there's some secondary market where prices are negotiated without being displayed publicly. But from what I can tell, it's seems to be sent towards enterprise-tier, thus you'd have to be a big company just to get one.

      If existing prices are a good way to calculate price of the 30TB whopper, it's likely to cost $14250 each (using $/TB from a Samsung MZ-76P4T0BW). Currently cheaper to get a three pack of spinning 12TB d

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by EvilSS ( 557649 )

        Currently cheaper to get a three pack of spinning 12TB drives (totalling $1350).

        No one is really buying SSD in the enterprise based on it's price vs HDD.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          No, but a lot of folks in enterprise will not by it based on its price compared with spinning rust. You can afford to spend a lot of time structuring your databases and similar so that frequently accessed data stays warm in a cache and still come out cheaper than the price of moving all your company's data to SSDs.

          • You can afford to spend a lot of time structuring your databases ...

            The extrapolated cost of this 30TB drive is less than the burdened monthly cost of a single engineer. Furthermore, if disk I/O is your bottleneck, then moving your DB from HDD to SDD is likely to give you far more speedup than fiddling with your schema.

            • Re:Price? (Score:5, Informative)

              by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2018 @05:38PM (#56159684) Homepage Journal

              The extrapolated cost of this 30TB drive is less than the burdened monthly cost of a single engineer.

              And if your company is small enough that a single 30 TB SSD is enough to meet your entire storage needs, then you probably aren't big enough to be so desperate for speed that you would buy a 30 TB SSD. I'm expecting most of these will be used for the most frequently accessed data for companies that are Google-scale, not companies whose total data capacity needs are rivaled only by my home RAID array. :-)

              Furthermore, if disk I/O is your bottleneck, then moving your DB from HDD to SDD is likely to give you far more speedup than fiddling with your schema.

              But "fiddling with your schema" so that tables that get hit frequently are indexed on SSDs or DRAM drives (and, if necessary, stored in their entirety on those drives) means you get most of the speed win without the expense of storing your *entire* data collection on an SSD. The more you can separate out the frequently accessed data from the rarely accessed data, the easier it is to keep your costs sane. And the bigger your total storage needs, the more that design decision matters.

              • Re: (Score:3)

                by Kjella ( 173770 )

                And if your company is small enough that a single 30 TB SSD is enough to meet your entire storage needs, then you probably aren't big enough to be so desperate for speed that you would buy a 30 TB SSD. I'm expecting most of these will be used for the most frequently accessed data for companies that are Google-scale, not companies whose total data capacity needs are rivaled only by my home RAID array. :-)

                I suppose it's what you do. To a video production company 30TB is nothing. For random document storage it's quite a bit. For a database/source code repository it's pretty huge. We have quite a bit of database data that we need to keep around for archive purposes that are almost never used again, but in the end the relative savings of HDD vs SSD in a relatively expensive storage unit that still needs backups etc. and the resources to partitioning and archive things it didn't add up so we're all SSD now. It's

          • Re:Price? (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Nostalgia4Infinity ( 3752305 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2018 @05:29PM (#56159614)

            In my experience running IT for a large department the cost saved in not having to replace drives, and worse, restore data is worth the cost of SSDs, probably just in labor costs but also the additional peace of mind.

            Also:
            "For most corporate workloads, the acquisition cost of flash storage is still significantly greater than for HDD storage. However, when operating costs are factored in, the TCO for SSDs may actually already be lower than for equivalent HDD arrays. Use of SSDs reduces data center costs for power, cooling, floor space, rack space, and maintenance. And as SSD purchase prices continue to fall, the TCO disparity can only grow greater over time."

            https://www.zadarastorage.com/... [zadarastorage.com]

          • A day of a competent DBA costs about $1000.
            You want to tell me a competent DBA will outperform on an HDD a less dompetent one on an SSD?
            Dream on ...

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by dgatwood ( 11270 )

              No, what I mean is that a good DBA can make the difference between needing to store everything on an SSD and needing only to store indices and frequently accessed data, and the rest of the performance problems can be handled with sharding for a lot less than the cost of storing everything on an SSD.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by EvilSS ( 557649 )
            Like I said: No one is really buying SSD in the enterprise based on it's price vs HDD. You won't save Capex buying the same size array going SSD vs HDD. However, the price for SSD storage is at the point that the advantages (performance, density, and reliability*) outweigh the price difference. You can get enterprise SSD solutions for under $0.30/gb from multiple vendors. At some point it's cheaper to go SSD than to invest in "spending a lot of time" trying to make it faster on HDD. I'd say probably close

        • Currently cheaper to get a three pack of spinning 12TB drives (totalling $1350).

          No one is really buying SSD in the enterprise based on it's price vs HDD.

          Sure, but it's a factor for the non Galaxy class Federation Starships.

    • > And how much will this thing cost?

      Wrong question.

      How many simultaneous pr0n streams can it sustain?

    • Bring it down to $300 and I'll buy one.

      I mean SSDs been available for ~10-26 years now, depending on how you define "available", you'd think they'd have figured out how to get the $/GB below that of HDDs long ago but it's maybe 6-12 months away before hitting that milestone, let alone advancing to the $/TB milestone.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by EvilSS ( 557649 )
        At this point it's really demand that's keeping the cost up. Between NAND and RAM, the fabs are all running full tilt and the memory cartel of Samsung, Micron, and Hynix doesn't seem all that interested in opening up new capacity. It's still a ways to go before it can hope to match HDD in price per GB, but it's not purely a technical hurdle anymore. I think you will see HDD demand start dropping in the coming year, and eventually that will push HDD prices up. I suspect in another decade or so SSD and HDD pr

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by EvilSS ( 557649 )
          ugh, that should read " I think you will see HDD demand start dropping in the coming years"

      • I bought my first flash SSD in 1994 (I think, maybe 1995). It was for my Psion Series 3, had a capacity of 128KB, and cost £30. It was a single cell, so you could write to it but not erase without erasing the entire disk, so you needed to do a backup and restore to replace all of the data. At about that time, a 1GB hard disk cost around £100-150 (I don't remember exactly what, but I remember being amazed when the price dropped to under 10p/MB a little bit later). Let's say £120, for t

        • If you graph the history of HDDs over the years there haven't been any significant advancements since 2011. We're basically at the 10nm theoretical limit right now (12TB). ODS showed promise for Petabyte storage but hasn't materialized commercially, despite being around since 2009. At this point it seems like profiteering is taking over from rapid advancement.

  • Because it is intended for the enterprise and uses the Serial Attached SCSI interface, it is unlikely that it will be sold in any consumer retail channels.

    But soon...

    • why not pci-e?

      • For one it's probably intended for cloud storage services so they intend to hook a LOT of them up to one storage cluster which generally uses SCSI.
        Secondarily, faster transfers means more heat and they may be forcing the SCSI interfaces to "throttle" the transfers and keep the thermal issues manageable.
        I was surprised how easily thermal issues could pop up on just a 512gb M2 stick.

    • SAS/SCSI needs to go away.

      I'm sick of "enterprise" gear being a shitty HBA to a shared storage device that slows you down (both speed and latency from the HBA, and the latency and shared aspect part of the storage device).

      The world has spoken - NVMe PCIe flash isn't just the way of the future, it's the way of today.
      But for servers I want it in a hot swap drive bay, and I need it to be redundant. There are only a handful of RAID controllers out there that will support such a thing. (And as far as I know, y

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by swb ( 14022 )

        I'm not sure the HBA is really the problem. I mean, you want I/O offload to some other CPU for RAID and logical disk management and some kind of physical disk channel multiplexing.

        There's no reason these things are inherently slow unless you're buying low end stuff. Obviously you'll get better raw I/O with direct NVMe off the PCIe bus to the CPU, but as soon as you get into RAID it gets more complicated. Either you use software RAID at the OS level or you have to add a RAID controller to your PCIe bus.

        • The HBA itself isn't a problem. No individual piece of such a setup is. But the cost of the HBA and cables, dealing with cable routing in the rack, handling risers and chassis slot compatibility, etc. only to then have to deal with an external box (perhaps 2 for redundancy) that gives you less performance than you could get with direct attached storage is overall shitty.

          If an HBA has its own PCIe bus, so can a RAID controller. There's no fundamental advantage there. The thing about software RAID is that

          • ceph and HBA in IT mode works and easy to move disks if an server dies (also your storage will stay up if an full server goes down)

            Yes do that os update needs an reboot live.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by swb ( 14022 )

            I'm not arguing against RAID, just that if you really want it RAID HBAs have a lot of appeal.

            Disk densities and shared storage have kind of nuked the external storage shelf market, which I agree was kind nuisance prone with its many cables and connectors.

            The one good thing external cabinets had going for them was some portability between attached hosts. I have had situations where a host died and I had the ability to move the storage to another host's HBA RAID controller and pretty easily get the data acti

            • Yeah, I've been looking at vSAN, but it costs extra (of course, it's VMware, everything costs extra) and has some odd requirements.

              AMD and Intel both have on-CPU RAID, and I'd love for Epyc and ESXi to get on this shit. With SSDs and redundant PSUs fed by redundant PDUs backed by UPS and generator power, I don't think I care about a RAID card's battery/supercap. Just let me use some fucking NVMe SSDs in a redundant, hot-swappable fashion. We already have all the pieces we need, but for some reason vendor

      • AMD EPYC is for you PCI-E no switches needed.

  • That 0.02 TB made the difference. (Score:4, Funny)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2018 @03:40PM (#56158854) Journal
    Originally I thought the capacity was 30.7 TB. I was like, meh! not impressed.

    Then I looked at the fourth significant digit. it is 2. Yes, it is actually 30.72 TB. That 651 parts per million more than my what I originally thought. Now I am all ears, looking at it carefully, camping outside Alibaba container terminal to be the first one on the block to get it.

    Very well done Dear Headline Writer, always provide very precise information. Next time, why stop with the fourth significant digit? You could be even more amazingly accurate and provide six, seven... why not go all the way to 11 significant digits! Most people have just 10 digits, so go for 11, that is a good number hard to beat.

    • Re:That 0.02 TB made the difference. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Jason Levine ( 196982 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2018 @03:46PM (#56158918) Homepage

      They claim it's 30.72GB but all you really get is 30.1415926535GB of space.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That's 20GB you are making fun of. We used to dream of drives with a fraction of that capacity. (Uphill both ways, etc.)

    • 1.21 GIGAWATTS?!
    • What? Flamebait? Who am I baiting to flame? The Headline Writer?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JD-1027 ( 726234 )
      That 0.02 TB is 200 times the capacity of the first external hard drive I bought. I think I remember my first drive at 100 MB.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sconeu ( 64226 )

        Meh. My first hard drive was 40MB -- special order, the machine's stock drive was 20MB.

        So it's 500 times my first hard drive.

        • Luxury...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by EvilSS ( 557649 )
          MFM or RLL?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by sconeu ( 64226 )

            MFM. ST-251, instead of the stock ST-225.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by EvilSS ( 557649 )
              That was my first hard drive. Bought it used as a kid and was in hog heaven since all I had before that was dual 5.25 floppies.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by sconeu ( 64226 )

                Since I had a stand for the machine, I even had the vendor run the low-level format with the drive vertical.

                For you youngsters, back in the day, there were no tower cases, you stood a desktop case on end. In addition, you had to run a "low level format" to physically mark the sectors on the drive, as well as mark the sector interleave. If you were running the drive vertically, instead of horizontally, you got better performance when you low leveled it in the vertical orientation.

    • The "PM1643," as it is called, offers an insane 30.72TB of storage space! This is achieved by using 32 x 1TB NAND flash.

      32 x 1TB NAND flash = 32TB or 30.72TiB.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fisted ( 2295862 )

        Who (and why?) produces NAND flash chips that don't have a size in bits which is a power of two? That doesn't make sense.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      2^40 or 10^12 size terabytes?

    • You have complained that accurate information was provided. Turn in your geek card immediately or risk the consequences.

    • Wooooâ"haa!

      Why stop at 11 digits? You need to think of the neglected digits after the dot!

  • New metric (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Instead of LOC, it should be LOP (Library of Pr0n). So how many of these drive will it take to store a single LOP?

    • At 1700 MB/s the right question is: How many will it take to keep up with the current growth rate of the LOP.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Good point! At the current delta growth rate, that could far exceed the bandwidth capabilities to keep up.

      • eventually with the deepfakes type stuff, we won't need LOP's anymore, just a program to generate on the fly whatever midget+monkey+donkey fetish the mind can conjure up.

        Coupled with VR, this will spell the end of mankind -- constant, ever increasing levels of titillation and depravity.

  • Only $25,000 (Score:3)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2018 @03:54PM (#56158974) Homepage Journal
    I got a quote for these. Only $28k. Pretty good job by Samsung. The 16TB previous gen are about $11k.
    • Ooops, $28k, not $25k. But what is $3k worth anyway? I can't even get a bitcoin for that!

    • At $0.81 a Gigabyte that is still a lot. Especially being traditional drives are between $0.02 and $0.05 a Gigabyte

      I hope these disks are more reliable then a Raid-5

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by EvilSS ( 557649 )
        Why would they need to be more reliable than a RAID 5? These aren't going into anything as single drives but as part of large dedicated storage systems. Also who the heck is still doing RAID 5 at the enterprise level? What is this 2002?

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by jabuzz ( 182671 )

          Any competent storage administrators who understands about mean time to data loss (MTTDL) knows that there are still use cases even in 2018 where RAID5 makes sense. If my MTTDL is 20,000 years using a RAID5 why would I need to move to RAID6?

          Sure if I am building a files system of a few hundred TB or more made of dozens of eight disk plus parity RAID arrays then RAID5 is inadequate. The problem is ignorant people have seen/heard storage administrators who make such petabyte scale file systems talk about RAID

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by EvilSS ( 557649 )
            Pretty much every storage vendor has gone to some flavor of DP or even TP, with RAID 0 or some other proprietary scheme to span shelves. Between that and hot spares drive failures become a non-urgent issue for the customer and hardware vendor. Drive fails, the system phones home, drive and (depending on your service contract) vendor show a day or two later to swap it out. The added cost is usually not much compared to the overall cost of the system. We also see RAID 4*, mainly on smaller SSD (14 disk shelv

      • Re:Only $25,000 (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ctilsie242 ( 4841247 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2018 @05:14PM (#56159524)

        I would assert they will be used in the usual RAID 1/10/6 configurations. They are fast, but because there is so much data on them and I/O hasn't kept up, RAID 5 would likely not be used, but would be used for RAID 6. Of course, RAID 1 and RAID 10 will definitely be alternatives.

        I do wonder what the real world failure rate on these will be. From what I've seen, SSDs have definitely been more reliable than HDDs.

  • then a new station wagon I could upgrade from all those damn tapes.

  • How much is this behemouth going to cost? It cannot be cheap.

  • Beowulf cluster.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ...of computers with these? you gotta wonder.

  • RPM of drive? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Is this a slow 5200 RPM drive, or does it actually spin at 7200 RPM or even enterprise-level 15k rpm?

  • I was wondering about this (Score:3)

    by Krishnoid ( 984597 ) on Tuesday February 20, 2018 @04:28PM (#56159182) Journal

    Since Samsung was the one who engineered stackable V-NAND [anandtech.com], I suspected that they could multiply the current market's SSD capacities by the layer-count. Maybe that's not what's happening here, but it sure seems like Samsung will have the edge in increasing SSD capacities.

  • Great! I've been looking for something to store my enormous collection of monster pictures on :)

  • I'd love to see this in a Full-Height 5 1/4" form factor for my old Pentium P133 server...

  • Around three years ago, we had articles claiming that we would have 128GB SSDs by this year.

    The market went backwards when that price issue hit around near 2 years ago.

    All I'd like (and have wanted for 3 years) is a "slow crappy" SSD that's "only" say 400MB/s sustained read and write, with typical SSD access times (or no more than half as slow as current ones)
    However that being said, in the 6 to 10TB range under 500$ USD.

    Looks like it's going to be 2026 at this rate unfortunately.

  • My 320 MB SCSI Maxtor hard drive I bought in 1987 is still a live and kicking. and only half full. Oh wait that's in my Amiga 2000 - that's why it's only half full - no bloated software!

    But Mr. Gates told us "No one will ever need more than 640K." so that means you don't need a 30+TB SSD - you only need a 12 MB Corvis Hard Drive!

  • Hey guys, you know about that flash chip shortage? I found them. Here they are.

  • Is there any evidence to show that these high-capacity SSDs result in lower-priced higher capacity SSDs in the near-term future?

    Perhaps some data indicating some kind of mass storage unit became more affordable or remained the same price but increased capacity (thus lowering the cost/unit-of-storage)?

    If so, what is that evidence? The article was almost indistinguishable from a press release and didn't point to any such evidence.

  • How many pictures ... songs and HD video hours it can hold...

  • Sadly, Windows will only recognize the first 3.5 GBs....

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