Watch out, Tokyo! Samsung readies a 15 terabyte SSD Samsung has revealed what can only be described as the Godzilla of flash drives, a 15TB SSD, at the Flash Memory Summit. Samsung opened the kimono on the new drive at its keynote session Memory Technology Advances Shape a New Era in Flash Innovation on 11 August. As reported by Golem.de the PM1633a uses Sammy's third …
Yep. My 4x3GB JBOD has this fifth slot not doing anything. Already has built-in automagical tiering or can let OS do it. I'd offer to sell my soul as my body parts are of questionable utility except, given being career US sailor, well, I already know where I'm bound*. Umm, Samsung, I praise and buy your stuff alot, and it being my birthday next month....
*[... and I'll be be too damn busy shaking the hands of all the sailors and Marines to bother me much when I get there. Come to think of it, Hell's gotta be using Windows....]
Pelican cases are decent, but they have no protection (being made of some type of plastic, albeit very tough plastic) against static discharge, emp, xrays or gamma-rays. I think this would be just as important as protection against water/mechanical damage.
Maybe a new production line that Pelican can develop/offer (if they haven't already, I haven't checked in a while..)
Having traveled with many a flash drive full of work photos, i've never thought twice about hauling 2 or 3 TB of work through an airport in a Pelican case. Not once have I had a card or drive damaged by scans. I've dropped a few, sat and stepped on a couple, but x-rays and gamma rays really are the least of your concerns.
Natural evolution. Give it a couple of years, and I'll have one of those things in a laptop.
SSD beats HD in sheer speed, hands down. SSD are already capable of maxing out any standard disk interface already.
SSD are on a par with, if not now better than, HD in reliability. Firmware issues are the biggest problem and HDs never escaped that either (a few brands quite famously).
SSD are already in the same physical sizes as HD and even smaller.
SSD are already on a par, power-wise, and that will only get better.
SSD only falls behind on capacity. 1Tb is about the largest a sensible person could buy at the moment (yes, I have one).
As soon as 1TB SSDs become the norm, everyone will stop bothering with HDs at all. Hell, in my workplace, we only have a few hundred gig in the clients anyway. I could SSD them all in a year as part of rolling upgrades, no problem at all. The only block is the server side but, to be honest, there everything is either good enough already (i.e. limited by network speed before disk speed) or expensive anyway.
Roll on SSD. Why people are still even trying to make HD I find baffling.
Worth doing. We rebuilt a bunch of RM Ones a year back by gutting them and fitting new mobo, CPU, RAM and a 120GB SSD in each. Just kept the box and monitor, but did the lot for about half the cost of a full refresh - about £190 each, and not much more time to complete (maybe a day). The room went from being unbearable to usable.
I've just dropped a 1TB MX200 SSD into an old Dell laptop (unfortunately now revealed to be susceptible to the Intel CPU cockup), plus a couple of 250GBs in two Toshibas, one on AMD Turion TL60 and another on a much newer Celeron 1000M. All are much better off for the switch from spinning disks - something like 16-25 seconds to login and then another 5-10 seconds to desktop, plus noise levels near silent as the fans don't spin up that often.
Fortunately, the Micron/Crucial Storage Executive firmware upgrade tool is a joke (web application, ships with outdated version of Java) and won't run on any of them, so hopefully I'll not experience the failure by firmware update that affected the Samsung SSDs a few months back. However, just imagine having 15-16TB go west instead of something that is more easily backed up...
The access time already convinced me with an OCZ* Vertex 2 60 GB SATA II way back when. Where it really shines is anytime the pagefile is being hit by, say, exceeding RAM (thank yew Chrome!), prefetch, buffering I/O there, &c. A whole world of difference to my RAM bound Asus. The i3 dual core, hyperthreaded only comes into its own with the 256 GB SSD. I wouldn't be surprised at all if dropping one of my 60 or 160 GB SATA II's would've done the same. Something to test on the WMC when I've got it apart. Same constraint.
* [I've bought a dozen OCZ's since then, all lines, SSD and PCIe, never a problem. Anyone else's, half DOA or dead not even a year old. Weird. Excuse me.]
HDD usually give the click of death on the way out. No such warning with SSD. Of course you have working backups so none of that really matters, right?...
If I look at the area most consumers need capacity, it is videos and photo storage. Both use cases get little practical benefit from faster seek time. One more I suppose is as a backup medium. Again seek time is not a benefit. SSD has a theoretical lower minimum cost (lacks motors and spindles and magnets etc that mean that a 100MB hard drive today would not be much cheaper than the smallest capacity manufacturers still bother with. A 128MB SSD would be by contrast much cheaper. HDD is a technology with an end of life (or at least a far more niched existence) but we aren't there yet.
in fact we have reached the capacity/reliability threshold for HDD.
One of the bottlenecks for HDD is that *even* if you RAID (as I'm sure we all do Z3), the increasing size makes the reliability worse (since the P(failure) doesn't change, but the rate of resilvering does).
With SSD's and a sane auditing filesystem (e.g. ZFS), the performance should be amazing and reliability might even be better...
P.
Thanks and kudos for pointing that out, BloodBeastTerror. You beat me to it!*
(Though in the spirit of pedantry, four times more would only be 19.2TB, not 20.)
And did you notice that Chris made that elementary and all-too-common mistake immediately after claiming "we're a tad pedantic[,] detail-wise"? Obviously not pedantic enough!
.
* I really did come to the comments section on this article just to point that out! But I felt obligated to peruse the existing comments first and see if anyone had already made the same point.
18 usable inches in a 19 inch rack case. That's 45cm, using 9mm drives with a little air spaces, that's 45 drives per row. Multiply that by 6 rows that's 270 drives in a single 3U unit. That leaves plenty of room for a motherboard and a few terabytes of RAM.
So, 270 drives times 15 gigs is 4050 terabytes per 3U. That's 14 3U servers per rack. That's 56,700 terabytes of storage... or about 55 petabytes per rack.
The problem of course is... there's not a single SAN vendor which can cope with a crash with regards to RAM. So, if I have a write cache of 6TB and my server crashes... or I get an ECC errors... it's toast. Windows Storage Spaces is not too bad though with SoFS.
Those are about a grand. There's already a 4TB drive from SanDisk for the enterprise market, which was about $2 grand iirc. I might need to up the limit on the credit card and never have to worry about storage on the old Thecus ever again.
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