Seagate soups up M.2 Nytro flash card

Seagate has more than doubled the maximum capacity of its Nytro M.2 XM1440 flash card from 980GB to 2TB. The 960GB XM1440 was introduced in August last year along with the XF1440, a 2.5-inch NVMe drive that had 2TB of capacity. Both used eMLC flash and were launched in August 2015. They came in performance (called capacity and …

[iOS6 user]

It is kind of problem with such cards or generally most of the big SSDs.

Bigger and more expensive SSD than it is more possible that someone will be trying to use such device to transfer more. All SSDs with even quite low power consumption are generating heat. If card or whole device have no enough radiators sooner or later all what will be written or read from such dev will be full of errors.

M.2 SSDs are almost naked and they could be used only up to some rate of read/write IOps.

So using big M.2 SSDs is like using most powerful transport but only on distance few meters.

[John 104]

what???

[Nick Ryan]

I think they're voicing concern that as the capacity of storage devices like these goes up, and thermal output of them goes up with intensive use, that there will be a heat dissipation problem particularly where there are many of these in one enclosure.

Well, that's my guess anyway. It would be more of a real concern if the entire extent of an SSD storage medium was written to repeatedly but this isn't really likely to happen for bandwith reasons and due to the way SSDs optimise writes, even writing repeatedly to a single file or "block" isn't going to impact the same physical location on the physical SSD chips.

[NoneSuch]

"There is no pricing information."

That tells me I can't afford it. hehehe

[Stuart Halliday]

So why is M.2 suppose to be the future over RAM stick based SSD?

Please explain. :)

[Ian Michael Gumby]

@Stuart H. M.2 isn't replacing RAM...

Here's the skinny.

DRAM is the fastest although its volatile. Lose power, you lose what's in memory. Then there's the density. 1 TB of memory takes up a lot of DIMM slots. Its also the closest to the CPU.

But what happens when you want to persist your data?

SATA spinning rust? very slow.

SATA SSD? Faster but limited by the SATA interface.

PCIe (Closer to the CPU) faster.

NVME (M.2) faster still.

So now with the faster bus, you're able to get better performance from the flash drive.

This is why the M.2 is a good thing. You now have a persistence layer that is fast so that you can still get better performance without maximizing your memory.

At the same time... these m.2 flash cards/SSDs use less energy and throw less heat than older alternatives.

Outside of this... the UltraDIMM technology (Diable) where you have DIMM slots with a persistence layer, albeit smaller than what you can get on an M.2 card.

[Mihai]

Simple arithmetic

7w x 30000 IOPS/w = 210000 IOPS

It is 270000 only in marketing.

[wsm]

NVMe

Non-volatile Memory Express. NVMe, but you've got it transposed in your title.