
No pricing...
*Trembles*
Viking Technology is shipping a 50TB SAS SSD. Yes, you read that right. The UHC-Silo SSD is claimed to be the highest-capacity drive of its kind shipping today, and has a 3.5-inch form factor that comes in two capacity points – 25 and 50TB. It uses planar SK Hynix MLC (2 bits/cell) flash and not the 3D TLC (3bits/cell) NAND …
The SSD prices have been kept high due to chip shortages.
For SOHO / Consumer, you'd need to have at a minimum 2 drives mirrored per machine and more likely a set of 4 in RAID 10. 50TB should be enough to store 20 years of data (docs, photos, movies, music, etc ... ) for the normal family.
Very cool and looks like a spinning rust killer.
This could be a game changer. The IOPS thing isn't that big of a deal. How many people have workloads pushing over 60,000 IOPS?... Not many, worst case you may have to buy a few drives. Most people just need low latency. I wonder what the cost is for one of these... it almost has to be much lower than what is currently on the market. Storage is getting crazy inexpensive.
Given write speed of 350MBps (large "B" implies that's megabytes right?), one would need 50e6 / 350 = 143e3 seconds = ~ 40 hours to fully populate a new drive, in case it needs to be replaced in a RAID(Z) array. Quite a significant time, so perhaps RAID6 (RAIDZ2) would have to be used rather than RAID5 (RAIDZ1). Making the cost of ownership even higher. Of course the same applies to HDDs, but the cost per device is much higher here.
Still, I'd love to be able to put these puppies in my arrays!
But you can then take into consideration that if your swapping out 12TB SAS drives then your increasing your capacity by four. You could choose to have three quarter less drives, or remortgage the UK and fully populate the arrays.
It would look so pretty....
Which would be okay for some sort of WORM type application, (log file archives) but not great for something that gets hammered.
It's not designed for front-line storage - more for the 2nd or 3rd line teir in a heirarchical storage system.
The sort of place where all you data that hasn't been accessed in 2 years can sit. Low speed, slow access but BIG.
As the previous poster noted, WORM (or what I'd rather call WIRE, Write Infrequently, Read Extensively) is another valid use for a big drive with OK reads and lousy writes. Things like media archives where they often don't get changed once they get in but can get hammered a lot in the playback department. Reliability is a plus in that department.
The DWPD warranties are just a way to reassure people concerned about SSDs. If that's the warranty, you can be sure it will last much longer than that. Besides, using SMART you can tell how it is doing as far as its rated write lifetime.
Given that it would take 40 hours to write the whole drive, you can "hammer" it all you like you won't hit the write lifetime warranty! I'll bet you could write it 24x7x365x10 before you started seeing flash sector remapping begin...
Should be some more LTO editions out soon ....
Yeah - but that involves using tape. Which was designed by Mephistopheles Himself to give the illusion of security, but to dash your hopes in the most cruel way possible when you absolutely have to get that backup restored immediately 1/2 an hour after your previous set went offsite and your current set keeps saying "tape error".
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
<speechless>
Wow. My workhorse PC has no less than 5 disks (including 2 180GB SSDs) for a total of almost 9 TB and I am quite happy with all that.
This puppy ? I stick in two 25TB disks and I have not only SSD performance for everything, but over 5 times more space to store stuff.
Looking forward to the HDD/SSD scene in a few years' time, when I will need to replace stuff. It'll be a dime a TB dozen.
<Snoopy happy dance>
With drives like these entering the market I might finally consider switching as these should bring down lower-capacity prices (over time) which means that a drive with a reasonable storage amount (6TB+, anything lower is a waste of money really) should be quite affordable and hopefully within the same price bracket as the mechanical equivalents.
When it comes to storage (for home usage) mechanical still has the best price/space ratio. Once I can pick up a 8TB SSD for the same price as a 8TB Mechanical drive, I'll be buying them for my desktop, and probably more than one.
But for now, it'll have to be mechanical as I need the storage space without paying thousands (I work on lots of business work and stuff like, well, you know, stuff that takes storage).
which means that a drive with a reasonable storage amount (6TB+, anything lower is a waste of money really)
I think that's a bit extreme. Spinning rust is fine for files that aren't heavily accessed - which I suspect is most of the data on most laptops/desktops. My new lappie has 256GB SSD for OS files, web server directories, DB etc, but then the general stuff sits happily on 1TB of rust. Works fine for me, but others no doubt have different requirements.
But their reliability when they're mothballed can be hit or miss. Sometimes you spin up a drive that hasn't been used in a while and it...doesn't. Solid state drives can't suffer mechanical failures the way rust drives can, and controller failures can happen to ANY drive, so it's a wash there. One good question is the rate of bit rot between them. I try to address this by keeping error codes with my backups to deal with it if it pops up on occasion.
Form factor is an issue, my laptop can't accommodate anything more than one m.2 drive for storage. This isn't a real issue for me because I have USB drives, a NAS box and a desktop computer. But if you want a lot of storage in a thin and light laptop, NAND density is the only real solution.
I still shudder when I think of what I spent on my first "high-speed" modem.
Happy memories of lording it over the peasants with their old 9600 modems with my shiney new Zoom 14.4K modem.
It even had the capability (via back-end software) to do voicemail! I was soooo cool!
(In my defense, I was young and foolish. I'm not so young anymore).
please folk, dont forget these kind of drives will probably never go to common consumer market:
companies rely on sales to make a living, so they need to either sell a lot of (relatively) small capacity devices at a (relatively) low price, or sell a few gigantic capacity devices at a gigantic price to keep making enough profit.
meaning we will *never* see such capacity drives on consumer market, simply because:
a) most consumers *dont* need such kind of storage space and,
b) most consumers would never pay a pay the gigantic price of professional hardware and,
c) even if consumers would in total irrationality buy one of these device at a gigantic price, they would only buy one for their whole life (or at least very very few) because thats plenty enough to store all your instagram pictures for a lifetime.
so entering the consumer market with such capacity drives is simply economically *not* interesting for storage companies,
they will stay in professional market, with corresponding pricing
I almost agree, with the exception of "never". There may come time when, due to availability of chips (production of which was paid previously by "enterprise" customers), it will be difficult to buy smaller capacities. For closest analogy, see availability and prices of 4GB or smaller SD cards on the market.
It will take a long time to get there, for tens-TB sized SSDs . But I would not bet on "never"
"There will never be a need for more than 5 computers....."
"640Kb is more than enough"
"For $100 Billion you could buy ...."
a) I have an 11 year old that has somehow managed to accumulate 430Gb of oddball crap games in just over 2 years. Never mind the goofy videos the middle and youngest have put together.
b) Our Familial Photo Archive is just a hair over 2Tb, SWMBO is a photography nut (yes a good chunk of those were scanned -- most twice , once from images on photopaper and again when I acquired a scanner with the capacity to scan negatives)
c) the eldest and their mate, in 36 hours after christmas gorged the PS4 to "Full" on junk games.
Data consumption is flying up a VERY steep curve in the retail space. Yes, these *will* make to consumer space. Just not any time soon I don't think, but considering they're built for cold storage in enterprises and designed to be arrayed, they'll do just fine even in small arrays. 5 of these in a zfs array sitting in my nas? YES GODDAMNIT.