Tall, slim models are coming to take over dumpy SSD territory Intel and Samsung have introduced "ruler" format SSDs, longer than the standard 2.5-inch drive format, and with higher capacities. However, adoption has been slow. Supermicro is bringing in ruler SSD-using servers, but few others. Why is that? Are the formats unsuitable in some way? We asked senior 451 analyst Steven Hill for …
Yeah, also my server doesn't have an emoji bar like the Macbook Pro, so I can't display the server status on the front in pretty pictures.
Also, its memory isn't soldered in, which means I don't get the opportunity to throw it away but have to keep them damn thing and upgrade it instead, which is a real nuisance.
I really don't know what the server designers are up to, surely they should be copying Apple better.
That's sarcasm by the way.
"And therein I see an issue - proprietary lock-in."
Yes. Why create interoperable standards when you can make something unique and propriety and try to be king of the hill? As usually happens, eventually one will win out and some manufactures will lose. As will many buyers. VHS/BetaMax, Amiga/Atarri, all over again.
PS, Amiga was better!
They look just like Isoliner Chips from Star Trek. Other than being green boards rather than crystaline. Perhaps they should package them in translucent plastic and complete the illusion.
I just remember my theory some 25 years ago that software would start getting supplied as thin storage chips, and you would have a row of slots on your PC that you would plug them into (merely keeping the settings and documents on the HDD). Granted, I was picking up the idea from the IBM PCjr, but these are more what I imagined them looking like. The advent of laptops & extra-small form factor machines would have destroyed the concept anyway.
Ha! I was thinking about the time it takes to hot swap a NVMe and rebuild... it brought to mind that episode where Data was brought in to rearrange the isolinear chips because he could do it faster. If they had to wait for the array to rebalance each time, the Enterprise would have been toast.
Or a TV series - The worst offender in recent years must be Zoo.
I mean how the hell does a half sister have the foresight to rescue\set up the accident for the heroes long presumed dead child in Africa (& hitherto unknown in the preceding two series), arrange childcare (& passport) when she would barely be of age able to drink in the US legally for some perceived slight of favoritism to occur some years later.
so... You designing a new 1U server and you have to pay a $25 per machine royalty to Intel if you use the Intel ruler or $0 for the Samsung ruler... What do you pick when designing. Will your boss or company be happy about paying Intel more for every server chassis you sell or not???
Think of the licensing for Thunderbolt from Intel. How well did it sell? How well did it get put on every system since 2011 with thunderbolt 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0? Well they had to drop the licensing royalties around 3.0 because nobody was using it but Apple... With USB 3.1 most users do not care about Thunderbolt...
So welcome to the new Itamium of the SSD/NVME world! Lets start arranging the chairs on the deck. ;)
For some odd reason, there seems to be some very odd backwards compatibility in hardware formats. For example 8x 3.5" drives will fit nicely in an 8" disk drive case yet 8 inch floppies were very hard to find by the time the 3.5 inch drives were introduced. Some of the ill fated 2ish and 3 inch drives could fit four in a 5.25 half hight drive bay.
While the Intel ruler format is long, it still is about a connector width shorter than the old 8" drives which happens to be about a nano-light second.
/mines the one with about a million 1 x 2 x 3 mm drive chips lost in the pocket.
I'm just not sure what to think of either format, but I do know this is going to get messy. I can see where for enterprise class, this makes perfect sense ... but will be pretty much incompatible with desk boxes except as single-slot options like M.2.
The advantage of reusing the spinning rust shape was that that everyone could use it because everyone had it. Even weird wonky designs could be handled because a SATA cable is a flexible thing.
I love my M.2 for performance, but I couldn't make a proper M.2 RAID5 in my desktop if I wanted to. These new NVMe formats face the same challenge. How much will it matter to manufacturers that they cannot share so much between rackmount and box storage designs? I think that will be the real question, how much it costs them to maintain the differing formats. Because there's just no way in the near future to replace the 2.5" SSD form factor with any of these.
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