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Samsung unveils 2.5-inch 16TB SSD
- markhahn 11y agowhat's that in stationwagons full of LTO6 tapes?
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- tired_man 11y agoBeats me. I've never dealt with fractional station wagons before... A compressed LTO6 is 6.25 TB, right? Let's just go with 3 of them. So, I figured out how many carts we need. You calculate the fractional station wagon part. My math was never _that_ good ;-)
- Someone1234 11y agoJust as a point of reference, a single LTO6 tape costs around $25-$35 only. So we're talking about $105 at absolute most for three. That is likely to be cheaper than a 16 TB SSD for a very long time to come. Tapes aren't going anywhere.
- TheCondor 11y agoThat's the problem, tape isn't going anywhere. A decade back, it boasted a huge capacity advantage. Now with all the newer tech, the spinning media storage advantages, etc, it can barely hold a big drives worth of data. And the tape drives are expensive... Lto7 should hold like 50T on a this and dollar tape drive to look really interesting again.
- jl6 11y agoAt scale, tape still has the lowest cost per byte of any storage medium.
- acdha 11y agoIt's true for sufficiently large values of “at scale” but tape has uniquely high overhead costs – hardware, software, staffing – which have to be balanced out by those lower storage costs. HDD/SSD costs have been declining at a much faster rate so we're already at the point where only the largest storage consumers are going to reach the point where they see a return from the initial investment in tape.
- fezz 11y agoLTO-7 is 6.4TB uncompressed. LTO-10 is 48TB. Hopefully we'll see LTO-7 this year but probably in 2016. That puts the diff between LTO6 and LTO7 at 4 years. Extrapolating... LTO8 in 2020 LTO9 in 2024 LTO10 in 2028 LTO-10 would have ideally come in 2020 in keeping with LTO's earlier pace of 2 years per revision which is also more in line with storage increases
- akx 11y agoThe SSDs seem to win there. https://gist.github.com/akx/61302f35a9a58bd9371d https://gist.github.com/akx/61302f35a9a58bd9371d
- hamburglar 11y agoNot to be a killjoy, but given that LTO6's and SSDs are so similar in size and shape, and you're assuming they pack into a station wagon equally well, it seems like it would be a lot simpler to just compare their storage per unit volume directly. :)
- function_seven 11y agoYou're not thinking hard enough! How hot is it outside? Can you pack some of the LTO6's on the dashboard? Or will they melt in the sun? I bet the SSDs can handle higher storage temps than the tapes, and therefore you can pack more of them in. I'm off to research the weight differences, and see if the wagon's suspension factors in to this...
- nathankleyn 11y agoIf anybody ever asks me what Hacker News is, I'm going to screenshot this thread and send it to them.
- jotm 11y agotip to tip efficiency... :-D
- akx 11y agoYeah, my calculation only takes into account the actual cargo space in a station wagon. If you can fit 5 people in the station wagon too and a human is about 66 liters in volume...
- hga 11y agoYeah, they're probably more heat resistant, but heating them up makes those trapped electrons more eager to flee.
- jtchang 11y agoHoly that is a lot of storage in a very small amount of space. Besides the fact that I want one right now I am starting to wonder how much heat this will generate. A lot of 1 unit rack servers can fit about 8 2.5" drives. 128TB of storage in 1U is pretty crazy storage density. Everytime they reveal a larger capacity drive I just wonder what the backup strategy is going to be. Longer tapes?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pyre 11y agoRedundant sets of drives... or high density backup tapes. Tape backups have come along with drive size increases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations looks like LTO-10 is planned to be 48TB per cartridge.
- dragontamer 11y agoLTO6 is current. LTO7 is "future". LTO8 may never happen, let alone LTO9 or LTO10 (If SSDs prove to be superior to tapes... investments will change for sure.) The chief benefit of LTO is that it still remains the cheapest and does in fact have huge sequential read/write speeds. Random read/write is even worse than discs but for backup purposes, sequential is king.
- pixl97 11y agoSSDs may have issues with long term 'disuse', as in you unplug the drive and leave it on the shelf, data loss may occur. With most tapes you can put them in cold storage and they should last decades.
- acdha 11y ago> With most tapes you can put them in cold storage and they should last decades. This is _hopefully_ true but operational history is so full of unpleasant surprises that I would hesitate to trust any type of storage which isn't regularly verified. With previous generations of LTO, a colleague had encountered fun failure modes like the media degrading rapidly (unrecoverable in less than a year) when a tape was stored on its side, which turned out to be an “everyone knows” fact not mentioned anywhere in the tape or drive documentation. A difference coworker had encountered some issues with a batch which had a defective lubricant causing the surface to break down over a couple years. One place we worked with had to carefully de-tune a new tape drive after learning that the old one had drifted out of alignment for at least a year before physically failing, which meant that most of their tapes were no longer readable by a drive in standard calibration. This is not to say that tape doesn't have a place - analogous failures happen for everything else and the cost-per-GB is appealing. I just don't think we actually have a toss-in-on-the-shelf storage media which can be assumed to work over a long term. You can address those issues with a regimented approach for rotation and mixing physical devices, media, and location but that increases the cost of adding a new storage technology into the mix since you need to develop that operational confidence for each class.
- riobard 11y agoAm I right to assume that NAND flash has higher storage density than magnetic disks? I've been trying to find some definitive data about this but failed so far. I'd really appreciate if someone can point me the right direction to search.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- wmf 11y agoYes, flash density is much higher. Partly that's because putting circular platters in a rectangular case wastes a lot of space and partly because you can stack eight flash dies into a package around 1 mm thick.
- jyxent 11y agoI found a paper from 2013 that compares storage densities up to 2012: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6558421 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6... In 2012 they list the density of magnetic disks as 750 Gb/in^2 and nand flash as 550 Gb/in^2. I'm not sure how the numbers have changed with 2d nand, but 3d nand probably pushes the density way over magnetic.
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- Gladdyu 11y agoI wonder how this will compare to Intels 3D NAND flash chips (http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2015/08/12/intel-micron-develop-3d-xpoint-as-an-eventual-successor-to-nand-flash-memory/id=60268/ http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2015/08/12/intel-micron-develop-3d...). Some competition on similar technologies is never wrong!
- wtallis 11y agoYou linked to an article about Intel's 3D XPoint memory, which isn't NAND flash or any other kind of flash. They are also doing 3D NAND flash, and that's what will be competing against Samsung's 3D NAND flash.
- jaawn 11y agoEvery piece of storage news I've seen for the past year or two reinforces my opinion that there is a great deal of price-fixing happening in the consumer storage market. The price trend of 2TB HDDs, for example, just does not make sense. When I see that a company can now create SSDs with ~16x more capacity than the best consumer option, I feel like something fishy is going on that is artificially slowing the pace of larger capacity drives making it into the hands of consumers at a reasonable price.
- curiousjorge 11y agoI feel that as well. We are told it will be a while until we see anything beyond single digit TB and suddenly Samsung drops a massive bomb with 16TB? I doubt that an average consumer would use 16TB but who knows. Also I have some qualms about storing on SSD knowing the data won't last forever
- inversionOf 11y agoIgnoring that it's a wholly new flash/storage chip just being introduced to the market, scaling up flash storage is not a great mystery or difficulty -- add more chips. The reason consumer drives are at the sizes they are is a matter of consumer tolerance for pricing levels, and we saw all of the noise when 1TB flash drives were announced, people annoyed that it isn't for less than $100.
- jaawn 11y agoI don't see much justification for the "consumer tolerance" argument. It seems like most people are holding off on SSD purchases, or choosing lower capacities because they think the drives are too expensive.
- inversionOf 11y agoYour conspiratorial argument is that they're holding off higher capacity consumer drives (note that in the Enterprise market you have been able to get multi-TB solutions for years) for some reason, but that the existing options are too expensive. This is a very entitled argument where your core complaint is that you can't have difficult, expensive technology for cheap.
- vegabook 11y agoMoore's law is passing the baton from GHz to the storage stack. Whereas you once had a simple RAM + HD setup, you now have a teamworking hierarchy of storage technologies: Cache / 3d stacked mem / DRAM / X-point / SSD / HD. Each one of these is behaving just like GHz did: doubling in speed/capacity every 18 months. Given that this is where the performance bottleneck has been, we're looking good on exponential performance upside for a long time to come if we extrapolate the recent trend. Excellent.
- pixl97 11y agoWon't be long till the network is the bottleneck again. 10Gb is still relatively expensive for the end user, and 40 and 100Gb are out of reach for most budgets.
- vegabook 11y agoFunnily enough I was just this morning googling for 10Gbit Ethernet cards and a whole bunch of "Copper wire 10Gbit will hit primetime in 2015" results game up. Totally agree. Throughput is where it's at.
- dublinben 11y agoMoore's Law has always been concerned about transistor size. Solid State Drives are nothing but a big pile of transistors, so it's no surprise we're seeing incredible capacity growth.
- neilmovva 11y agoHowever, some manufacturers have been backpedaling on NAND process size recently, since larger cells have better endurance. Capacity still scales well thanks to tech like Triple Level Cells (TLC) and 3D-stacked dies.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- IanDrake 11y agoCan someone explain to my why SSDs still cost more than HDDs? When I look at all the moving parts in an HDD, I'm shocked they can still be produced for less.
- Joeri 11y agoYou need to look at the amount of moving parts in the factory, not in the product.
- teekert 11y agoExactly, I just went to a talk by someone from ASML, a modern processor may go through 700 sequential steps of (UV) illumination, "sanding" (to moleclar flatness) and adding a new layer of lithographic material. It's insane and there are hardly any working specimens in the first batches.
- andrepd 11y ago>there are hardly any working specimens in the first batches Why is that?
- mozumder 11y agoWay too many atoms in the wrong places. Building a transistor on a chip is like making a building by bombarding meteors from space and hoping the craters form the shapes you want. Building a chip is like making a city with that process.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoI think the post was was asking why the first batches are special in that regard (atoms in the wrong places) as opposed to the (presumably successful) later batches.
- rasz_pl 11y ago
- logicallee 11y agoif they really wanted to make waves they would unveil the world's fastest AND the world's largest hard-drive, two in one, with an onboard battery and hybrid 64, 128, or 256 GB of RAM (not SSD) in 2x, 4x, or 8x 32gig dimms exposed as a physical Drive, costing +/- $800, $1600, and $3200 respectively, in addition to the 16 TB second physical drive, all integrated in one package so you can't disconnect the battery and nuke your lightning-fast drive without being extremely aware that you're doing so. The hard drives would have ironclad firmware that keeps the RAM refrehsed until its battery goes down to 15% (or whatever the conservative 10 minutes of power is), at which point it takes the ten minutes to dump the contents of that RAM to SSD, and reverts to having that drive also be SSD until the power is reconnected long enough to charge battery back up to 80%. Then it reads it back into RAM and continues as a Lightning Fast 64 GB + Very fast 16 TB drive. You would store your operating system on the lightning-fast drive. The absolute nightmare failure state isn't even that bad, as even though the RAM drive should be as ironclad as SSD, in case it ever should lose power unexpectedly through someone opening the device and disconnecting the battery or something, it can still periodically be backed up, so that if you pick up the short end of six sigma, you can just revert to reading the drive from SSD rather than RAM and lose, say, at most 1 day of work. thoughts? I bet a lot of people would be happy to pay an extra $800 to have their boot media operate at DIMM speed, as long as the non-leaky abstraction is that it is a physical hard drive, and the engineering holds up to this standard. There is a lot of software out there that is very conservative about when it considers data to be fully written - it would be quite a hack for Samsung to hack that abstraction by doing six or seven sigma availability on a ramdrive with battery and onboard ssd to dump to.
- rzzzt 11y agoThe basics of your idea were captured in a device in 2009: http://2xod.com/articles/ANS_9010_ramdisk_review/ http://2xod.com/articles/ANS_9010_ramdisk_review/ It would be very interesting to see a similar product being introduced using contemporary technology, though. One question is what sort of interface it would communicate over to leverage the higher transfer speed.
- logicallee 11y ago
- ck2 11y agoWhat ever the price of them, you need to double the cost because you'll need to run them at least raid10 to be remotely safe.
- AlexEatsKittens 11y agoI'm slightly surprised by the numbers given for IOps. The example they give is 48 drives giving 2MM IOps: 2,000,000 / 48 = 41,666.66… IOps 45k IOps for 16TB limits its use cases a bit. I don't know enough about storage to make an educated guess, but anyone know what the constraint there might be? Aren't there controllers that can do 1MM IOPS on single EFDs? 45k is still a ton of operations, but I expected more somehow.
- skuhn 11y ago45k iops is not terrible, but it's not competitive with current Intel enterprise SSDs (S3500 is 70k+, S3710 is 85k). I suspect that Samsung had to make huge sacrifices to the controller and DRAM portions of the drive to fit that many NAND chips into the 2.5" form factor. They're basically trying to create a new class of flash storage, which is space-optimized rather than performance-optimized. I'm sure there's a market there, but I don't know how big it is. This is denser than current hard drives, but total cost is probably heavily in favor of hard drives for most use cases. I find it particularly confusing that Samsung (seems) to have gone for a SAS SSD versus NVMe. NVMe would allow them to do a PCIe card form factor, which would surely be easier from a physical space perspective. And it's not like anyone has a PCIe flash product at 16TB either -- Fusion-io tops out at 6.4TB. NVMe also might allow them to improve the iops. Intel's P3500 NVMe is 430k iops at 2TB. Night and day compared to this Samsung drive. So in one 2U chassis you could have any of: 24x2TB Intel P3500 = 48TB = 10,320,000 iops (read 4k) 24x1.6TB Intel S3500 = 38TB = 1,572,000 24x16TB Samsung PM1633a = 384TB = 1,000,000 iops (meanwhile HDD would have far lower iops, but also probably a lot cheaper) While the Samsung one is alluring from a space perspective, I can't really see replacing either the 'fast SSD' tier or the 'slow HDD' tier with it in my deployments.
- jseliger 11y agoI'm sure there's a market there, but I don't know how big it is. This is denser than current hard drives, but total cost is probably heavily in favor of hard drives for most use cases. I'm not an expert on this, but my impression is that a lot of organizations that need a lot of space would be much happier with larger-capacity-but-slower drives because those drives can be so much cheaper than trying to build out more space.
- HorizonXP 11y agoI'm reading the Innovator's Dilemma right now, and I just finished the chapter about the storage industry. The author draws the conclusion that solid-state drives may eventually move upmarket from cash registers and embedded applications to PCs and such. Having seen the move from 5.25" HDDs to 3.5" HDDs, then the move from desktops to laptops, and now seeing SSDs becoming extremely common in laptops, tablets, and phones, I have to believe that the author predicted the future when he wrote the book. Since PC sales have dropped, people are not buying as many HDDs, and buying more SSDs, usually indirectly. Cloud infrastructure has likely gobbled up the existing HDD supply. But even there, SSDs are preferred for many applications, such as databases, since they're faster overall, storage limitations be damned. And now we're seeing the first SSD that has a capacity greater than HDDs, in a similar sized package. And no current HDD company has an SSD offering worth mentioning. It's disruption happening right before our eyes. History seems to repeat itself all too often!
- __float 11y agoSince when is Samsung not an HDD company?
- jotm 11y ago~2011, when Seagate acquired their HDD manufacturing business: http://www.notebookreview.com/news/seagate-acquires-samsungs-hard-drive-business-for-1-4-billion/ http://www.notebookreview.com/news/seagate-acquires-samsungs... Samsung has focused on SSD storage ever since...
- Tloewald 11y agoYou do realize that the example of the hard disk industry in The Innovator's Dilemma is actually one of the weakest in the book: "In fact, Seagate Technology was not felled by disruption. Between 1989 and 1990, its sales doubled, reaching $2.4 billion, “more than all of its U.S. competitors combined,” according to an industry report. In 1997, the year Christensen published “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” Seagate was the largest company in the disk-drive industry, reporting revenues of nine billion dollars." and: "Between 1982 and 1984, Micropolis made the disruptive leap from eight-inch to 5.25-inch drives through what Christensen credits as the “Herculean managerial effort” of its C.E.O., Stuart Mahon. (“Mahon remembers the experience as the most exhausting of his life,” Christensen writes.) But, shortly thereafter, Micropolis, unable to compete with companies like Seagate, failed." Note that he published his book long after this stuff had been shown to be hopelessly wrong, without making any corrections. Many of his examples are similarly terrible. And those are the ones he cherry-picks to back his thesis. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-... I found The Innovator's Dilemma to be infuriating. It's a classic 20/20 hindsight -- just vague enough to apply to everything but excuse itself from any conspicuous counter-examples (Apple, say). Like most management fads, I guess. (Prediction: wait until electric, self-driving car tech becomes practical. Ford and GM will crush the "nimble" disruptors like bugs. Well, unless it's Apple. Then all bets are off.) Now, the hard disk makers may well be going under, but let's set aside Clay Christensen's over-rated terminology. Samsung is hardly a small startup "disrupting" big, slow stalwarts. Samsung dwarfs the hard disk makers -- it's more like Google "disrupting" libraries, or Walmart "disrupting" local businesses. BTW in Christensen's terms, this new disk is a "sustaining" innovation -- it's a better, faster, more complicated, harder-to-manufacture iteration of an existing, successful product.
- MaysonL 11y agoThe really amazing thing is one of their other announcements [0]: Samsung has designed the PM1725 to cater towards next-generation enterprise storage market. This new half-height, half-length card-type NVMe SSD offers high-performance data transmission in 3.2TB or 6.4TB storage capacities. The new NVMe card is quoted with random read speed of up to 1,000,000 IOPS and random writes up to 120,000 IOPS. In addition, sequential reads can reach up to an impressive 5,500MB/s with sequential writes up to 1,800MB/s. The 6.4TB PM1725 also features five DWPDs for five years, which is a total writing of 32TBs per day during that timeframe. [0] http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_announces_tcooptimized_highperformance_ssds_pm1633_pm1725_and_pm953 http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_announces_tcooptimized_...
- skuhn 11y agoThat does kick it up a notch versus Intel's current top of the line. The P3700 is max 2.0TB, 450,000 read iops, 175,000 write iops, and 2,800 / 2,000 MB/s. It's also $3.25/gb for 800GB vs the Samsung PM1725's $2.15/gb for 800GB. Hopefully there is a P3710 waiting in the wings that is competitive with Samsung's new offerings. I have had infinitely better luck in terms of reliability and performance consistency with Intel than any other SSD brand, and I think I'm not alone on that front.
- rasz_pl 11y ago"6.4TB is rated to handle five drive writes per day (32TB) for five years" ~10K cycles sounds good
- ChuckMcM 11y agoInteresting given the reliability news Facebook posted on their SSDs. With a 5x10^11 UBER you could not even read all the sectors on a 16TB disk reliably. Something I'll be looking at when I get my hands on one.
- intrasight 11y agoA version of Moore's Law seems to apply to storage, which is very much a good thing. The first IBM Winchester I used cost a couple year's salary and stored 30MB on 14" platters. The next I used was an 8" ~150MB and only cost a couple months salary. Forward 30 years and I can buy a 500GB drive the size of a stick of gum for a couple hours salary. 30 more years? Can't wait to see. I assume I will eat the stick of gum and by doing so know everything in the Library of Congress.
- jawngee 11y agoc:> park.exe