8 ms·

WD announces enterprise 128TB SSD

125 points by doener 2y ago

ComputerGuru 2y ago
No price announced?
- jsheard 2y ago
  I think this probably falls under "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".
  - yieldcrv 2y ago
    aka a boomer scam everything has a market price
- baruch 2y ago
  I believe pricing (in quantity, these usually do not sell by single pieces) is around 6 cents a Gig so about $7680. I could very well be wrong though, it's been a while since I heard pricing of DC SSDs.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - hypeatei 2y ago
    To be honest, that doesn't seem unreasonable. Obviously it's steep for a homelab project but I could see small-medium sized businesses buying that for on-prem needs.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      It's much better than not unreasonable. If that price is accurate it's competitive with consumer drives. The big clouds would charge you 6 cents per gigabyte per quarter. Add on RAID and you still break even after four months.
  - sumtechguy 2y ago
    the 128 also looks to be in proof of concept stage. The rest of the articles seem to be for consumer being 8/16TB SSD drives and 30TB spinning. With 64 being the the data center sizes for this set of announcements.
- elorant 2y ago
  You can get a 30TB nvme at about $3k. So that’s probably four times that? I would guess around $15k.
  - bityard 2y ago
    This is for enterprise gear, the drives might cost something like that but whatever storage array these go in will be at least 6 figures on its own with a 3 year support contract.
kelsey98765431 2y ago
These are for making raid systems with higher speed for graphing systems, possibly for high speed swap memory for frontier model cpu inference.
- 1-6 2y ago
  If it’s for raid system, I would be less reserved about QLC.
radicality 2y ago
Link to press release (since the link in the article is a tracking link): https://www.westerndigital.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/2024/2024-08-05-western-digital-reveals-new-solutions-and-delivers-keynote-at-fms2024 https://www.westerndigital.com/company/newsroom/press-releas...
porphyra 2y ago
I really want a denser SSD to store my photo collection. My current small form factor PC has two NVME PCIe slots and no room for SATA drives. I have two 4 TB SSDs in there right now and it seems that consumer SSDs basically cap out at 4 TB. I would really love to get about 16 TB in my computer.
- tracker1 2y ago
  You can get 8tb drives, but they're well over 2x the cost of 4tb drives. An external USB drive or multi-drive enclosure may be more prudent though. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CTTL9R7Z/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CTTL9R7Z/
- Coolbeanstoo 2y ago
  I'd like to find some good quality but slow nvmes, I dont need super high speed for media serving but getting a lot of storage (4x4tb/2x8tb ~) is much more expensive than hard drives. Itd be nice to have a silent home server
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    Good quality has a baseline level of speed which is pretty fast. There's not much you can cut at that point. But cheap SSDs got down to 2x the price of hard drives last year. Even after prices stabilized, they're at 3x. Flash catching up relatively soon seems likely. Flash matching the current price of hard drives seems even more likely.
    - Coolbeanstoo 2y ago
      Interesting, thanks. I'm quite hopeful to be hard drive free at some point in my NAS
    - ksec 2y ago
      I think that is too optimistic. The cost / capacity of NAND, even by Western Digital roadmap wouldn't have come down to current HDD price by 2027 / 2028. And that is assuming HDD price dont fall.
doublepg23 2y ago
Anyone in the industry able to tell me where WD sits in the flash space? I use WD for my HDDs pretty exclusively but had assumed their SSD offerings were mostly white label drives they slapped their name on, are they a real competitor in the space?
- jsheard 2y ago
  WD is the real deal, they design their own SSD controller silicon in-house. They acquired Sandisk and HGST so there's a lot of expertise under their roof.
  - magicalhippo 2y ago
    > they design their own SSD controller silicon in-house And they've been leaning into RISC-V[1] due to this. [1]: https://blog.westerndigital.com/risc-v-swerv-core-open-source/ https://blog.westerndigital.com/risc-v-swerv-core-open-sourc...
- wmf 2y ago
  WD SN850(X) is pretty much the best consumer SSD.
markhahn 2y ago
how big is the market of people who have money to burn? or is it that some people mistakenly believe that bigger devices are more cost-effective? this part of the release is interesting: https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/platforms/rapidflex/product-brief-rapidflex-c2110-interposer.pdf https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...
- choilive 2y ago
  This is targeted for enterprise/cloud/hyperscale customers and density is often a big deal in those applications. I know that 61.44TB SSD have been selling very well exactly for this reason.
- wmf 2y ago
  Drive bays cost money so in some cases it could be cheaper to use a smaller number of more expensive drives.
- jandrewrogers 2y ago
  There are applications and workloads where storage density is a key consideration, and the set of data models isn't that small as a subset of the market. Networked storage is not a substitute for NVMe when working with very large storage volumes due to the poor storage bandwidth. For some workloads you also cannot substitute a single high-density server with multiple low-density servers for effectively the same reason (low bandwidth to remote storage). For these workloads, ultra-high density storage can definitely be cost effective within reason. It bears keeping in mind that most popular open source software is not designed to be effective for storage densities anywhere near this high. If you are working with data at this density then you are likely using one of the closed source storage engines designed to work at this scale running straight off of the raw block device.
- supersour 2y ago
  This is also useful for power-constrained systems - 128T x 35W is less power than 2 x 64T x 35W which gives a larger power budget for whatever h100-type device you have connected to these drives
ggm 2y ago
There is a huge price:cost disconnect in the SSD and HDD market, and always has been. The floor price for 2TB SSD is basically stuck on USD100.00 for reputable brands. Less reputable brands are significantly cheaper but the good ones are self-policing around the floor price. People like Tom's Hardware say "oh its the NAND shortage" but thats bullshit. It's the last vestige of not-really-illegal collusive pricing behaviour by a bunch of highly profitable manufacturers. Demand (price) is driving this. Cost has nothing to do with it. "it's the market" is true, because if somebody dropped the floor to USD80 or USD70 I am willing to bet they'd make a killing for a very short while until the others come on board but while they can make book on $100 they're not going lower. the other SSD sources are very dodgy. There's a lot of risk in going for the super cheap brands right now, you only have to read the reviews to see they come up far more often in post-purchase failure and inevitably problems with replacement. Not to say the majors never fail, but nobody much complains about their RMA on the failure. Pricing of 2.5" HDD are now predominantly driven by SMR or not SMR as far as I can see it. Shucking is no longer much use to anyone. I expect some of the shuckable drives to migrate slowly to SSD and not bother saying so except indirectly "shockproof" or somesuch. It would actually be better for them not to admit they used SSD, than have to break the de-facto price barriers here. If you want 4TB or higher, you are paying a premium, its more than 2x the cost of 2TB. The unit price of a 1TB does seem a bit more malleable and the sub TB units are now cheap as .. chips. You burn PCI lines or USB ports to glue these into RAID structures. Nice if you have the slots. Highly reliable with all those discrete media units but you need loads of them to get back to the 5-10TB scale effective filestore size. DO NOT USE USB MEDIA IN RAID IF YOU CAN AFFORD NOT TO (I don't think M.2 or SATA 2.5" FF has much to do with this)
- wkat4242 2y ago
  I think it's also that spinning disk storage isn't really a consumer product anymore. And the enterprise market is characterized by high shelf prices that are deep discounted for large volume purchases. Of course you can still buy external HDDs but they've become much more of a niche with most people subscribing to cloud storage. I think that lack of interest is stopping the market driving prices down. In fact a 14TB here is now over 300€ and before the pandemic I'd buy them for 219€. Really annoying.
nightshift1 2y ago
Interesting. Are we finally reaching the point where ssd are bigger than hdd ? How many years before price/GB gets better too ?
- newsclues 2y ago
  I think there have been large ssds in DC it’s just cost.
- edward28 2y ago
  There have already been 32.72TB ssds for a while now, which is larger than all HDDs expect the upcoming 32TB SMR WD drive.
bjoli 2y ago
Does anyone have any clue whether the new e3 and e1 form factors will ever make it to the consumer sector?
rekabis 2y ago
>QLC In a 128Gb SSD? Welcome to BitRot city. I’ll stick to SLC as long as I can, thanks.

125 points by doener 2y ago

ComputerGuru 2y ago

No price announced?

jsheard 2y ago
I think this probably falls under "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  aka a boomer scam everything has a market price
baruch 2y ago
I believe pricing (in quantity, these usually do not sell by single pieces) is around 6 cents a Gig so about $7680. I could very well be wrong though, it's been a while since I heard pricing of DC SSDs.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hypeatei 2y ago
  To be honest, that doesn't seem unreasonable. Obviously it's steep for a homelab project but I could see small-medium sized businesses buying that for on-prem needs.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    It's much better than not unreasonable. If that price is accurate it's competitive with consumer drives. The big clouds would charge you 6 cents per gigabyte per quarter. Add on RAID and you still break even after four months.
- sumtechguy 2y ago
  the 128 also looks to be in proof of concept stage. The rest of the articles seem to be for consumer being 8/16TB SSD drives and 30TB spinning. With 64 being the the data center sizes for this set of announcements.
elorant 2y ago
You can get a 30TB nvme at about $3k. So that’s probably four times that? I would guess around $15k.
- bityard 2y ago
  This is for enterprise gear, the drives might cost something like that but whatever storage array these go in will be at least 6 figures on its own with a 3 year support contract.

kelsey98765431 2y ago

These are for making raid systems with higher speed for graphing systems, possibly for high speed swap memory for frontier model cpu inference.

1-6 2y ago
If it’s for raid system, I would be less reserved about QLC.

radicality 2y ago

Link to press release (since the link in the article is a tracking link): https://www.westerndigital.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/2024/2024-08-05-western-digital-reveals-new-solutions-and-delivers-keynote-at-fms2024 https://www.westerndigital.com/company/newsroom/press-releas...

porphyra 2y ago

I really want a denser SSD to store my photo collection. My current small form factor PC has two NVME PCIe slots and no room for SATA drives. I have two 4 TB SSDs in there right now and it seems that consumer SSDs basically cap out at 4 TB. I would really love to get about 16 TB in my computer.

tracker1 2y ago
You can get 8tb drives, but they're well over 2x the cost of 4tb drives. An external USB drive or multi-drive enclosure may be more prudent though. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CTTL9R7Z/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CTTL9R7Z/
Coolbeanstoo 2y ago
I'd like to find some good quality but slow nvmes, I dont need super high speed for media serving but getting a lot of storage (4x4tb/2x8tb ~) is much more expensive than hard drives. Itd be nice to have a silent home server
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  Good quality has a baseline level of speed which is pretty fast. There's not much you can cut at that point. But cheap SSDs got down to 2x the price of hard drives last year. Even after prices stabilized, they're at 3x. Flash catching up relatively soon seems likely. Flash matching the current price of hard drives seems even more likely.
  - Coolbeanstoo 2y ago
    Interesting, thanks. I'm quite hopeful to be hard drive free at some point in my NAS
  - ksec 2y ago
    I think that is too optimistic. The cost / capacity of NAND, even by Western Digital roadmap wouldn't have come down to current HDD price by 2027 / 2028. And that is assuming HDD price dont fall.

doublepg23 2y ago

Anyone in the industry able to tell me where WD sits in the flash space? I use WD for my HDDs pretty exclusively but had assumed their SSD offerings were mostly white label drives they slapped their name on, are they a real competitor in the space?

jsheard 2y ago
WD is the real deal, they design their own SSD controller silicon in-house. They acquired Sandisk and HGST so there's a lot of expertise under their roof.
- magicalhippo 2y ago
  > they design their own SSD controller silicon in-house And they've been leaning into RISC-V[1] due to this. [1]: https://blog.westerndigital.com/risc-v-swerv-core-open-source/ https://blog.westerndigital.com/risc-v-swerv-core-open-sourc...
wmf 2y ago
WD SN850(X) is pretty much the best consumer SSD.

markhahn 2y ago

how big is the market of people who have money to burn? or is it that some people mistakenly believe that bigger devices are more cost-effective? this part of the release is interesting: https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/platforms/rapidflex/product-brief-rapidflex-c2110-interposer.pdf https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...

choilive 2y ago
This is targeted for enterprise/cloud/hyperscale customers and density is often a big deal in those applications. I know that 61.44TB SSD have been selling very well exactly for this reason.
wmf 2y ago
Drive bays cost money so in some cases it could be cheaper to use a smaller number of more expensive drives.
jandrewrogers 2y ago
There are applications and workloads where storage density is a key consideration, and the set of data models isn't that small as a subset of the market. Networked storage is not a substitute for NVMe when working with very large storage volumes due to the poor storage bandwidth. For some workloads you also cannot substitute a single high-density server with multiple low-density servers for effectively the same reason (low bandwidth to remote storage). For these workloads, ultra-high density storage can definitely be cost effective within reason. It bears keeping in mind that most popular open source software is not designed to be effective for storage densities anywhere near this high. If you are working with data at this density then you are likely using one of the closed source storage engines designed to work at this scale running straight off of the raw block device.
supersour 2y ago
This is also useful for power-constrained systems - 128T x 35W is less power than 2 x 64T x 35W which gives a larger power budget for whatever h100-type device you have connected to these drives

ggm 2y ago

There is a huge price:cost disconnect in the SSD and HDD market, and always has been. The floor price for 2TB SSD is basically stuck on USD100.00 for reputable brands. Less reputable brands are significantly cheaper but the good ones are self-policing around the floor price. People like Tom's Hardware say "oh its the NAND shortage" but thats bullshit. It's the last vestige of not-really-illegal collusive pricing behaviour by a bunch of highly profitable manufacturers. Demand (price) is driving this. Cost has nothing to do with it. "it's the market" is true, because if somebody dropped the floor to USD80 or USD70 I am willing to bet they'd make a killing for a very short while until the others come on board but while they can make book on $100 they're not going lower. the other SSD sources are very dodgy. There's a lot of risk in going for the super cheap brands right now, you only have to read the reviews to see they come up far more often in post-purchase failure and inevitably problems with replacement. Not to say the majors never fail, but nobody much complains about their RMA on the failure. Pricing of 2.5" HDD are now predominantly driven by SMR or not SMR as far as I can see it. Shucking is no longer much use to anyone. I expect some of the shuckable drives to migrate slowly to SSD and not bother saying so except indirectly "shockproof" or somesuch. It would actually be better for them not to admit they used SSD, than have to break the de-facto price barriers here. If you want 4TB or higher, you are paying a premium, its more than 2x the cost of 2TB. The unit price of a 1TB does seem a bit more malleable and the sub TB units are now cheap as .. chips. You burn PCI lines or USB ports to glue these into RAID structures. Nice if you have the slots. Highly reliable with all those discrete media units but you need loads of them to get back to the 5-10TB scale effective filestore size. DO NOT USE USB MEDIA IN RAID IF YOU CAN AFFORD NOT TO (I don't think M.2 or SATA 2.5" FF has much to do with this)

wkat4242 2y ago
I think it's also that spinning disk storage isn't really a consumer product anymore. And the enterprise market is characterized by high shelf prices that are deep discounted for large volume purchases. Of course you can still buy external HDDs but they've become much more of a niche with most people subscribing to cloud storage. I think that lack of interest is stopping the market driving prices down. In fact a 14TB here is now over 300€ and before the pandemic I'd buy them for 219€. Really annoying.

nightshift1 2y ago

Interesting. Are we finally reaching the point where ssd are bigger than hdd ? How many years before price/GB gets better too ?

newsclues 2y ago
I think there have been large ssds in DC it’s just cost.
edward28 2y ago
There have already been 32.72TB ssds for a while now, which is larger than all HDDs expect the upcoming 32TB SMR WD drive.

bjoli 2y ago

Does anyone have any clue whether the new e3 and e1 form factors will ever make it to the consumer sector?

rekabis 2y ago

>QLC In a 128Gb SSD? Welcome to BitRot city. I’ll stick to SLC as long as I can, thanks.