6 ms·

Also the capacities for SSDs have barely budged. Many years ago I went all-out and equipped my PC with a 4TB SSD. Just last week I went SSD shopping for the fir

Also the capacities for SSDs have barely budged. Many years ago I went all-out and equipped my PC with a 4TB SSD. Just last week I went SSD shopping for the first time in ages.. and 4TB was the largest drive anyone had. It's a few generations later and the new NVME/PCIe standards mean faster, lower-latency drives. But where are the 8TB, 12TB, or 24TB drives?

Dylan16807 1y ago
There's a couple 8TB options, but with the twin constraints of M.2 size and price nobody is really bothering to go bigger for consumer parts. And the technologies for fast connections to 2.5" drives keep failing to get a foothold in consumer products.
- crote 1y ago
  > And the technologies for fast connections to 2.5" drives keep failing to get a foothold in consumer products. Not surprising, considering the vast majority of consumers don't need more storage than you can easily fit in an M.2 form factor. Why mess around with expensive enterprise U.2 drives when it gives you zero benefit and gains you the hassle of dealing with extra wires and finding space for an ugly bulky rectangle? Once you get to storage sizes where 2.5" becomes a need, you are well beyond the consumer price range. Very few people are willing to spend more on a single SSD than on the rest of their gaming computer combined.
  - mort96 1y ago
    With individual games being hundreds of gigabytes and growing, I'm not convinced that you're right.
    - Tadpole9181 1y ago
      The "vast majority of consumers" are not PC gamers who keep a dozen AAA games installed at a time. They have work PCs and laptops.
      - mort96 1y ago
        I never said that the vast majority of people need large SSDs. I said that the set of people who need large SSDs is big enough such that its complement does not necessarily constitute the "vast majority". Obviously what you mean by "vast majority" is somewhat subjective, and there is absolutely room to disagree with my statement. But argue against the right thing.
        wtallis 1y ago
        4TB is what currently fits easily into the M.2 form factor, and 8TB has been possible for years without much extra expense in custom packaging. I'm quite confident that it is fair to say the "vast majority" of consumers do not need 8TB or more of storage in their laptops.
      - taraindara 1y ago
        If local storage becomes too cheap, how can companies push their cloud storage subscriptions? Imho it’s sad that ssds haven’t gotten much bigger. A spinning disk can now house dozens of tb. If 8tb can fit on an m.2, it could feasibly fit even more into an SSD form factor. Not as fast as nvme, but still faster and somewhat more resilient than hdds. I have a strong desire for ssds like this… but my only option is super expensive u.2, and I don’t need it to be that crazy fast. Just faster and smaller than hdd would suffice
        mort96 1y ago
        It pains me so much. I would love a laptop with a 4TB or 8TB SSD. But the 3.5 extra TB to go from a 0.5TB SSD to a 4TB SSD costs 1758 USD if I want an Apple laptop (which I do, for all sorts of other reasons). It's absolutely wild.
        inetknght 1y ago
        If you're worried about price and pricing Apple, you're doing it wrong. You could put the SSD in a Thunderbolt enclosure and it'll be just about as fast, if a little awkward to carry around and plug in often. There are plenty of non-Apple but good manufacturers with flexibility. Hell, I don't like Dell for their price points, but all of the laptops I've seen from them have upgradeable RAM and storage. If you want even more customization there are things like Framework.
radicality 1y ago
They exist but definitely more painful to use at a home setup since their formats are more server oriented, like U.2/U.3 or E1S and few others. And for course the prices - you can get 30,60 TB (and even more), but it’s gonna be >$4k. And versus the normal M2 drives, the larger server grade are more annoying. For example, I got recently a 15.36TB Kioxia Cd6-R in U.3 format, for $1.3k, which is not bad for ssd prices. After getting the right adapters and fitting it inside a minisforum ms-01. It’s working fine, but it immediately reached its “critical” temperature (while doing nothing) so I had to attach a big fan and cool it. All the larger SSDs which are meant for server rooms will expect lots of cooling. https://www.serversupply.com/SSD/PCI-E4.0/15.36TB/KIOXIA/KCD6XLUL15T3_338542.htm https://www.serversupply.com/SSD/PCI-E4.0/15.36TB/KIOXIA/KCD...
- adastra22 1y ago
  Why not get 4x 4TB drives and stripe?
  - LtdJorge 1y ago
    MS-01 doesn't have enough space
  - b112 1y ago
    I agree this would work, and yes backups are important, but you're now at 1/4 reliability plus raid issues reliability. The upthread may be able to hug that, but I like a quiet night in, not an unreliable wildcat.
  - cm2187 1y ago
    RAID 0, ok (but that's a bit dangerous). As soon as you add some redundancy, you pay either a massive price in term of capacity or in term of performance, pretty much any implementation you look at (ZFS, MD, Windows storage space, etc). Larger SSDs means less components which can fail, less power consumption per TB.
    - adastra22 1y ago
      I fail to see how 16TB of chips spread across 4 PCBs is significantly different in risk than the exact same number of chips being collocated on one PCB.
Culonavirus 1y ago
I mean, isn't it obvious? There is no demand for massive SSDs. The current "average consumer" capacity has stabilized at 1-2TB for a system drive. It's also what you buy for your PS5s etc. There's just not that many (popular) use cases for larger SSD. Even with gaming, which is probably the most widespread use case for "fast and big" drives, people found out that there's only so many AAA 150GB behemoths that they can play at the same time...
- bravesoul2 1y ago
  photo and video use case?
  - zozbot234 1y ago
    As an average consumer/data hoarder, why not store those on cheap spinning HDD's? They can stream the data fast enough, and modern NAS hardware gives you easy RAID too. You don't really need super-quick random access to multiple TB's of data, so HDD storage is probably good enough.
    - daymanstep 1y ago
      HDD is really not fast enough if you're going to be doing a RAID rebuild with a 18TB HDD
      - GauntletWizard 1y ago
        It's plenty fast enough for my N+2 ZFS Raid, but I'll admit that that time is still measured in days.
      - lostlogin 1y ago
        I’m running several that large or larger in a Synology. Adding a drive takes a week. Replacing a drive a slightly quicker, but rebuild times are no joke.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
justinclift 1y ago
The capacities for SSDs have barely budged in the consumer space, but they're going upwards a lot for enterprise and 2nd hand enterprise drives. ie: https://www.ebay.com/itm/186355513308 https://www.ebay.com/itm/186355513308 There are heaps on Ebay, but you'll be paying $$ for the larger sized drives.
mananaysiempre 1y ago
There are 8TB drives, and (ignoring QLC ones) 18 months ago you’d have paid over $1200 for either of the two models available (Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus or Inland Performance Plus). Then WD released a 8TB version of their SN850X at an initial price of $850. These days I regularly see it for $650 or below (Amazon actually has it for $600 right this moment), which is a positive but tolerable premium over buying 2×4TB of the same (admittedly high-end) model. The other two options have also come down in price, though the Sabrent still hovers just below a thousand.
- justinclift 1y ago
  Be extremely careful of buying WD (NVMe) SSDs if you're intending on using them with Linux: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/14793 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/14793 Many _serious_ reports of problems there, across many models and firmware revisions. It's an ongoing problem, and WD is ignoring it entirely.
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    It's just a brand. The SN770 shares nothing technical with, for example, the SN8100.
    - justinclift 1y ago
      Well, "the brand" is ignoring the problems across several SSD models.
      - wtallis 1y ago
        The reports in that thread you linked to are clustered around several models that do have substantial shared technology: a DRAMless design using an in-house SanDisk controller, and difficulties arise with the NVMe Host Memory Buffer feature that is only applicable to DRAMless drives. But the high-end SanDisk drives aren't DRAMless, and the SN8100 in particular doesn't even use an in-house SanDisk controller.
  - 1y ago
mschuster91 1y ago
> But where are the 8TB, 12TB, or 24TB drives? Kioxia has them for servers [1]. You'll pay for that privilege though, 12.8 TB will set you back a healthy 1.600 € [2] and 30 TB 4.100 € [2]. [1] https://europe.kioxia.com/de-de/business/ssd/enterprise-ssd.html https://europe.kioxia.com/de-de/business/ssd/enterprise-ssd.... [2] https://www.primeline-solutions.com/de/kioxia-12-8-tb-cd8-v-sie-ssd/ https://www.primeline-solutions.com/de/kioxia-12-8-tb-cd8-v-... [3] https://www.primeline-solutions.com/de/kioxia-30-72-tb-cm7-r-ssd/ https://www.primeline-solutions.com/de/kioxia-30-72-tb-cm7-r...

Dylan16807 1y ago

There's a couple 8TB options, but with the twin constraints of M.2 size and price nobody is really bothering to go bigger for consumer parts. And the technologies for fast connections to 2.5" drives keep failing to get a foothold in consumer products.

crote 1y ago
> And the technologies for fast connections to 2.5" drives keep failing to get a foothold in consumer products. Not surprising, considering the vast majority of consumers don't need more storage than you can easily fit in an M.2 form factor. Why mess around with expensive enterprise U.2 drives when it gives you zero benefit and gains you the hassle of dealing with extra wires and finding space for an ugly bulky rectangle? Once you get to storage sizes where 2.5" becomes a need, you are well beyond the consumer price range. Very few people are willing to spend more on a single SSD than on the rest of their gaming computer combined.
- mort96 1y ago
  With individual games being hundreds of gigabytes and growing, I'm not convinced that you're right.
  - Tadpole9181 1y ago
    The "vast majority of consumers" are not PC gamers who keep a dozen AAA games installed at a time. They have work PCs and laptops.
    - mort96 1y ago
      I never said that the vast majority of people need large SSDs. I said that the set of people who need large SSDs is big enough such that its complement does not necessarily constitute the "vast majority". Obviously what you mean by "vast majority" is somewhat subjective, and there is absolutely room to disagree with my statement. But argue against the right thing.
      - wtallis 1y ago
        4TB is what currently fits easily into the M.2 form factor, and 8TB has been possible for years without much extra expense in custom packaging. I'm quite confident that it is fair to say the "vast majority" of consumers do not need 8TB or more of storage in their laptops.
    - taraindara 1y ago
      If local storage becomes too cheap, how can companies push their cloud storage subscriptions? Imho it’s sad that ssds haven’t gotten much bigger. A spinning disk can now house dozens of tb. If 8tb can fit on an m.2, it could feasibly fit even more into an SSD form factor. Not as fast as nvme, but still faster and somewhat more resilient than hdds. I have a strong desire for ssds like this… but my only option is super expensive u.2, and I don’t need it to be that crazy fast. Just faster and smaller than hdd would suffice
      - mort96 1y ago
        It pains me so much. I would love a laptop with a 4TB or 8TB SSD. But the 3.5 extra TB to go from a 0.5TB SSD to a 4TB SSD costs 1758 USD if I want an Apple laptop (which I do, for all sorts of other reasons). It's absolutely wild.
        inetknght 1y ago
        If you're worried about price and pricing Apple, you're doing it wrong. You could put the SSD in a Thunderbolt enclosure and it'll be just about as fast, if a little awkward to carry around and plug in often. There are plenty of non-Apple but good manufacturers with flexibility. Hell, I don't like Dell for their price points, but all of the laptops I've seen from them have upgradeable RAM and storage. If you want even more customization there are things like Framework.

radicality 1y ago

They exist but definitely more painful to use at a home setup since their formats are more server oriented, like U.2/U.3 or E1S and few others. And for course the prices - you can get 30,60 TB (and even more), but it’s gonna be >$4k. And versus the normal M2 drives, the larger server grade are more annoying. For example, I got recently a 15.36TB Kioxia Cd6-R in U.3 format, for $1.3k, which is not bad for ssd prices. After getting the right adapters and fitting it inside a minisforum ms-01. It’s working fine, but it immediately reached its “critical” temperature (while doing nothing) so I had to attach a big fan and cool it. All the larger SSDs which are meant for server rooms will expect lots of cooling. https://www.serversupply.com/SSD/PCI-E4.0/15.36TB/KIOXIA/KCD6XLUL15T3_338542.htm https://www.serversupply.com/SSD/PCI-E4.0/15.36TB/KIOXIA/KCD...

adastra22 1y ago
Why not get 4x 4TB drives and stripe?
- LtdJorge 1y ago
  MS-01 doesn't have enough space
- b112 1y ago
  I agree this would work, and yes backups are important, but you're now at 1/4 reliability plus raid issues reliability. The upthread may be able to hug that, but I like a quiet night in, not an unreliable wildcat.
- cm2187 1y ago
  RAID 0, ok (but that's a bit dangerous). As soon as you add some redundancy, you pay either a massive price in term of capacity or in term of performance, pretty much any implementation you look at (ZFS, MD, Windows storage space, etc). Larger SSDs means less components which can fail, less power consumption per TB.
  - adastra22 1y ago
    I fail to see how 16TB of chips spread across 4 PCBs is significantly different in risk than the exact same number of chips being collocated on one PCB.

Culonavirus 1y ago

I mean, isn't it obvious? There is no demand for massive SSDs. The current "average consumer" capacity has stabilized at 1-2TB for a system drive. It's also what you buy for your PS5s etc. There's just not that many (popular) use cases for larger SSD. Even with gaming, which is probably the most widespread use case for "fast and big" drives, people found out that there's only so many AAA 150GB behemoths that they can play at the same time...

bravesoul2 1y ago
photo and video use case?
- zozbot234 1y ago
  As an average consumer/data hoarder, why not store those on cheap spinning HDD's? They can stream the data fast enough, and modern NAS hardware gives you easy RAID too. You don't really need super-quick random access to multiple TB's of data, so HDD storage is probably good enough.
  - daymanstep 1y ago
    HDD is really not fast enough if you're going to be doing a RAID rebuild with a 18TB HDD
    - GauntletWizard 1y ago
      It's plenty fast enough for my N+2 ZFS Raid, but I'll admit that that time is still measured in days.
    - lostlogin 1y ago
      I’m running several that large or larger in a Synology. Adding a drive takes a week. Replacing a drive a slightly quicker, but rebuild times are no joke.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]

justinclift 1y ago

The capacities for SSDs have barely budged in the consumer space, but they're going upwards a lot for enterprise and 2nd hand enterprise drives. ie: https://www.ebay.com/itm/186355513308 https://www.ebay.com/itm/186355513308 There are heaps on Ebay, but you'll be paying $$ for the larger sized drives.

mananaysiempre 1y ago

There are 8TB drives, and (ignoring QLC ones) 18 months ago you’d have paid over $1200 for either of the two models available (Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus or Inland Performance Plus). Then WD released a 8TB version of their SN850X at an initial price of $850. These days I regularly see it for $650 or below (Amazon actually has it for $600 right this moment), which is a positive but tolerable premium over buying 2×4TB of the same (admittedly high-end) model. The other two options have also come down in price, though the Sabrent still hovers just below a thousand.

justinclift 1y ago
Be extremely careful of buying WD (NVMe) SSDs if you're intending on using them with Linux: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/14793 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/14793 Many _serious_ reports of problems there, across many models and firmware revisions. It's an ongoing problem, and WD is ignoring it entirely.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  It's just a brand. The SN770 shares nothing technical with, for example, the SN8100.
  - justinclift 1y ago
    Well, "the brand" is ignoring the problems across several SSD models.
    - wtallis 1y ago
      The reports in that thread you linked to are clustered around several models that do have substantial shared technology: a DRAMless design using an in-house SanDisk controller, and difficulties arise with the NVMe Host Memory Buffer feature that is only applicable to DRAMless drives. But the high-end SanDisk drives aren't DRAMless, and the SN8100 in particular doesn't even use an in-house SanDisk controller.
- 1y ago

mschuster91 1y ago

> But where are the 8TB, 12TB, or 24TB drives? Kioxia has them for servers [1]. You'll pay for that privilege though, 12.8 TB will set you back a healthy 1.600 € [2] and 30 TB 4.100 € [2]. [1] https://europe.kioxia.com/de-de/business/ssd/enterprise-ssd.html https://europe.kioxia.com/de-de/business/ssd/enterprise-ssd.... [2] https://www.primeline-solutions.com/de/kioxia-12-8-tb-cd8-v-sie-ssd/ https://www.primeline-solutions.com/de/kioxia-12-8-tb-cd8-v-... [3] https://www.primeline-solutions.com/de/kioxia-30-72-tb-cm7-r-ssd/ https://www.primeline-solutions.com/de/kioxia-30-72-tb-cm7-r...