SanDisk vows: We'll have a 16TB SSD WHOPPER by 2016 Intel is well behind the curve with its 10TB flash drive, slated for 2016, claims a SanDisk enterprise storage bigwig, adding that the flash memory storage provider will have a 16TB drive by then. Brian Cox, SanDisk’s senior director in marketing for enterprise storage, said the company's 4TB drive technology would develop at …
I have my backup in two places.
One is on the shiny discs that I purchase films on, and the other (somewhat quicker to recover from) is on BitTorrent.
For self generated content I'll happily back up every 4GB or so onto a DVD, that's what the DVD robot* is for. Then I have a pile of shiny, but very low cost, backup discs (and a robot to help load them back onto the next generation of storage if needed) as well as high speed access to those holiday snaps. At least the TV works better than a dusty slide projector ;)
Frankly the power savings over enough spinning rust to store 16TB of mostly static data should pay for the drive in relatively short order...That's what Facetwit et al. are looking for after all.
* OK the robot is cool, I got it cast off from the office when it got replaced. It was then used at a church until they stopped producing CDs and went to MP3. Very nice piece of kit, massively excessive for a house, but it would make the recovery phase easier.
Have you actually done the power calculations? 5 4TB drives (for RAID5 16TB array, so you don't have to keep all the Blu Rays safe) have idle AND ACTIVE READ power below 20 watts TOTAL if you buy the right model. So the hard drives draw 175 kwh per year, if they're running/reading 24x7. Of course, you'd have the hard drives spin down when not in use, so the reality is at most 20% of that power (if you stream 5 hours a day, every day) So 35 kwh per year.
Even if the flash drive required no power, that's only 35 kwh per year, or 175 kwh over a five year expected life span. Your power must cost 100x what mine does if you think the flash could pay for itself with power savings.
Ah, you're replacing new disks.
I have a stack of <1TB disks - and of course the extra PC (and controller card) which is used to control them all.
I'd also expect a large WORM SSD to have much more than a 5 year lifetime.
So I'd be dropping a PC, and ~10 older drives in favour of a single SSD - which would be effectively zero power - connected to another machine which is always on.
I think the potential price of W(O|F)RM SSD media might surprise you as well.
@DougS
>Using SSDs for that is pointless unless someday they cost less per TB than hard drives.
Do you really doubt SSD's will outperform spinning rust $/Tb? SSD prices are divided by 2 roughly every 2 years ... I think that SSD's will start being cheaper than consumer HDD's as early as 2016. Besides, SSD's will become monsters, capacity wise, the sky's almost the only limit. Look at the capacity of the smallest (in cm) usb flash drives ... now, imagine a 2.5" enclosure full of those chips ... then you could also dream of a 3.5" enclosure with those chips ... no competition.
Ok fair enough - you write once therefore the cells don't wear out. Wear levelling and garbage collection are not needed, but what about the data retention on TLC cells. I've seen figures banded about that 34nm MLC is good for 5 years unpowered (that is without garbage collection moving the data around) - hardly archive suitable really. Makes me wonder how long the data will last on TLC at even smaller processes.
"In order for the price to be driven down, don't manufactures need to sell enough to pass the eventual savings on to the consumer markets?"
Conversation in a local a few weeks ago: "why don't you stock {drink type Z}?"
"No-one ever orders it."
"They can't order it if you don't stock it."
"Well we won't ever stock it if people don't order it."
Faces and palms all around..
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