Seagate flashes 60TB (yes, sixty) SSD monster Don't count us out of the flash drive business. That's Seagate's message at the Flash Memory Summit as it shows off another two new SSD products: an 8TB NVMe drive, and a massive 60TB SSD demo in a 3.5-inch form factor. The 60TB shows what's possible if you cram more than a 1,000 Micron 3D NAND dice into a full-size, 3.5-inch …
Expensive 60TB or 100TB MLC NAND is just wasting money. Unreliable for any proper professional enterprise use.
Enterprise class SLC is the bare minimum type of NAND to be used to get some reliability.
3D XPoint is going to make sense buying expensive 60TB, 100TB or 500TB or higher config.
NAND even SLC is a huge risk. Anything MLC and TLC is just useless.
Mind you, remember that seasoned RAID administrators recommend to either build arrays from different brands/models of hard drives, or to be *very* reactive in replacing a failed drive right away *and get an extra one handy*, because drives coming from the same batch will probably have the similar kind of defects, and their useful life will be quite similar. So, if you buy 24×2TB SDDs today and arranging them on some level of redundancy, you are not getting 24 times better redundancy. Some 10 times, perhaps (which is nothing to despise, of course!)
You do know that SLC is only 5% of the market don't you? MLC with over-provisioning and a decent SSD controller is the choice of most enterprise storage vendors, and is far more reliable than HDD. (think IBM, HP, NetApp, HDS, Dell as well as newcomers Pure, Nimble, Tintri, Tegile, SolidFire) They also can get pretty good endurance most systems carry a 5 year warranty. Maybe they are on to something?
No pics of the 60TB SSD? ... why
I thought the same, so did a quick image search on the web. Found what I assume is the official Seagate press kit photo of the drive (out of respect for the Reg, I won't link to another tech site). Problem is, just how interesting do you think a top-down shot of a 3.5" SSD is going to be?
Visualize a black rectangle, with a blue/white label across it saying "Seagate SAS SSD" and "60". That's it.
What were we expecting? Sparkles? Unicorns? A 5-dimensional hypercube twisting in Escherian impossibility, maybe? :)
Chris made the right call - I don't think its' inclusion would have added anything to this article.
My very first hard disk plugged into the motherboard ... all of 10M if I recall correctly (Plus Hard Card, anybody?) The world has come full circle, albeit bigger and (arguably) better.
I felt old enough finding out last week that my kids are older than both Sonic the hedgehog and the web as we know it. I feel positively ancient now.
Pass me those carrier bags; I'm off to shout at the passing traffic ...
Keeeerist. I remember how many hardcards the professor's lab went through at the university. OTOH, they *did* teach academics to actually keep backups, which is a nigh-impossible task.
I took several dead ones apart. The engineering seemed rather dodgy.
Wikipedia lists hardcards bigger than 80MB, but in 1990, which was about the time we went "f*ck that for a lark" and stopped buying them.
The first hard drive I owned personally was a Plus Hardcard 20M. If I recall it was about $1200 retail. I was amazed because the minicomputer I was running at work had a 70M hard drive about the size of a washing machine and cost more than $50K. I still have that old Hardcard somewhere and it still worked in the last ISA slot computer I had - probably still does.
Found an old 1979 copy of Personal Computer World a while back. Amused myself trying to work out what it would have cost to build a machine in 1979 with the RAM and disk storage of my current £1000 laptop - came out as £50 million squids (without allowing for inflation).
Got a new laptop arriving next week - 16GB + 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD - anyone got change for a billion-pound note?
Pass me my zimmer frame.
I updated my original (calculator type keyboard) Commodore PET which had 8k static ram with 32k of dynamic RAM. The RAM board was almost the size of the motherboard. Cost 1979 over £350
I think I was earning about £3k
Cannot remember the cost of the floppy drive but I kept that from my wife !
Then went to BBC B.
The first PC I ever owned (an Amstrad PC1512) had one of those. 20MB if I remember correctly, along with 2 5.25" FDDs. A friend offered me his old Win 1.0 FDDs then I saw they were 3.5". Took me bloody ages to copy the files on a PC at college from one size to the other so I could install it.
There seems to be some Enterprisey over-engineering going on here; I rather like the idea of a card with a PCIe switch and four or six M.2 NVMe slots on it, so I can run software RAID0 across six cheap Samsung half-terabyte NVMe cards. IDT make a switch chip that would be perfect for this, which costs about $200, so I'd expect a competent Guangzhou shanzhai to make a profit selling the card for £250.
Given the price for the 15TB version is still over $10k. the price of this drive has got to be around $40k. Insane.
60tb with spinning drive technology would cost less than $3k. OK it wont have the crazy performance but will cope with a whole lot more write cycles. Spinning drives are clearly a long way from dead yet.
Just as we have 15k ,10k, 7.2k, and 5.4k spinning drives, each has their place in the performance hierarchy. SLC, MLC, TLC, and QLC again follow almost the same scheme. This and the 100TB drives are CAPACITY drives. They offer 10x the throughput and 2000x the IOPs of a spinning 7.2k drive.
This is going to be used for Tier 2 and Tier 3 storage, not your Tier 1 or 0 applications. Those are being slated to be replaced by Xpoint, or NVMe based ssd.
Will this drive be expensive, yes. Though it will still probably end up being less than $1 / GB, if not closer to $ 0.50. Add in dedupe and compression and it goes well below that in effective cost.
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