You have a 1TB SSD? That's cute....

Very awesome. Has all the right enterprise features as well, such as AES/Opal 2.0, power loss protection, secure erase, etc.

Sandisk's 4TB SSD is around $7K, so I can imagine this 4TB model will be around there, as well. The 8TB, otoh, holy shit....I don't know if I even want to see the MSRP on it.
 
8TB in 2.5" the 2.5" form-factor is impressive. What is stopping companies from packing a 3.5" drive space full of SSD-goodness, though? Do the controllers have a limit to the amount of NAND they can work with or something?
 
MrCaffeineX said:
8TB in 2.5" the 2.5" form-factor is impressive. What is stopping companies from packing a 3.5" drive space full of SSD-goodness, though? Do the controllers have a limit to the amount of NAND they can work with or something?
Click to expand...

No, but it is cheaper from a production and manufacturing standpoint to have as few form factors as possible. There are already numerous types of SSD form factors, and the more there are, the higher cost the end-user pays.

2.5" keeps it rather simple for just about any traditional storage drive environment as well, ranging from a budget netbook to a gaming desktop, or a business workstation to an enterprise data center.

...That's why I'm really looking forward to SATA Express... hopefully it will be the only future form factor that will cater to any application/environment.
 
DejaWiz said:
No, but it is cheaper from a production and manufacturing standpoint to have as few form factors as possible. There are already numerous types of SSD form factors, and the more there are, the higher cost the end-user pays.

2.5" keeps it rather simple for just about any traditional storage drive environment as well, ranging from a budget netbook to a gaming desktop, or a business workstation to an enterprise data center.

...That's why I'm really looking forward to SATA Express... hopefully it will be the only future form factor that will cater to any application/environment.
Click to expand...


To top it off 3D NAND is the future and I don't expect us to jump past 2.5" for mainstream users anytime in the near future. The limits are now greatly higher in that form factor. I personally like the small factor. Reminds me how massive the differences are from 2.5" > 3.5" drives size wise.
 
You know, I often wondered that too. :) As it stands, a lot of 2.5" SSDs are around 1/2 the maximum height of a 2.5" hot-swap drive carrier. Does that make any sense? :p
 
I guess your carriers are sized to take the 2.5inch 15KRPM SAS drives which were/are much fatter than laptop HDDs and SSDs.

Though i've noticed SSDs moving down from the traditional 9.5mm thick laptop form factor to only 7mm thick.
 
Ah, yes, that they are. :) Seems that all the servers I've seen lately from Dell, Intel and SuperMicro use the same size carrier. Of course Dell (and others) are now using the 1.8" SSDs; not sure what the current maximum capacity is on those are right now though.
 
MrCaffeineX said:
8TB in 2.5" the 2.5" form-factor is impressive. What is stopping companies from packing a 3.5" drive space full of SSD-goodness, though? Do the controllers have a limit to the amount of NAND they can work with or something?
Click to expand...

I believe there is a limit to the number of channels a controller has, with 1 NAND chip per channel. Thus, to go up in capacity with current controllers, higher density chips are needed. Also for this reason, SSD PCBs usually take up less than half the case.
 
OCZ's 3.2TB PCI-e drive is $7500 and they transfer data at much faster rates than SATA or SAS
 
I just use SSD for the OS. Everything else is more or less storage to me and fast enough.
 
Tsumi said:
I believe there is a limit to the number of channels a controller has, with 1 NAND chip per channel. Thus, to go up in capacity with current controllers, higher density chips are needed. Also for this reason, SSD PCBs usually take up less than half the case.
Click to expand...
While this may be true i'm pretty sure theres chips out there* that can raid together multiple SATA devices and make them appear as a single device to the host. By putting such a chip inside the drive you could have multiple controllers each fully stuffed with NAND chips.

I suspect the main reason we don't see this much is that there just isn't much market for it. Those buying large ammounts of SSD storage also want high bandwidths and high operation rates and theres a limit on what one SATA/SAS connection can provide int hat regard so more smaller drives can be better. More smaller drives also mean you throw away less when parts fail.

P.S. you can get adaptors to put six 2.5 inch SSDs in a 5.25 inch bay.

* Because i've seen an icy dock product that does it.
 
MrCaffeineX said:
8TB in 2.5" the 2.5" form-factor is impressive. What is stopping companies from packing a 3.5" drive space full of SSD-goodness, though? Do the controllers have a limit to the amount of NAND they can work with or something?
Click to expand...

I'm guessing that the price of a 3.5" SSD would be so high as to really limit the market to high-end enterprise. And unless there was a significant savings relative to 2.5" SDD, why would enterprises even care?

Just my guesses. :rolleyes:
 
Just think though a single SSD could replace large raid arrays on pure IOPS alone....if it is speed and some space you need, SSD's are the way to go, unless you need massive storage space...

Even Ent SSD's are coming down in price enough that SSD / SAS arrays now can be done so well and cheap vs pure SAS / mechanical.

Too bad there are still older people in I.T who think SSD's are unreliable :rolleyes:
 
plugwash said:
While this may be true i'm pretty sure theres chips out there* that can raid together multiple SATA devices and make them appear as a single device to the host. By putting such a chip inside the drive you could have multiple controllers each fully stuffed with NAND chips.

I suspect the main reason we don't see this much is that there just isn't much market for it. Those buying large ammounts of SSD storage also want high bandwidths and high operation rates and theres a limit on what one SATA/SAS connection can provide int hat regard so more smaller drives can be better. More smaller drives also mean you throw away less when parts fail.

P.S. you can get adaptors to put six 2.5 inch SSDs in a 5.25 inch bay.

* Because i've seen an icy dock product that does it.
Click to expand...

OCZ's PCI-E drives do do this. The problem is that I doubt there is a RAID controller capable of interfacing with a SATA port.
 
jrweis said:
OCZ's 3.2TB PCI-e drive is $7500 and they transfer data at much faster rates than SATA or SAS
Click to expand...

That's great and all, but then you're limited by the number of PCIe slots you have available. Let's say there are six in a 2U chassis whereas one could cram ~26 2.5" drives into the same. In the end it's all about what the needs of the application are.
 
fastgeek said:
That's great and all, but then you're limited by the number of PCIe slots you have available. Let's say there are six in a 2U chassis whereas one could cram ~26 2.5" drives into the same. In the end it's all about what the needs of the application are.
Click to expand...

For servers, there is 2.5" PCIe connector as you can see Dell has extenders which allow connecting 4 2.5" NVME SSDs to one PCIe slot. Future is definitely on the side of PCIe NVME as other interfaces are too slow for the potential of SSD speeds. New M.2 interfaces for motherboards are PCIe 3.0x4 which means net speed of 3.2 GB/s, this is now achievable target of SSDs.
 
four years ago i judged a sensible setup to be:

System - 128GB SSD
Games - 1TB 7200 spinning disk
Storage - 3TB 5400 spinning disk

this time around I have built with the intention of:

System - 1TB m.2 SSD (256GB partition) with nvme and PCIe 3.0 4x
Games - 1TB m.2 SSD (768GB partition) with nvme and PCIe 3.0 4x
Storage - 6TB spinning disk (of whatever speed)
 
R3MF said:
four years ago i judged a sensible setup to be:

System - 128GB SSD
Games - 1TB 7200 spinning disk
Storage - 3TB 5400 spinning disk

this time around I have built with the intention of:

System - 1TB m.2 SSD (256GB partition) with nvme and PCIe 3.0 4x
Games - 1TB m.2 SSD (768GB partition) with nvme and PCIe 3.0 4x
Storage - 6TB spinning disk (of whatever speed)
Click to expand...


Don't you love Technology?
 
Anyone aware of any server motherboards (intel) that support M.2 interfaces and are PCIe 3.0x4 ?
Planning to eventually go PCIE 3600 intels, but just curiuos about server m2 integration yet!
 
Anand has an article about Intel and microns 3d band and expecting to produce 10tb drives
 
ToddW2 said:
Anyone aware of any server motherboards (intel) that support M.2 interfaces and are PCIe 3.0x4 ?
Planning to eventually go PCIE 3600 intels, but just curiuos about server m2 integration yet!
Click to expand...

I don't think something like that will surface. M.2 is more like a consumer/mobile/appliance thing because it is small, light and requires no cables. It is not scaleable enough for servers.
 
Found an ASROCK that has an x99 'server' board they call it at-least that has the m2 ultra for anyone looking for xeon/ecc & m2 ultra support.
 
Very nice to look at, but I'll keep my affordable 1TB drive, thank you ! A bit like a Ferrari is nice to look at.

Tsumi said:
I believe there is a limit to the number of channels a controller has, with 1 NAND chip per channel. Thus, to go up in capacity with current controllers, higher density chips are needed. Also for this reason, SSD PCBs usually take up less than half the case.
Click to expand...

Stacked NAND allows several chips or dies or both on a single channel.

jrweis said:
OCZ's 3.2TB PCI-e drive is $7500 and they transfer data at much faster rates than SATA or SAS
Click to expand...

But how much faster does it kill your data ? :p
 
At work I have 8 workstations with 2TB of SSD each. And we plan to move in a server with 70TB and 10gigabit this year. I hope network won't be a bottleneck on IOPS.
 
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