At 100TB, the world’s biggest SSD gets an (eye-watering) price tag

erek

erek

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Crisis prices at their finest! $400 a TeraByte! (sometimes quadruple current 1TB drive prices!)

"The target audience for this drive are outfits looking for the highest storage density available on the market at any cost. The ExaDrive range has a five year warranty, is guaranteed for unlimited drive writes per day during that period and has a mean time between failures of 2.5 million hours.

The 100TB model has 5x more capacity than the largest hard disk drive on the market and 67% than the next largest solid state drive, a 60TB Seagate SSD that was launched back in 2016. Very large capacity solid state drives haven’t been flooding the market despite previous predictions.

Blame it on demand and supply as hyperscalers, web hosting companies and service providers are generally happy with hard disk drives and NAND manufacturers are just about keeping up with demand from other verticals (smartphones, laptops etc)."

https://www.techradar.com/news/at-100tb-the-worlds-biggest-ssd-gets-an-eye-watering-price-tag
 
$0.40 per GB is not much more than consumer MLC SSD drives on the market right now. The 970 Pro is about $0.34 per GB. QLC drives go for around $0.10 per GB.
 
Interesting on the "writes per day" endurance... They could have said 0.5 or 1 or something and it would have looked terrible. In reality:

If the drive can consistently write 500MB/s, that is:
1GB = 2 seconds
1TB = 2048 seconds = 34.13 minutes
100TB = or 56.89 HOURS

1 drive write @ 500MB/s = 56.89 hours....so at that point the drive can't even do a full drive write in 2 days, so "drive writes per day" is a meaningless number, really.
 
/dev/null said:
Interesting on the "writes per day" endurance... They could have said 0.5 or 1 or something and it would have looked terrible. In reality:

If the drive can consistently write 500MB/s, that is:
1GB = 2 seconds
1TB = 2048 seconds = 34.13 minutes
100TB = or 56.89 HOURS

1 drive write @ 500MB/s = 56.89 hours....so at that point the drive can't even do a full drive write in 2 days, so "drive writes per day" is a meaningless number, really.
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DWPD is just the standard enterprise way of measuring drive endurance. Rather than total writes, that is how it is done. Makes sense with normal sized SSDs since you can overwrite them multiple times per day with lots of data (like database transactions) and it lets you size the endurance you need fairly easily. Often a company will have multiples of the same models for different needs. Like Micron had 3 variants of the 5200. The Eco was rated for less than 1 write per day, so normal SSD usage. The Pro was rated for less than 3 so heavy SSD usage but not insane, the Max was rated for more than 5 so for really heavy tasks like databases and such. Regardless of capacity they all had the same number of DWPD within a given subset so you could easily compare. It also correlates with warranty. Basically they are saying "If you write this much or less per day, you will have plenty of write endurance for the duration of the disk's warranty."

Also remember that less than 1 is not terrible, in most normal use, even server usage, you write WAY less than 1 DWPD. Our VM servers use less than 0.1 DWPD because for the most part the VMs are dealing with reading/serving data, not writing it back to disk.
 
Sycraft said:
DWPD is just the standard enterprise way of measuring drive endurance. Rather than total writes, that is how it is done. Makes sense with normal sized SSDs since you can overwrite them multiple times per day with lots of data (like database transactions) and it lets you size the endurance you need fairly easily. Often a company will have multiples of the same models for different needs. Like Micron had 3 variants of the 5200. The Eco was rated for less than 1 write per day, so normal SSD usage. The Pro was rated for less than 3 so heavy SSD usage but not insane, the Max was rated for more than 5 so for really heavy tasks like databases and such. Regardless of capacity they all had the same number of DWPD within a given subset so you could easily compare. It also correlates with warranty. Basically they are saying "If you write this much or less per day, you will have plenty of write endurance for the duration of the disk's warranty."

Also remember that less than 1 is not terrible, in most normal use, even server usage, you write WAY less than 1 DWPD. Our VM servers use less than 0.1 DWPD because for the most part the VMs are dealing with reading/serving data, not writing it back to disk.
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It just depends on the use case. I don't consider < 1 DWPD to really be "enterprise" for heavy workloads. Something like 0.3DWPD is consumer level. The point i was trying to make was that "DWPD" is not really a valid metric to look at for this drive.

I have several workloads where I will do > 1DWPD (network packet capture, rrd graphing, etc) so in my use case, < 1DWPD (ON SMALL DRIVES) isn't very good...
 
I mean, when 3.2TB SSDs came out, they were over $15000... Or about $5000 per TB. I'd say this is priced much better. To get that much space in a single drive, of course it'll cost more than a normal dinky SSD. It's needs a much bigger board and controller, ic chips, etc. I probably won't be getting one anytime soon, but for an ok 7.8TB (link) you're looking at $200 per TB, and you need to figure out where to put 13 of them!! Let's just round down to 12. So you need a 12 drive chassis + SAS controller for 100GB vs a single drive.

If you needed more space, like 1PB you'd need a full rack of chassis just to hold the drives + a good amount of power to run everything, wiring it all together with multiple SAS cards, etc. Compare that to a single 12 drive rack with 10 drives and maybe some room for a hot spare or two. So, 120 drives for 1PB storage or 10? I means really it's a good deal if you need tons of storage and don't want to install a bunch more racks and cooling and power supplies, etc. Space and power are important considerations.
 
Kinda want to pick up 8 for my next UnRaid Thread Ripper build.
 
erek said:
Crisis prices at their finest! $400 a TeraByte! (sometimes quadruple current 1TB drive prices!)
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As with most things in life... you gotta pay for that last little bit ;)

Overall, this is interesting, but it's still SAS/SATA; that limits the usecases a bit given how long it's going to take to actually write or read the full capacity of the drive. And then it's one drive with that much data that's that hard to access!
 
/dev/null said:
It just depends on the use case. I don't consider < 1 DWPD to really be "enterprise" for heavy workloads. Something like 0.3DWPD is consumer level. The point i was trying to make was that "DWPD" is not really a valid metric to look at for this drive.

I have several workloads where I will do > 1DWPD (network packet capture, rrd graphing, etc) so in my use case, < 1DWPD (ON SMALL DRIVES) isn't very good...
Click to expand...

I understand that there are plenty of enterprise cases where you need 1 DWDP or more... But there are plenty that don't. Like I said a VM server. Also plenty of big data storage doesn't need many writes. Most data is stale, it gets written and sits there, not overwritten.

So I can understand why low DWPD things still apply to enterprise. That said, Micron agrees with you, looks like they discontinued the ECO models. Just the Pro and Max now.
 
I spend about 100 for a tb ssd. So it is 4x the cost of what I'd buy.

Also, I wonder what kind of reliability it has. Ssd's don't last forever with you basically just being lucky to get one that doesn't get unrecoverable read errors after a couple years. A huge drive like that starting to fail would be incredibly inconvenient... And its size makes it hard to backup
 
Darth Ender said:
I spend about 100 for a tb ssd. So it is 4x the cost of what I'd buy.

Also, I wonder what kind of reliability it has. Ssd's don't last forever with you basically just being lucky to get one that doesn't get unrecoverable read errors after a couple years. A huge drive like that starting to fail would be incredibly inconvenient... And its size makes it hard to backup
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You must buying the cheap crappy brand SSDs...
I still have one of the original Samsung RBX SSDs, that thing came PREINSTALLED in a CORE 2 laptop...
Samsung 830 256GB still chugging along too.
Literally 100% of the SSDs I have, have never failed yet. They are mostly Samsung's though. 7 Samsung's, 2 HPs, 1 Sabrent NVME pcie4.

A decent SSD will work until you decide you need more space and buy a bigger drive.
 
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Eh. This is a halo-enterprise product. The data density makes my server look like a tinker toy, but it's not practical for 99.99999999% of use cases.

If I were sending storage up in a space ship or something like that? I'd probably use something like this.
 
Rockenrooster said:
You must buying the cheap crappy brand SSDs...
I still have one of the original Samsung RBX SSDs, that thing came PREINSTALLED in a CORE 2 laptop...
Samsung 830 256GB still chugging along too.
Literally 100% of the SSDs I have, have never failed yet. They are mostly Samsung's though. 7 Samsung's, 2 HPs, 1 Sabrent NVME pcie4.

A decent SSD will work until you decide you need more space and buy a bigger drive.
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Luck of the draw that you haven't had a single SSD failure yet.

Dont know about Darth Ender experience but I've had one SSD fail on me. Ironically, that was a Samsung SSD that failed me (850 EVO mSata) and it failed only a few months after purchase. (wasn't due to nand but something else on the ssd failing).

Not saying they aren't reliable, All other SSD's I own or installed into family member computers still work to this day including my oldest SSD (samsung 830 128GB). Just failures do happen regardless of brands.

Darth Ender said:
Also, I wonder what kind of reliability it has.
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Well... It must be pretty good if the company is saying "Unlimited for 5 Years" on the endurance factor alone.

https://nimbusdata.com/products/exadrive/specifications/

Wish i could find some hard numbers since this SSD been out for a little while now (This news is just Nimbus Data having a public facing price tag on this SSD.)

Although this SSD is probably such a low production item that all Users/Companies that have them dont have any issues with them.
 
You can rent data storage for 5 years for only $8K a year. Its a steal! With how often my little SSD's fail that thing is scary. The warranty is great and all but all they have to do is hand you a new drive, but where'd my 100TB of stuff go?
 
Darth Ender said:
I spend about 100 for a tb ssd. So it is 4x the cost of what I'd buy.

Also, I wonder what kind of reliability it has. Ssd's don't last forever with you basically just being lucky to get one that doesn't get unrecoverable read errors after a couple years. A huge drive like that starting to fail would be incredibly inconvenient... And its size makes it hard to backup
Click to expand...

my 970 EVO, only 4-5 months old, already has a unrecoverable read error :(
 
Dang. What kind of SSDs is everyone getting that fail so often? All of mine are 2.5 and I have one NVME. Is it NVME that have the most problems?

Back in 2010, my dad got adata SSDs for work and 100% of them failed after 2 years. My brother had a mx500 that would basically format itself once a year for 3 years, got tired of that and got a 860 evo lol.
 
Rockenrooster said:
Dang. What kind of SSDs is everyone getting that fail so often? All of mine are 2.5 and I have one NVME. Is it NVME that have the most problems?

Back in 2010, my dad got adata SSDs for work and 100% of them failed after 2 years. My brother had a mx500 that would basically format itself once a year for 3 years, got tired of that and got a 860 evo lol.
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Seems like the ones complaining are all TLC drives. I've purchased nothing but MLC drives and have not had a single issue in 6 years so far.
 
Nifty, I'll get one for my PS3 now and Windows XP box now.
 
DJ Lushious said:
Ha! :ROFLMAO:

Someone had to acknowledge this was a funny joke...
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I was going to mention that there isn't enough midget porn in the world to fill 100TB, but I take my midget porn seriously and didn't want to ruin it.
 
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