News Samsung quietly launches 61.44TB SSD, talks about a 122.88TB model

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I am a photographer and use 8TB SSDs - not in an array, but individually. I need at least 12 TB and 16 would be great. I have several 8TB Samsung SATA SSDs (those are getting cheaper and are slow, but still 4 times faster than spinning rust) and 2 or 3 very expensive 8TB PCIE 4 M.2 SSDs.
I am shocked that there is not more demand for some higher capacity SSDs. I predicted 3 years ago that by now we would have 16 TB PCIe 4 M.2 SSDs for less than 400 bucks. Boy was I wrong. We are stuck in the mud at 8TB.
 
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Samsung? Hard pass. I wouldn't pay $20, and even then, I wouldn't trust any data storage for more than a year. Samsung products are typically buggy with poor firmware and worse support. Samsung products are prone to failure within 2-3 years in my experience, doesn't matter whether it's a TV, smartphone, SSD, or HDD. YMMV but I doubt it will.
 
JJEvans25 said:
Samsung? Hard pass. I wouldn't pay $20, and even then, I wouldn't trust any data storage for more than a year. Samsung products are typically buggy with poor firmware and worse support. Samsung products are prone to failure within 2-3 years in my experience, doesn't matter whether it's a TV, smartphone, SSD, or HDD. YMMV but I doubt it will.
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You made an account 20 minutes ago to write this comment lol. You are so demonstrably wrong and an obvious troll. Leave.
 
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That is not even remotely true. Samsung makes great products (especially TVs, refrigerators, SSDs, tablets, etc. You are being pretty obvious there.
That said, we all get mad at major manufacturers of electronics from time to time when stuff breaks. I have a good friend who is a successful professional who boycotted Samsung 6 years ago because some local repair service on a refrigerator warranty gave him the run around on a faulty icemaker. He was furious that the icemaker broke on a 6-month-old Samsung refrigerator, and it took them 2 weeks to fix it. Now he won't get a Samsung TV, even though those are outstanding. LOL. (Replying to wawaplanets who slammed Samsung across the board.)
 
Since we're all trading Samsung stories, I know someone who has used Samsung SSDs for around 11 years now (how time flies), and they still work. Their Crucial 2.5'' SSD failed and their external spindle disk drives of another name brand failed, but not the Samsung SSDs. My own Samsung SSD has been working 8 years straight now. No complaints. Except for the recent firmware issue on the 2TB 980 Pro, I don't see anything wrong with Samsung drives.
 
The article said:
One of the world's highest-capacity SSDs has been released without fanfare.
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What do you mean by "quietly"? Are you just saying it launched without a dedicated press release? Is it that uncommon for datacenter products?

They did make a blog post for it, which the article linked. So, it's not like they just added it to their catalog without telling anybody.

At present, only Solidigm (D5-P5336) and Western Digital (SN655) can offer 61.44TB capacity with a PCIe interface.
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Uh, that's still two and means they're hardly the first to reach this milestone.
 
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SB99 said:
How much? Asking for a friend... 😂
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Since it's probably aimed at competing with this drive from Solidigm, I'd say somewhere in the ballpark of $7.6k.

If that's too rich for your blood, consider this 31 TB option, at $3.2k:

Both QLC drives, though. And in either case, you'd want to have some kind of backup or redundancy solution, because SSDs tend to fail hard when they fail.

A year ago, I snapped up one of these (new; full warranty) for less than half the current price:

The only bad thing about it is the high idle power (about 5W, according to specs). In order to provide the lowest latency, it doesn't support ASPM. It's like a sprinter who's always crouched at the starting line, waiting to pounce on new requests as soon as they arrive.
 
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Greg7579 said:
I am shocked that there is not more demand for some higher capacity SSDs. I predicted 3 years ago that by now we would have 16 TB PCIe 4 M.2 SSDs for less than 400 bucks. Boy was I wrong. We are stuck in the mud at 8TB.
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You predicted based on what... just extrapolating trends? Don't do that. Tech doesn't always follow neat exponential curves. Sometimes, the progress moves more in fits and starts. Pricing can also be highly variable, based on fluctuations in supply, demand, and geopolitics.

Interesting you should mention 16 TB M.2 SSDs, since NAND chips with the requisite density were just announced:

Greg7579 said:
Samsung makes great products (especially TVs, refrigerators, SSDs, tablets, etc.
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I wouldn't compare these types of products to their semiconductor division. Being such a massive conglomerate means these products have nothing to do with each other. They share a brand and maybe some corporate culture, but that's it. The business units responsible for them might as well be completely separate companies, given how little they probably interact.
 
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JJEvans25 said:
Samsung? Hard pass. I wouldn't pay $20, and even then, I wouldn't trust any data storage for more than a year. Samsung products are typically buggy with poor firmware and worse support. Samsung products are prone to failure within 2-3 years in my experience, doesn't matter whether it's a TV, smartphone, SSD, or HDD. YMMV but I doubt it will.
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About 4 years ago my work (a collection of libraries) transitioned all staff and patron computers using mechanical based drives to Samsung 860 EVO SSDs, about 800 computers in total running a mixture of 256 gigabyte and 512 gigabyte drives.
In the last 4 years we only had 3 SSD failures.
We called support and said these 3 drives had died under warranty and each time they sent us a new drive back through advanced replacement.

If you can't trust data storage for a year then try an online backup solution.
I use Crashplan at my house for online backup.
Unlimited storage for about $12 a month ... I currently have 16.6 terabytes backed up.
This may not be worth it if you only have like 400 gigabytes to backup, but for multi-terabyte backups that price is hard to beat!
 
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Greg7579 said:
I am a photographer and use 8TB SSDs - not in an array, but individually. I need at least 12 TB and 16 would be great. I have several 8TB Samsung SATA SSDs (those are getting cheaper and are slow, but still 4 times faster than spinning rust) and 2 or 3 very expensive 8TB PCIE 4 M.2 SSDs.
I am shocked that there is not more demand for some higher capacity SSDs. I predicted 3 years ago that by now we would have 16 TB PCIe 4 M.2 SSDs for less than 400 bucks. Boy was I wrong. We are stuck in the mud at 8TB.
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The switch to M.2 2280 is entirely to blame for the current capacity of client drives. 2.5" drives simply have way more surface area in which to mount NAND and they can double as a heatsink which makes double sided less problematic.

As @bit_user pointed out we're just now getting NAND capacities high enough to make 16TB client drives plausible.
 
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thestryker said:
The switch to M.2 2280 is entirely to blame for the current capacity of client drives. 2.5" drives simply have way more surface area in which to mount NAND and they can double as a heatsink which makes double sided less problematic.
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2.5" SATA SSD exist in that physical format, mainly for mounting compatibility.

Pop one open, and it is mostly air inside.
 
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USAFRet said:
2.5" SATA SSD exist in that physical format, mainly for mounting compatibility.

Pop one open, and it is mostly air inside.
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These days, that's true, as SATA SSDs have been relegated to the low end. However, if you were to open one of these 61 TB models, you'd see it's far from empty! That shows the potential of the form factor.

Here's a review of Solidigm's 61 TB drive. I can't embed the image in this post, but they show the PCB right near the top and it indeed fills out the drive's case.

Also, I'd point out that SATA SSDs were the first consumer drives to reach 4 TB and the first to reach 8 TB. That's due to the flexibility provided by their form factor, and no other reason.

Finally, @thestryker mentioned cooling. Datacenter SSDs can use up to 25 W. Try that in a M.2 form factor and you'd find active cooling would become a necessity!
 
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USAFRet said:
2.5" SATA SSD exist in that physical format, mainly for mounting compatibility.

Pop one open, and it is mostly air inside.
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I didn't say SATA now did I? The 61.44TB drives mentioned in this very article are available in U.2/3 2.5" format.

Not to mention the fact that they only shrank the boards inside SATA SSDs as components shrank/became higher capacity. Open up one of the original crop and you'll find the boards were about the size of the enclosure.
 
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thestryker said:
I didn't say SATA now did I? The 61.44TB drives mentioned in this very article are available in U.2/3 2.5" format.

Not to mention the fact that they only shrank the boards inside SATA SSDs as components shrank/became higher capacity. Open up one of the original crop and you'll find the boards were about the size of the enclosure.
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Yes.

Time goes on, capacity increases for the size of the drive.

500GB HDD vs 20TB HDD, in the same physical 3.5" package.

64GB SATA SSD vs WhereverWeAreNowTB, in the same physical package.
 
Greg7579 said:
I am a photographer and use 8TB SSDs - not in an array, but individually. I need at least 12 TB and 16 would be great. I have several 8TB Samsung SATA SSDs (those are getting cheaper and are slow, but still 4 times faster than spinning rust) and 2 or 3 very expensive 8TB PCIE 4 M.2 SSDs.
I am shocked that there is not more demand for some higher capacity SSDs. I predicted 3 years ago that by now we would have 16 TB PCIe 4 M.2 SSDs for less than 400 bucks. Boy was I wrong. We are stuck in the mud at 8TB.
Click to expand...
There is plenty of demand for these high capacity drives in data centers. If you use a traditional vSAN setup with caching and capacity drives these would be your capacity drives.
 
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Amdlova said:
Years ago... 1 one drive per day of endurance... now 0.26... Now I know what is the meaning of QLC quad loss cells
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Well, here's what Solidigm claims about theirs:

Endurance Rating (Lifetime Writes): 0.58 DWPD (16K RW) / 65.2
​
Not sure quite how to parse that, but it's literally what the specs say. When I do the math, 0.58 DWPD works out to 65.1 PBW. I'd guess the 16K part is indicating it's computed using an average transaction size of 16 kB?
 
thestryker said:
The switch to M.2 2280 is entirely to blame for the current capacity of client drives. 2.5" drives simply have way more surface area in which to mount NAND and they can double as a heatsink which makes double sided less problematic.

As @bit_user pointed out we're just now getting NAND capacities high enough to make 16TB client drives plausible.
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I'd say it's more the fact that for 75% of people 1TB is plenty and for 99% of people 4TB is plenty. My feeling is most people who need more than 4TB have a lot of movies or videos on their computers so HDD is a better value. Sure there are some people who need more as they do things like video editing. But those people make up the minority of consumers so why make a consumer drive that only less than 1% of consumers will buy. Instead those drives are focused as enterprise consumers as storage is always needed.
 
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