Exactly my case, I am using Synology 425+ NAS with 4x 12TB synology HDD and it can saturate the 2.5+1gbps aggregate link easily, but if SATA SSD is available I will be tempted to use it if any drive goes bad as the rebuild time should be much quicker due to random R/W IOPS, raid 5 or raid 6 plus extra copy on PC should be good enough for most consumer unless their home is on fire IMO, most data loss comes from single copy in a single drive/mediaI would be happy with SATA SSDs in the 12-20TB range for my Synology NAS. Sure, the interface of a single drive limits bandwidth, but SHR addresses that; my current 16xx with 6x 16TB mechanical drives can cope with a 10Gb LAN connection and manage almost-wire speed transfers consistently. Replacing the HDs with SSDs would easily accomodate 10Gbe transfers, possible bi-directional, or even 2 x 10Gbe interfaces.
Of course NVMe is faster, but the largest NVMe drive I can find is 8TB and horrendously expensive. And no doubt hot. Give me a lower-cost SATA SSD, with a memory technology that can handle SATA-III speed (or close to it) and I'm a happy bunny with a RAID
I like the Synology [other brands available] form factor and low power draw; I dont want to build a tower with an EATX board to handle multiple PCIe-attached 4TB NVME drives (I would need 5 PCIe adaptors and 20 drives just to approach 80TB).
But hey, I was also hoping for a single-slot PCIe graphics card in the days of the 1070. Its taken until the 3050 for it to become reality.
In regards to backups, I agree with that best practice dictates backing-up to a different media, but what consumer media has the capacity, interface, and the right price point? As it is, I backup key data, not the entire NAS.
excalibur1814
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- Sep 12, 2009
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The problem is one of greed. Why should these drives enter the market, when spinners are still being purchased day in, day out. The market is there and the cash keeps coming in. Would 'you' disrupt that easy cash cow to release this fancy new product? Probably not. Will they appear? Eventually. When? When people stop buying 16/24Tb spinners.
- Jan 20, 2010
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Switching to a SATA SSD will certainly boost random performance, but the SATA interface will be your next hurdle.
It would be interesting if we start seeing NAS models that support either 12 gigabit SAS or U.2 drives. They wouldn't actually need to connect each U.2 drive at full x4 width. Just using PCIe 3.0 x2 would already be faster than 12 gigabit SAS. Even PCIe 3.0 x1 would be faster than SATA.
- Jan 20, 2010
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I don't understand this argument. If a company can make a SSD that gives them an advantage over their competitors, they'll do it. That's exactly what behavior greed predicts.
The only reason higher-density NAND flash has come to enterprise SSDs and not yet consumer ones is that the consumer drives with such chips would still be too expensive and therefore not sell in high enough volume to be worth making.
It sounds awfully entitled for you guys to be talking like the SSD industry is somehow willfully holding back from giving you what you want. I understand you're frustrated, but I think it's still a miracle the tech is continuing to advance at all. By increasing bits per cell and moving to 3D NAND, the SSD industry made massive strides over the past decade, but the gains are slowing down again, as they must resort to only 3D layering and chip-stacking as the main ways to increase density. Both lithography gains and increasing bits per cell are running out of gas.
LOL, because many of the companies in those markets are completely different! Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix have no real footprint in the HDD market, not to mention Phison and Silicon Motion.
Sure, there are some players with a foot in both markets, but those are mainly HDD makers that also make SSDs. They're not in a position to hold back the SSD industry.
I have said this many times here for the past 4 years that I'm a photographer and I have all my raw files on 1 internal very fast 8TB SSD (M.2 PCIe 4 for now) and backed up to 3 more just like it (for 3 synced copies - one off site). I have about 7 TB of raw files now so am approaching that limit as I shoot every week. I might hgave about a year left maybe. I desperately want a 10 or 12 TB SSD to get me through3 or 4 more years of shooting. I don't want any kind of NAS or array. I want everything on one 10 or 12 TB SSD with 3 more for backup. I would happily pay 4 grand for four 10 or 12 TB SSDs right now.
Jared (on the comments of past articles on 8TB SSDs) has been kind enough to tell me why there are no 10 TB or greater PCIe 4 (or 5) M.2 SSDs right now in the consumer market and not likely anytime soon, but it makes me sad because I need them. I'm about to build a new high-end PC and I want to install three 10 or 12 TB PCIe 4 M.2s on the Motherboard).
Jared (on the comments of past articles on 8TB SSDs) has been kind enough to tell me why there are no 10 TB or greater PCIe 4 (or 5) M.2 SSDs right now in the consumer market and not likely anytime soon, but it makes me sad because I need them. I'm about to build a new high-end PC and I want to install three 10 or 12 TB PCIe 4 M.2s on the Motherboard).
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LOL, nice try! I have yet to find out his forum ID (if he has one). I haven't seen any evidence he reads these comments, either (sadly for us).
Die-stacking.
Also:
Source: https://www.palomartechnologies.com/blog/bid/80106/Stack-Die-3D-IC-Assembly-Drivers-and-Challenges
Crazy, eh?
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It's refurb, and not a very desktop-friendly form factor, but you could get these 16 TB drives for less than that.
More of a FYI thing, rather than a serious suggestion.
Sadly, the best price I can find on a new 16 TB datacenter drive is outside your price range:
JarredWaltonGPU
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So, anything beyond 8TB is very difficult to do right now in an M.2 form factor. M.2 limits power to basically 12W (11.55W or something officially, I think), with burst power going up to 25W or something. But that truly is "burst" power, meaning it's for transients and should not be sustained in any way, shape, or form.
This was one of the big problems with PCIe 5.0 drives, keeping power draw below the limits. Phison had to do some serious tuning and tweaking of their controller to get the E26 to stay below the limits, while hitting higher speeds. (See our Max14um article: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-com...ed-phison-e26-max14um-2tb-performance-preview)
Most of the other companies basically didn't even try to do PCIe 5.0 until they had 7nm/6nm controllers. Innogrit is the only other company to do 12nm (I think, on the IG5666) with PCIe 5.0, and it was worse than Phison's E26 — on power as well as overall performance. (See: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/adata-legend-970-pro-ssd-review) Now we have multiple TSMC N6/N7 designs, though, and power has dropped quite a bit.
Anyway, the issue is with 8TB on M.2, you're basically capped out on the number of NAND chips already. Each controller has a maximum number of channels and CEs (chip enables), and once those are full, you actually get worse performance if you add more NAND per channel. Data center stuff has up to 16 channels, twice as many as the top consumer parts (and lower tier consumer parts are only 4-channel). So with data center, you can still get a very high performance 16-channel, 16TB SSD, and you have 25W to work with on U.2 and similar.
With consumer M.2 drives, it's theoretically possible to do 16TB with a dual-sided drive, but it would need cutting-edge QLC NAND packages to get there. And then you'd potentially have enough NAND that if it was all active at once, you'd exceed the 12W limit... and QLC would mean it's still slow.
So basically, the 8TB WD Black SN850X is as good as it gets right now for consumer SSDs in terms of capacity and performance (TLC and PCIe 4.0). I think Phison and some of its partners might do 8TB with E28, and possibly Samsung and Silicon Motion could offer that as well. But 8TB M.2 drives are very niche products, and balancing power with performance will be difficult. For anyone who seriously wants a 16TB SSD, picking up a U.2 drive (with an adapter) shouldn't be too much of an ask.
Long-term, I think with more NAND layers and process node shrinks (on the controller), we'll eventually see 16TB M.2 drives. I believe PCIe 6.0 is also looking to boost M.2 power limits to 25W when that arrives (first on data center, naturally). Basically, best-case I'd guess M.2 16TB is at least a few years off still, and when it eventually arrives, it could still end up as a $1000+ niche product.
-Fran-
Glorious
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I think you have the wrong impression: some friends have the money for an Airbus and have bought an Airbus with plans to buying more. This is to say, in case the allegory wasn't clear: friends do buy enterprise drives, new, for their NAS'es and they spend some serious money on this...
That being said, I don't disagree: I would never even consider one of these. As I said, I'm happy with 2TB HDDs for my lame-as-heck NAS 😀
Regards.
- Mar 16, 2013
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My statement was about buying a single A380, and not a fleet of them.
Convincing Airbus to sell you a single one would be difficult.
And as far as your friends? Price for a used A380 starts at about $20,000,000+.
-Fran-
Glorious
- May 3, 2007
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And here I thought my English writing skills weren't so terrible for being a non-native speaker.
I guess I have to learn again/more?
Regards.
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SATA have the benefit of interchangable with HDDs, and size make it easier to make much bigger SSDs, the thing from my personal experience is that e.g. with a Raid 5 config with 4x 12TB HDDs, the through put in sequencial read/write can easily exceed 300MB/s and near saturate the throughput of 5GBE connection, which is plenty for even importing files into lightroom processing without making a big load waiting times, so IMO for real world application, given it is slower interface, don't need massive heat generating controller and easily switchable between HDD and SSDs are a plus, all NVMe will become too cost prohibitive for large volume application though.
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I read something about NVMe hard drives, a few years ago. Maybe it was just that the spec now supports them? Not sure if anyone actually started making them, yet.
likely not, and for one, say Synology, which is no.1 trusted in security for NAS, the non rack mounted version only have SATA main bay and maybe with NVMe slots for read/write cache, even without the NVMe cache it's easy to saturate the 2.5Gbpe link aggregated ports in 4 bay models, the main thing making significant difference is that SATA SSDs will rebuild much quicker in case of failure and no loading noise/spin up time, if one wanted NVMe I think there are some great all NVMe systems out there, but at my age, most ppl value system stability and volume vs hackability than shear speed, so just hoping the SATA drives arn't going extinct soon
George³
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BOM also isn't problem. I suppose is id around $200-250. But margin from there to retail prices is problem.
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George³
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