News Solidigm's 61 TB SSD Hopes to Vanquish HDDs

cyrusfox

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Woah am I calculating this right? 1000+ R/W cycles for QLC, this is unheard of, I have never seen more than 400...
(32*1024)/30.72≈1066
(65*1024)/61.44≈1083
Is that a typo on PBW metric? Otherwise Solidigm 192-layer QLC is class leading, PLC must be right around the corner....
 
yeah...no.
hdd will be around long time still.
even if u had cheap large fast ssd hdd's better for cold storage of data.

thoguh would love these for gaming.
can finally fit a steam library on ssd's w/o worrying about size issue
 
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Aug 7, 2022
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I just finished upgrading all the drives in my RAID array, and I looked at replacing them with SSDs. It would have cost me more than double to go with SSDs. The issue is the cost for the capacity. Until SSDs reach or get very to close to cost parity with HDDs, they simply won't make sense for mass storage, or even every HPC use. Performance wise, my new drives are plenty fast, and the additional juice to go with SSDs just isn't worth it.
 

USAFRet

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I just finished upgrading all the drives in my RAID array, and I looked at replacing them with SSDs. It would have cost me more than double to go with SSDs. The issue is the cost for the capacity. Until SSDs reach or get very to close to cost parity with HDDs, they simply won't make sense for mass storage, or even every HPC use. Performance wise, my new drives are plenty fast, and the additional juice to go with SSDs just isn't worth it.
And unless you have a 10Gbe LAN, SSD performance is unnoticeable in a NAS.

I have a 480GB SSD as the system drive and small shared space in my NAS.
The other 79.5TB is all HDD.
Accessing either, I cannot tell the difference between SSD and HDD, because the gigabit LAN interface is the limiting factor.
 

PiranhaTech

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I call certain drives hoard drives, and I don't mind using slower tech like QLC as a hoard drive (just need decent reads). Often I have music and video files, and they are going to have really good transfer rates even on magnetic.

Video games especially mostly are reliant on read performance. This is a huge reason why I got the Kingston NV2 that's on sale.
 

eyalo

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Be aware that due to solid state disk tech, SSD chips may deteriorate over time. As in about 5 years. They may offer warranty that'll cover the device but not the data you'll lose. I'm sticking with nvme for boot drive only.
 
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USAFRet

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Be aware that due to solid state disk tech, SSD chips may deteriorate over time. As in about 5 years. They may offer warranty that'll cover the device but not the data you'll lose. I'm sticking with nvme for boot drive only.
"data loss" should never ever be a consideration.
No matter what type of drive.

ALL types of storage device can and do fail.

You personally need to keep good backups.

2 of my 3 most recent dead drives were HDD.
The other was a SATA III SSD.

And if any of my drives were to die right now, the most I'd lose is what I've worked on today. Nothing more.
 
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I’m going to buy five of these and do a raid five lol
 

loveday.ben

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I don’t think their target audience is people at home with massive Plex libraries lol. This will start hitting entry grade enterprise storage and archival solutions. It’s great because it helps drive the cost of enterprise storage down overall, bring it on.
 

warezme

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It's all about the cost. I would have dumped all my spinning drives for SSD's a long time ago if they weren't so much more expensive than HDD's for similar capacity. I thought they would have reached parity by now but they are still stuck on premium.
 

bit_user

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"data loss" should never ever be a consideration.
No matter what type of drive.

ALL types of storage device can and do fail.

You personally need to keep good backups.
However, if your backup medium is SSD, that's where it'll kill you. Let's say some "life event" happens and you go > 90 days without refreshing your backup. That might be all it takes for a QLC or PLC drive that's sitting in a drawer/vault/etc. to start having errors.

Between the two, HDD is still the superior medium for cold storage. Optical is even better, but typically less practical.
 

bit_user

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I thought they would have reached parity by now but they are still stuck on premium.
The key difference is that HDDs store bits on what are basically a set of blank platters. Sure, the platters need to be precision-manufactured, but they just need to be very uniform and that's basically it. I'm sure they're much cheaper and simpler to produce than a blank silicon wafer of equivalent area.

Whereas every storage cell in a flash chip needs to be etched by a much more expensive lithography machine. So, flash needs to reach extremely high densities to offset the per-mm^2 cost difference in manufacturing techniques, not to mention the differential between wafer and platter costs.
 

bit_user

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From the article:

now TLC, which has become the de-facto value standard for SSD-based products despite the initial outcries regarding the loss in performance and endurance.
Sounds like it was lifted from an article written several years ago. QLC has already been the de facto standard, for a while. Maybe not for products shipped by Solidigm, which is more biased towards enterprise & datacenter sales, but if we're considering the SSDs and NAND flash used in phones, chromebooks, and removable storage, then I'm sure TLC exited those markets years ago.

for anyone saying that QLC can't provide the same level of performance as previous solutions, we'd point you toward Solidigm's own D5-P5316 QLC SSD, which offers up to 800,000 random read IOPS, 7 GB/sec sequential read and 3.6 GB/sec sequential write bandwidth across a PCIe gen 4×4 NVMe interconnect throughout its 30.72 TB capacity.
Wow, that's such an outrageous claim, I knew it couldn't be true. So, I had a look at StorageReview's writeup of that drive, which they characterized as "a read-optimized SSD designed for warm storage". Uh oh, this doesn't look good, @Francisco Alexandre Pires .

Then, I scrolled down to their sequential write benchmarks, and we see that it basically hits a wall at about 800 MB/s.

StorageReview-Intel-P5316-30TB-SeqWrite-64k.png

the volume and capacity advantage for SSDs (which occupy a smaller footprint than most HDDs) may turn around choices for even cold storage applications.
Except they don't do cold storage. And if you did spec a SSD for cold storage, you'd lose the density & any cost advantage.
 
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USAFRet

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However, if your backup medium is SSD, that's where it'll kill you. Let's say some "life event" happens and you go > 90 days without refreshing your backup. That might be all it takes for a QLC or PLC drive that's sitting in a drawer/vault/etc. to start having errors.

Between the two, HDD is still the superior medium for cold storage. Optical is even better, but typically less practical.
And that is why defense in depth is a thing.

3-2-1
3 copies, on at least 2 different media, at least 1 offsite.
 

bit_user

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The number of use cases where RAID 0 + NVMe is a viable configuration is vanishingly small.
@Mandark said "RAID 5".

And what do you mean about it not being "viable"?

Approaching zero in the consumer space.
BTW, I'm not sure if you noticed, but this article doesn't seem to deal with consumer media. Nowhere does either the text or the slides mention M.2 form-factor. The slides explicitly list which form factors they're talking about, and it's all server & datacenter stuff.
 
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