Toshiba's $7000+ 400 GB SSD: SAS 6Gb/s, SLC Flash, And Big Endurance

[acku]

Have you ever wondered what separates an enterprise SSD from a consumer-oriented drive? How about SLC and MLC flash (and a corresponding price gap)? We explore the differences with Toshiba's MK4001GRZB SSD, an obviously enterprise-oriented powerhouse.

Toshiba's $7000+ 400 GB SSD: SAS 6Gb/s, SLC Flash, And Big Endurance : Read more

 

[compton]

Good job, Mr. Ku.

Perhaps the Enterprise SSD Fairy will bring you a Hitatchi UltraStar with Intel's 6gbps controller. I'd be eager to see how it compares.

There is no substitute for SLC though.

 

[nebun]

$7000 any company willing to pay this much for an SSD is fullish

 

[bennaye]

[citation][nom]nebun[/nom]$7000 any company willing to pay this much for an SSD is fullish[/citation]

...fullish of cash? Definitely. Foolish? Probably not.

 

[nebun]

[citation][nom]bennaye[/nom]...fullish of cash? Definitely. Foolish? Probably not.[/citation]
damn the english language.....there are way to many words that sound alike

 

[confish21]

How is this $7000 drive profitable over it's competition again?

 

[nitrium]

Why is the 4KB Random read/write performance shown as IOPS, but 128KB and 2MB performance is in MB/sec? What speed (in MB/sec) does this drive achieve in 4KB? I guess I could calculate it from (IOPS * 4KB) / 1024 (I think that's right), but why should I have to?

 

[spazoid]

[citation][nom]amdfreak[/nom]It is too expensive for the performance it offers. You can get a RAID array of many Intel SSDs beating Toshiba in every segment.[/citation]

You've clearly not understood the purpose of this article. Stick to commenting the desktop drive reviews in the future, please.


Thank you for this review, and especially your estimations on the endurance of the drive. It's something that's damn near impossible for us IT professionals to get accurate estimations of in the real world. For some reason, bosses tend to want the expensive hardware to be put to use instead of being thoroughly tested.

More of these types of articles please! :]

 

[Guest]

@spazoid, so you are telling me that you are willing to pay 10x for an endurance of 3x over the INTEL 520 SSD?
Even when the INTEL SSD already has an endurance longer than your refresh cycle for your tech stack?

 

[EJ257]

[citation][nom]frozonic[/nom]LOL, i can just imagine myself in ten years telling my kids that we had to pay 7000$ for a 400gb ssd...by that time we are gonna have 400+ TB ssds[/citation]

"Back in my days storage drives used to have moving parts. Now its all solid state."

 

[jaquith]

I own a small data center and thankfully have access to a 'major' financial institutions test data, and I agree with your conclusions especially regarding deployment into production. $7K SSD is a tough call with a 5-year, but if it were 7~10-year then probably an easy call.

Unlike super-sized enterprise which I am not, the cost/benefit calculations would be difficult for myself. I know firsthand the money that i.e. financial institutions push into their data centers, and for those folks $7K isn't out of the question.

Interesting SSD and if the prices come down and warranty extended then IMO it would be something to consider and compare against Intel's products.

 

[willard]

I came into this article expecting people to bitch about prices, compare to consumer products and just misunderstand enterprise class hardware in general.

I was not disappointed.

 

[therabiddeer]

[citation][nom]nebun[/nom]$7000 any company willing to pay this much for an SSD is fullish[/citation]
I refer you to the ~$20,000 1.2TB fusion-io SSD's.

 

[Guest]

I've got one of those $20,000 fusion IO drives... and it stomps all over my $130,000 storage san...

 

[andywork78]

Good review and test.

but wow... $7000...

I go with 10 of 128GB SSD....

 

[nforce4max]

[citation][nom]nebun[/nom]$7000 any company willing to pay this much for an SSD is fullish[/citation]

Hell I'll gladly pay that much because drives like this save money in the long run. They are cheaper and much easier to set up and maintain vs hundred of mechanical drives in a raid setup. In power alone over the live of the drive vs mechanical drives adds up. So $7k isn't that bad and this isn't the most expensive SSD that I have seen.

 

[holyprof]

[citation][nom]amdfreak[/nom]It is too expensive for the performance it offers. You can get a RAID array of many Intel SSDs beating Toshiba in every segment.[/citation]

Throw 50TB daily writes on that Intel SDD array of yours and it will last you only 3 months until full failure.

 

[A Bad Day]

[citation][nom]nebun[/nom]$7000 any company willing to pay this much for an SSD is fullish[/citation]

"Hey uh, our entire rack of $50 SSDs simply died on us, along with all of our business files."

 

[garciam]

Anyone thinking this can last longer than a few SSD's raided obviously does not know *** about how NAND works and how much it lasts.
Throw 3 Intel MLC 480 GB SSD's in RAID-5 (1k each), make an agressive overprovisioning...and they will both last MUCH longer and also run circles to this expensive piece of hardware being reviewed.

Heck, it's pretty much touching Fusion-IO pricing without even coming close on speed.

This will only work for people needing plug & play replacement for their SAS drives AND with very deep pockets. Since i suspect the replacement should be made in batches...it will be VERY expensive.

Anyone else with brains can find a lot of cheaper, faster AND more reliable solutions.

I'd wait for a Velodrive, raid a couple of them and just have regular backups on a storage with regular HDD's (that is, read GB/s from a couple SSD's...write GB/s sequentially to a storage).

I do understand though that there are out there companies that can't risk innovation and smart choices and have to recur to handwritten promises and warranties of the big guys.

Reason why buying a Dell costs a hell lot more than building it yourself.
Reason why building your own storage is a fraction of the price of an EMC solution.

And so on...

 

[Reynod]

Anybody checked to see if it is worth it's weight in gold or platinum ?


For $7000 that is the first thing I would have done Andrew.

 

[peevee]

[citation][nom]EJ257[/nom]"Back in my days storage drives used to have moving parts. Now its all solid state."[/citation]

"Why are they called drives, granpa?"

 

[Guest]

"The last point can't be understated. " Erm, don't you mean can't be OVERstated? Or is it just a really insignificant point?

 

[bin1127]

You guys at toms are one dedicated team. To spend 41 days to test a drive is really impressive.

 

[ozchoz]

Interesting that chose to go with a 2.5" form factor considering there is an imminent shift to 1.8" drives in some vendors for server and storage in order to maximise storage per RU.

 

[JerryC]

LOL, i can just imagine myself in ten years telling my kids that we had to pay 7000$ for a 400gb ssd...
by that time we are gonna have 400+ TB ssds

10 years from now we will still be paying close to that price for a similar drive. Price is the one flaw in SSDs.