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Comment by bullen | Hacker News Reader

I said it before and I'll say it all again:

I bought 30x X25-E SSDs from 2011 because:

- Spinning disks consume 5-10W when idling (as in ready to read/write idle).

- Spinning disks have 2 motors (spin and head driver) that inevitably fail.

That said the SLC(1) -> MLC(2) -> TLC(3) -> QLC(4) layers is a race to the bottom with increased complexity and failures over time!

These are the reasons big actors still use tape as storage medium!!!

There is no great solution, but 64GB 50nm SLC SSDs from 2011 have the best write per bit that will ever be seen (100.000), they only use 0.07W on idle and ~2W when writing/reading. So if your motherboard has alot of SATA ports it might be the best solution until some real innovation happens!

Edit: Maybe I'm the only person in the world that can have 5 million customers on 512GB? Atleast I can have them for 250 years if they all write to the database every day now no matter how expensive electricity becomes!

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> Spinning disks have 2 motors ... head driver

Wrong. One motor. The head moves with something called a voice coil. It's completely solid state. Open up a hard drive and watch it move back and forth while it's working. Of course this isn't good for the hard drive, but it looks basically instant to the naked eye. Very cool.

Probably splitting hairs, but I’d still call it a motor. It transforms electric current into physical motion.

true but the structure is simpler than the main disc motor

ok, I guess "moving part" would have been more precise, still the argument holds: that coil breaks.

Or you could get a single DC P4600 and have the same capacity at five times the endurance rating, despite 'inferior technology'.

I have explored those options, but:

1) It's more expensive for more complexity and shrinking disk space as the hidden flaw.

2) The heat will kill those drives looong before my 100 year expected lifetime for my setup.

Also with 8x 64GB drives per motherboard manually mounted I can fix things over time.

30x64GB = 1920GB. That is nowhere near the storage requirement people have, no case or PCIe extenders will give you hundreds of sata ports. And power consumption? 100 2W SSDs still consume 200W in use.

But this is not for (longer-term) storage. Consider scratch space for graphics, video editing, massive compilation. Something that needs a lot of fast writes.

A RAID0 array of HDDs is a traditional way to solve it; it's slower than an SLC SSD. A QLC disk won't be any faster than an HDD at high write loads, but would die significantly sooner.

Of course, for your home NAS you just take a bunch of 5400rpm HDDs and store your videos on the cheap. And for your gaming PC you take a cheap QLC SSD and enjoy the high read speeds while doing pretty little writes.

Many SAS expander cards can be chained to support up to 255 devices.

I guess I should state that I made my own database and that I control the amount of data better then most people.

If you need more than 512GB for you product and still can't pay rent then you are out of luck I guess!

Ok, I'll bite: what does the database contain?

My multiplayer online standard data: https://github.com/tinspin/fuse

You can try the database here: http://root.rupy.se

>and failures over time!

Are there any studies that show that TLC/QLC SSDs are less reliable at the SSD level? I'm pretty sure TLC is already used by enterprise SSDs.

Enterprise SSDs use capacitor backed dram to buffer writes.

Some consumer SSDs do that, too. But with significant smaller amounts of dram.

This can intercept all the small writes that you e.g. do for metadata of the filesystem and via mapping can combine them into very few big writes. Or writes to the same position over and over again only need to touch the flash when the devices is powering down.

Are there any QLC enterprise SSDs? All the cheaper used enterprise SSDs I looked up where using TLC so far.

I'm pretty sure the only real factor in reliability is the SSD controller. The NAND will affect the lifespan of the SSD but when you have TBs of data a lot of it is written once.

Is it worth buying one 64GB SSD/SLC for $150, when for the same price you can buy 4x 250GB SSD/MLC?

Yes! Because:

1) They don't make them any more. SLC scarcity is about to blow up!

2) MLC is completely garbage! All SLC drives in the world will still be operational decades after all MLC has completely stopped working!

3) You need to have stable storage (quality), everything else (quantity) is less important because you can work around it with compression f.ex. OTOH when a bit stops working you are screwed!

Sidenote: You need to be able to power your machines on lead-acid batteries, so magnetic is out of the question, you also need to power the drives independently from the motherboard to get power stability and the ability to power them when the mains go out for longer times and not loose data! 0.07W x 8 on 100Ah = 3 months!

Storing 2 petabytes in 64GB shards is a breeze.

Multiply your 0.07 W or 2W to match single 12 TB hdd, where is the power saving?

Spinning disks do not consume anything while idling. They spin down or are in not even connected.

10W is enough power to fly quadcopter, way too much to maintain spin on disk plates.

Yup, a 3-platter 5400 SATA drive consumes 5W while writing.

While I agree with you, one normally does not spin down raid disks.

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