200TB SSDs could come soon thanks to Micron's new chip

Some of that is probably covid supply shortages. SSDs have controllers, and controllers have chips.

The prices kinda look like they are going down a tiny bit, and thats because companies keep introducing ssd’s without dram cache. One those are halfway full their writes are maybe 3/4 fast as a hdd and they might last for 2-3 years

Have you looked at something like Intel 660p? They're pretty crappy as SSDs go, but they're quite cheap (by about 40% compared to what I would put into my desktop, at least where I live).

That makes sense considering that QLC (2^4 charge levels) only stores 33% more data per cell than TLC (2^3 charge levels). Therefore at best it can only be 33% cheaper/bigger.

Well, for me it's noise, power/heat and shock resistance (in laptops). And these have also indirect negative consequences. For example, an external 3.5" HDD needs an additional power supply and cable in addition to the data cable, which is cumbersome and reduces portability.

Not the op, but I've just switched away from spinning disks recently. Kinda.

I have a NAS of 4x 8TB WD Red Pro; and a a desktop with 4x1 TB of nvME and 1TB of (grandfathered) SATA SSD.

For batch photo processing (i.e. lightroom) spinning disk is really sub-optimal. I'd rather have a 256GB or 512GB nvme and process batch by batch (and then offload to NAS), then a 8TB 7200 RPM HDD with all my photos.

To OPs point - depending on shooting style, you might easily do 300GB+ over a single wedding (primary + secondary shooter, 2 cameras each, 46MP, 14-bit uncompressed, spray-and-pray style).

Earthquakes.

There's a good chunk of price to performance tradeoff. Taking samsung as an example, currently their lower end is $95/TB and their higher end is $125/TB. WD currently has a cheap QLC for $75/TB and a gen4 drive for $140/TB.

This is looking mostly around the 2TB range, and mostly M.2

It's hard to physically fit large amounts onto an M.2, but a 2.5 inch SATA drive would hold a big pile of QLC flash just fine.

I suppose the SATA bottleneck just looks bad. Maybe if we had better consumer support for 2.5 inch drives with NVMe then companies would be more willing to make that size.

Not OP, but for me the main reason would be travel. A SSD is much easier to carry as an external drive together with a laptop.

if you are moving that data around, nas/cloud storage can be super frustrating. copying 16tb of data over usb3/c is much faster than 100mbps or 200mbps internet.

If one SSD has a failure rate of 5%, 4 SSDs will have a failure rate of 18.6%. If the 4 devices are in a RAID0 for convenience (don't have to figure out where to put files), there is an 18.6% chance of losing all data vs 5% with a 16TB drive. You can use RAID5/6 to mitigate the risk but then lose capacity.

IMO, higher SSD speeds are not a target for improvement by manufacturers, but a side-effect of using higher-density chips, which is more cost-effective. They probably can't make a slow, high-capacity SSD economically.

>Opening a single picture is a sequential operation

Exactly what i was thinking!

Not the person you replied to, but bulk exports from something like Lightroom or Capture One benefit from faster speeds. If you have a fast enough CPU and enough memory, the main bottleneck is I/O. It doesn't matter for a few photos, but when you want to (for example) convert a whole trip worth of processed raws to JPG, every MB/sec counts.

Laptops tend to not have HDD slots anymore.

Raw photos are 30-100MB in size. Going through your shots on an HDD is excruciatingly slow.

AFAICT this has been documented quite well. Use a SSD as cache. Easy to do with ZFS. The one I use on my NAS is one TB, it cost 200 EUR. It has the benefit of not causing data loss at power loss.

You could say the same thing about CPUs. Do you buy the $400 CPU that has good performance? Or do you splurge for the top of the line Threadripper that costs a few thousand? It is always a trade-off between price and performance. If the situation is right and your job justifies saving a few minutes for lots of money, then go for it.

If I needed a ton of disk space and I could buy a 50TB HDD for $1000 or a 50TB SSD for $5000 right now, I would opt for the HDD. But that is just me.

resilience too, especially if you're just mostly storing the data and not overwriting it constantly which is the actual death of SSDs whereas it's is mechanical wear with HDDs

For 50Tb? I'm not one to question anyone's data hoarding, but I just can't imagine needing silence or random access on 50Tb, at least not enough to justify 5x prices. By all means, give me 5Tb in my laptop at lightning speed, I'll pay through the nose for it. But in bulk? I can't imagine wanting to spend thousands when hundreds will do.

If I'm buying for my home 6 bay NAS, I'll take the savings and buy the HDDs. As it stands now, network performance is my bottleneck, not the hard drives.

I'll only consider SSD for that system when the price is competitive. And I do spend extra on NAS HDDs.

There aren't a lot of use cases for putting that much flash storage behind the bottleneck of a single SAS or SATA port. Most of the time when you're paying tens of thousands for flash, it's worth paying for enough IO bandwidth to actually be able to use all the performance that mountain of flash can offer.

I think it's less of an ad and more an in depth explanation about the technology that goes into high capacity SSDs. Today, Pure just happens to be one of the only companies with a product on the market. That will no doubt change in a few months.

I am not familiar with this. I just watched the video yesterday and found it interesting to know that enterprises are considering alternative controllers, and also caches which would enable SSD with larger sizes.

If we could replace chips like we could replace cells in batteries, things would be better maybe.

But I would love to have a pure SSD NAS.

20TB for home user is probably for storage so I would expect longevity to be way better than HDD.

See e.g. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-reliable-are-ssds/: “SSDs can be expected to last as long or longer than HDDs in most general applications.”

My experience with SSDs and rotational drives (which may be somewhat dated and also biased by the specific models I was exposed to) is SSD failure rate is significantly lower than spinning drives, although I don't think I got much experience at 5+ years with SSDs, maybe there's a cliff. The downside is that SSD failures had no known prefailure indicators and tended to result in a completely inaccessible device with no chance of a last minute copy, whereas rotational drives often give signs (SMART metrics/warnings, failed reads of specific sectors, etc) and a last minute copy can be pretty effective if the signs are noticed in time. Sure, you should have backup protocols, but many people don't... so probability of an incident goes down, but probability of full data loss given an incident goes way up. In theory, SSDs are supposed to detect when they wear out and go to read only mode, but I've never seen that happen, and I've not run write heavy workloads that got them close to wearing out anyway.

I have basic understanding of a generic process. I mean specifically 200+ layers. Do they “just” deposit layer after layer after layer, 200-something times?