256TB SSD from Samsung
semiconductor.samsung.com
semiconductor.samsung.com
I've recently had an unexpected run of failing WD Blue SSDs and just had a new Sandisk drive (not one from gparent) fail, right after I backed another drive up to it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/search?sort=new&restr...
I had the exact same problem with SanDisk as explained in The Verge article. I had it in January, before it became a known major issue, so I guess they were not prepared for that. However, the process was smooth enough, and I just filled a ticket with details, received a couple of questions, send it to their service center and received a new one later. It works fine now.
But I had a similar situation with Samsung SSD too, it died after a couple of months. But they made it impossible to replace it. The process is so bad that I was never able to get into any support for that case, and never received any meaningful response. So I just gave up eventually, so I guess I just donated few hundred dollars to Samsung.
This to me, it's the opposite of observably true. You would think large drives would be most in demand for personal use.
I'm not sure that cloud storage kills anything. There's reasonable mistrust in it and much of the world lives with unreliable infrastructure..
cloud storage doesn’t make local storage irrelevant. just less relevant. drives still fail, new machines are built, etc, etc. and when that happens to the average consumer, they don’t seek out the biggest drive available. just whatever is down the street.
and just down the street doesn’t want to stock dozens of massive drives, lest the average consumers balk at the prices.
Most of the people in my life rely on cloud storage for their digital lives - mostly Google Drive or iCloud. It’s the primary destination for photos and videos for many people, and services like Google docs both store files and remove the need for traditional local storage.
Every year I have more pictures and more documents and more stuff in general to store. That or I have to fuss with pruning things, which is a PITA and I'm reluctant to do.
For example apple requires larger storage to even use prores:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212832
Or Baldur's gate 3 takes 123GB of storage for the install.
Gamers are an exception, but gaming is a niche market. Most people using computers are using laptops with integrated intel gpu and never install any game.
I don't think this is about capacity, but rather it's about performance: small SSDs are slower because they have fewer flash chips to write to in parallel. But that effect goes away as you move up to higher capacities and hit other bottlenecks; even high-end PCIe gen5 SSDs that are too power-hungry for anything other than desktops and servers reach full speed by 2TB.
Also - it starts getting very spendy for cloud storage after a few TB.
eesh.
[Update] from https://www.anandtech.com/show/20007/samsung-teases-256-tb-s...:
"Samsung's 256 TB SSD is based on 3D QLC NAND memory and probably uses innovative packaging to cram multiple 3D QLC NAND devices into stacks."
3D QLC should have higher endurance than regular QLC. We'll have to wait and see for the spec sheet.
This number doesn't reflect that, but maybe the MTBF is just a distraction.
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/6382908
> The JEDEC spec for Enterprise SSD drives requires that the drives retain data for a minimum of 3 months at 40C
>A system (and its enclosed drives) should be powered up at least 2 weeks after 2 months of system power off.
The recommendation to have the drive be powered up for two weeks after taking it out of cold storage is only so that the drive can do it's low-priority background checks of data integrity. If you do a full scrub of your data from the host system, you don't need to worry about that, because you'll be giving the drive all the same opportunities to discover bitrot.
None of the above changes the fact that SSDs are still quite expensive for cold storage purposes.
• 3-bit per cell = TLC ······· 3'000 write cycles per cell
• 2-bit per cell = MLC ····· 10'000 write cycles per cell
• 2-bit per cell = eMLC ··· 30'000 write cycles per cell
• 1-bit per cell = SLC ··· 100'000 write cycles per cell
The above degradation cycles are optimist. Looks like the SSD technology is not evolving, but counter-evolving in terms of data integrity; there are neither MLC, eMLC nor SLC disk nowadays (seven years ago widely available).
Some of this is from more advanced SSD controllers with more robust error correction, enabling drives to get better uncorrectable bit error rates out of flash with a higher raw bit error rate. But most of this is because SLC and MLC simply had more write endurance than people needed, and sacrificing endurance to get higher capacity made for more useful drives. And as larger SSDs have become more affordable, SSDs have been taking over more use cases from hard drives, so unlike a decade ago SSDs aren't just for frequently-modified hot data any more—you don't need as many P/E cycles or DWPD when most of your data isn't changing very often.
Cell modes are done by charging a cell to a level on write, and measuring the voltage on read. The more bits per cell, the more voltage divisions, and the sooner these voltages divisions turns unreadable, while the material degrades. Technically is on the manufacturer's firmware to decide what cell mode is going to use the NAND, assuming the hardware allows it (ADC/DAC, etc).
But even if the data is not changing very often, the controller of the disk needs to do internal writes for to refresh the cell, or even change the data of cell, in order to avoid data loss.
So IMHO, they are not giving more capacity, due that capacity is going to be consumed for to try to keep alive the data. If one fills the QLC disk of the article for long term storage, bad things will happen, as I understand it.
May be should be the user who decide what bit mode must use the disk.
But what is happening, I think, is along years they are stretching like chewing gum the NAND incrementing the bits by cell, hopping the people adopt the reduced endurance as a normality at prices of data-stored, not of NAND chips-used, at time they limit their chips production.
Your opinion aside, QLC drives really do offer more capacity for your dollar, and the extra write cycles necessary to stave off data degradation do not render the drives useless. You absolutely can fill a QLC drive and leave the data on there. You may need to perform scrubs a bit more often than you would for an equivalent TLC drive if you're not writing enough new data to keep things fresh, but that's hardly a showstopper.
> But what is happening, I think, is along years they are stretching like chewing gum the NAND incrementing the bits by cell, hopping the people adopt the reduced endurance as a normality at prices of data-stored, not of NAND chips-used
People have been predicting a catastrophe of low write endurance for many years, and it keeps not happening. There's some plausibility to the notion that consumers may end up getting screwed over by cheap drives that cannot hold up under reasonable usage, but consumer QLC drives have now been on the market for five years: the time limit on those drive warranties is now expiring, with no sign of an epidemic of premature drive failures. And in the enterprise SSD space, it is foolhardy to presume the big customers that would consider buying 256TB SSDs do not understand their workloads and endurance requirements well enough to correctly determine whether QLC is suitable for their needs.
The failure is not shown as an epidemic, it is shown firstly as a degradation; in forums under questions about why turned so slow the disk that find as answer to enable the RAPID mode (so using RAM cache), in other post as regrets about the purchase, and things like that.
those who know what kind of thing they are buying with QLC store disposable data, at time they do not fill the disk.
[2021] doi.org/10.1145/3445814.3446733 (use sci-hub)
" 3D NAND density-increasing techniques, such as extensive stacking of cell layers, can amplify read disturbances and shorten SSD lifetime. From our lifetime-impact characterization on 8 state-of-the-art SSDs, we observe that the 3D TLC/QLC SSDs can be worn-out by low read-only workloads within their warranty period since a huge amount of read disturbance-induced rewrites are performed in the background. "
[..]
" the SSDs entered an era where one can wear out an SSD by simply reading it. "
Not sure if anyone has maximized the space like you're thinking however.
QLC is taking over more and more of the market every year and will continue to do so though because it’s among other things pretty perfect for consumer devices, offering good enough performance especially with a fat cache in front of it, combined with lower prices.
When I keep wondering how my phone is running out of space every time its images / videos. Even when you look at an app that is like 400 MB its not 400 MB of code, its like 350 MB of images and 50 MB of code.
if generative AIs get good enough then I suppose at some point the data transmitted for games and media could be significantly less than now -- you'd 'just' need to transmit the data required for the prompt to generate something within some bounded tolerance.
Imagine a game shipping no textures, generating what was needed on the fly and in real time to fulfill some shipped set of priorities/prompts/flavors.
we're not there yet but it seems like on-the-fly squashing of concepts into 'AI language' is going to be a trend in lossy compression at some point.
It'll be very interesting where AVIF and similar next generation image formats go in the near future, hopefully we'll get some reduction from the exponential growth.
Environmental regulations also bite, an 8K tv that’s “green” is going to have to use very aggressive auto dimming. Storage capacity growth to me looks like it’s outstripping media size growth pretty handily.
Now this isn’t to say I can’t think of a few ways to use a few yottabytes of data but I don’t think there is a real need for this for media consumption. You might see media sizes increase anyways because why not store your movies as 16K RAW files if you have the storage, but such things will become increasingly frivolous.
iPhones for example capture a small collection of images at the same time which are able to be replayed as a small animation (or loop) called “Live photos”.
I am certain the future will hold for us: video which allows us to pan left and right.
These both require more space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerbook_160
I chose the 80 MB version as the 40 was too little, and the 120 was way too much for non-professional use (impossible to ever fill).
Ah yes, Yagnibytes.
My home server has a couple dozen terabytes (on spinning metal) and, with current fill rate, it's predicted it'll need an increase in space only after two of the drives reach retirement according to SMART. It hosts multiple development VMs and stores backups for all computers in the house.
Another aspect is that the total write lifetime is a multiple of the drive capacity. You can treat a 256TB drive as a very durable 16TB drive, able to last 16 times more writes than the 16TB one.
Then you're defiantly not torrenting enough "definitely legit" content as I am. Once you sail the dark seas it piles up quick. Or maybe I have ADHD.
No torrents here, absolutely none.
And yes, this is the universal answer to "how much storage is enough" - use cases will grow to consume generally-available computing resources. Today it's 4k UHD + HDR; tomorrow it'll be 8k UHD + HDR, few years later it will be 120 FPS lightfield recording with separate high-resolution radar depth map channel. And as long as progress in display tech keeps pace, the benefits will be apparent, and adoption will be swift.
I definitely don’t want to delete any of it, so I have been just hoping for bigger storage to be offered soon, but…
I hadn’t considered that re-encoding could be an option. I take standalone snapshots of everything every few months so if re-encoding would make a significant difference I might have to try this.
Do you have any tips on tools, parameters etc. that work well for you, please?
mkdir -p reencoded
ffmpeg -i input_filename.mp4 -c:v libx265 -crf 26 -preset fast -c:a aac -b:a 128k reencoded/output_filename.mp4
Anyway, 20TB takes a 3.5" bay, something my laptop lacks.
I have a 12 TB NAS that is 99% full at the moment. Should I delete movies I may want to watch later, knowing full well they aren’t easily available on the streaming services I pay for? Ha.
It fills fast!
I love all the Backblaze drive update posts about the lifespans of storage media.
Won't take that long.
Even with brand new 25TB 3.5" drives, it's 10 of them, each holding 1,000 movies, for a total of 20,000 hours of entertainment or, roughly, 2 years of uninterrupted watching.
That's a lot.
I now have 24 terabytes in my NAS
(I'm currently working on sending 100TB of images to some colleagues at the NIH for a study, we're doing it about 500GB a night for the next year or however long it'll take just because there's no hurry on the data, so it's not just some academic thought exercise!)
Other cases?
It can be a 1T in some use-cases, but DPWD is probably low.
>Compared to stacking eight 32TB SSDs, one 256TB SSD consumes approximately seven times less power, despite storing the same amount of data.
This is aimed for servers, where the electricity costs are higher because they are running 24/7 and space is limited. Also less power means less heat.
Data density is a hell of a drug.
I have 4k screens and an okay sound system, who are these whatever-philes that think these 60gb rips change the experience meaningfully
like, how many audio tracks you need and the other 50gb so you can stare at black pixels and say “wow these blacks are so impressive”
You can have a great experience by streaming videos directly off shady streaming sites and using a cheap Hisense TV but there will always be a market for people dropping tens to hundreds of grand on some elite home theatre with inky blacks and perfect sound and maybe a datacenter storage array in their garage. It’s practically a hobby.
I did recently get back into piracy, and did a couple comparisons since I figured 4gb h265 is so last decade, and I really wasnt amused by the larger bluray rips. I have 20/10 vision acuity and can also see a broad vivid colorspace. I have great monitors and screens chosen for that color space and quality too.
There’s certain scenes where I can definitely see compression artifacts or whatever and others where quality differences cannot be noticed.
QLC would be nice for such a home application over noise/space/power usage concerns but the cost is still extremely high.
Imagine how much data could you generate daily!
Thos aside, a FHD movie in good quality still takes 10-30gb
We are still limited by size and internet speed and need to compress data
I learned a lot about Statistical Quality Control that summer, and built them some tools for improving their SQC across all their models.
they build now with many smaller SSD attached, and maybe with this large one all maintenance process will be encapsulated in one component, so you can think about it as NAS but placed directly inside the server.
If I have a century’s worth of point-in-time data, and I want to quickly run various tests against it: data marshaling will kill my soul if I’m using an HDD or various incarnations of hot-cold disk schemes.
Granted, I’ll have to read it in 1TB “pages” since motherboard and RAM engineering haven’t gotten us very far.
There is always the chance that all the flash chips fail at the same time because of a manufacturing defect. That has always been the gamble over multiple drives as well; many documented cases of all the drives in a RAID array failing at the same time. (This happened to me once! Terrible shipping from NewEgg damaged all 3 drives in my 3x RAID-1 array. I manually repaired them by RMA-ing the disks one at a time; fortunately different blocks failed on different drives and with 3 drives you could do a "best of 2".)
No matter how many independent drives you have, you will always need your data stored in multiple data centers to survive natural disasters. So I don't see 256TB in one device any differently than putting 32 8TB SSDs in one server. If you need that much storage, you spend less of your day plugging it into your computer. Savings!