WD announces enterprise 128TB SSD | Hacker News Reader

WD announces enterprise 128TB SSD

tomshardware.com

125 pointsdoener76 comments

Link to press release (since the link in the article is a tracking link):

https://www.westerndigital.com/company/newsroom/press-releas...

I really want a denser SSD to store my photo collection. My current small form factor PC has two NVME PCIe slots and no room for SATA drives. I have two 4 TB SSDs in there right now and it seems that consumer SSDs basically cap out at 4 TB. I would really love to get about 16 TB in my computer.

You can get 8tb drives, but they're well over 2x the cost of 4tb drives. An external USB drive or multi-drive enclosure may be more prudent though.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CTTL9R7Z/

I'd like to find some good quality but slow nvmes, I dont need super high speed for media serving but getting a lot of storage (4x4tb/2x8tb ~) is much more expensive than hard drives. Itd be nice to have a silent home server

Good quality has a baseline level of speed which is pretty fast. There's not much you can cut at that point.

But cheap SSDs got down to 2x the price of hard drives last year. Even after prices stabilized, they're at 3x. Flash catching up relatively soon seems likely. Flash matching the current price of hard drives seems even more likely.

Interesting, thanks. I'm quite hopeful to be hard drive free at some point in my NAS

I think that is too optimistic. The cost / capacity of NAND, even by Western Digital roadmap wouldn't have come down to current HDD price by 2027 / 2028. And that is assuming HDD price dont fall.

I agree. The price difference between SSD storage and HDD per TB is still a multiple (seems to be currently about 5x). That is better than the 10x it was a few years ago; but I don't expect them to be equivalent any time soon.

What numbers are you looking at for 5x?

Making sure I'm looking at new hard drives, I see prices around $15/TB at the cheap end. There are a few name-brand SSDs at $45/TB, many more at $50/TB. They're not high end but even the low end is fast these days.

Just like SSDs are $50 at the cheap end; I have seen HDD at $10 on the cheap end.

Definitely new ones? When and where? I keep an eye on prices and I've never seen that.

Although the ads I saw claimed to be new drives, I have no way to verify that they are not refurbished. Of course, I don't know if the $50 per tb SSDs are reliable either.

I think it's more that we have different amounts of time in mind for "relatively soon". I'd be happy with that roadmap.

Where can I find info on that roadmap, by the way? I've found a few things but they're very vague about price at best.

It seems that HDD density has stopped improving so fast and you're going to run into a wall on price reduction because due to the extra material and shipping cost involved in producing an HDD vs. a tiny m.2 SSD.

Even the 870 QVO SATA drives are way more expensive than spinning rust.

https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-870-QVO-SATA-MZ-77Q8T0B/dp/B0...

list price of $850 or $624 on sale for 8tb

Still way better than the M.2 NVMe drives which can be well over $1000 each.

However, these SATA drives still dominate HDDs in most metrics like random access and sustained transfer with like 560MB/sec. Not great compared to modern NVMe drives at like 7GB/sec, but for reference HDDs are usually less than half that and the random access metrics can be dire.

8TB: https://sabrent.com/products/sb-rktq-8tb

But your aren't going to like the price.

Spoiler alert - price is $800 (regular price $2000).

That is not as bad as I expected

I use the Intel P4510 (8TB) and have been super impressed with the performance. I also have some older WD SN200’s that are excellent MLC flash. You do need some active cooling for these types of drives such as in the path of a fan.

As for controller I’ve had good luck with this one: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2255800570197081.html

https://nimbusdata.com/products/exadrive/specifications/

Funny.

OP did say "no room for SATA drives", those SSDs are SATA. That said ... I do have room for a couple of SATA drives :-)

I'm using these (Samsung 970 QVO) as the data drive in a couple of workstations right now. Not the fastest SSD for a number of reasons, but still a lot faster than a mechanical drive.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B089C3TZL9/

Oddly, these were ~$300 when I bought them at the end of 2023, but the price has now doubled.

I'm looking forward to the next NAND price crash in a year or two, hopefully we will start to see 16TB client SSDs hit the market then.

>Oddly, these were ~$300 when I bought them at the end of 2023, but the price has now doubled.

The Camel agrees with you! I've just setup a price drop alert.

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B089C3TZL9

>Oddly, these were ~$300 when I bought them at the end of 2023, but the price has now doubled.

Pricing in 2023 was edge case not the norm when everyone was losing money. But most on HN wouldn't believe it when I wrote it.

I'd love to find a M2-only NAS in a very low profile form factor. I live in a small apartment and prefer small electronics that can hide in a cabinet, but it seems like all of the NAS enclosures that I've ever seen recommended are fucking huge.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C5HW6W9Y

This would give 3 M.2 slots and high speed ethernet.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07N1HC88M

Something like this can be used to upgrade a dual-3.5" SATA NAS into a 8x-M.2 NAS (assuming the cooling and everything work appropriately).

Just some ideas.

There ie the rockchip CM3588 NAS Kit but it is a non mainstream CPU which cost between 200-300€:

https://wiki.friendlyelec.com/wiki/index.php/CM3588_NAS_Kit

there is also the asustor nas: https://www.asustor.com/de/product?p_id=80

If you just need a single nvme SSD you could also buy a banana pi 3 Router:

https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R3

Edit: forgot links and product

I've heard the Flashtor 12 is great, and can take lots of M.2s, but they end up with relatively few channels so data transmission rates aren't awesome. It can be fine as most users will be connecting over the network anyway which will be the bottleneck.

I have the Flashstor 12 Pro. As the name suggests it's 12 m.2 nvme bays and it's pretty darn small considering.

Pros:

- It does what it says on the tin and I have 12 nvme drives in a ZFS pool

- It has 10G ethernet built in.

- It's pretty small, especially compared to most HDD focused NAS systems.

- It's just an x86 PC and you can blast the factory OS away to install your OS of choice without issue.

Cons:

- Each drive only gets a 3.0 x1 connection. It's honestly not much of a problem though as 1 GB/s per drive is still a ton of bandwidth after 12 drives.

- The built in ethernet is RJ45 instead of SFP+. Not the end of the world, just less power efficient.

- No PCIe expansion slots for anything but m.2 2280 drives.

- Single RAM slot so no dual channel and no large amounts of RAM. 32 GB works fine (I think Intel says the processor is only rated for 16). I can't remember if I tried 48 and it failed or if I never bothered. Either way 32 GB can be a bit small if you're really wanting to load it up with 4 TB or 8 TB drives and features like ZFS deduplication.

- The single built in fan could have been silent had they made any reasonable design choice around it. Instead I had to externally mount a noctua fan (to the same screw holes, just the inside is not a standard mount) and feed it power via a USB adapter. Works damn silent and cool now though.

- CPU (4 core Intel Celeron N5105) is very weak and the actual performance limitation for most any setup with this box.

I don't regret getting it, it's a solid choice given the relative lack of premade options in this segment, but the follow up NAS build was just me getting a motherboard/CPU with lots of PCIe lanes and loading up 4 way switches. You can do that via buying used Epyc servers on Ebay (loud/chunky) or just building a low end consumer class "workstation" (things like x8 x8 from the CPU instead of x16 for the assumed GPU) and PCIe to x4 switches (not the splitter cards which assume the motherboard has bifurcation and lanes available but actual switches). If you go the Epyc route you don't have to get switches and you can go back to cheaper splitters. I went the latter via some PCIe switch cards off Aliexpress. Performance and scaling of this one was better of course, but so was cost. Since I did all of this prices for m.2 drives have actually went up quite a bit so I'm glad I did it when I did.

What I would not recommend is anything non-x86 (older Ampere servers have lanes at not sky high prices but better to just go used Epyc at that point and get more CPU perf for the same dollar. SBCs are... a poor choice for a NAS on most every account but hacking factor). I'd also not recommend the Flashstor 6 as it only has 2.5 GBe connectivity and at that point what's the value in paying extra to do this all in flash.

I believe there is also a gen-2 just around the corner.

> - No PCIe expansion slots for anything but m.2 2280 drives.

You can get m.2 adapters: https://www.delock.com/produkt/64219/dokumente.html?d=467

In general yes but in the Flashtor you're going to be hard pressed to do much with that unless you wire up a separately powered external chassis which defeats the point of getting the Flashtor.

Yeah, I said that before I looked at just how small it was.

There’s a lot of really cool options in the replies here, but I think I’m at my limit on the number of tech hobbies I can manage. Really just waiting for a consumer grade Synology SSD NAS.

Exactly. It would have been great if I was still young and studying. I have seemingly infinite of time to fiddle around with things. Once you are working and have a family, most would really prefer to having something that simply work out of the box.

Unfortunately Synology have been moving towards Enterprise segment and completely forgot consumer.

ODROID H4 Plus Intel N97 SBC (with in-band ECC) has an option for 4xM.2 via PCIe bifurcation, https://www.hardkernel.com/blog-2/new-m-2-card-for-the-odroi...

> I'd love to find a M2-only NAS in a very low profile form factor.

QNAP has at least two "NASbooks":

https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tbs-464 (2.5 GbE, USB 3.2)

https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tbs-h574tx (2.5/10 GbE, Thunderbolt 4)

It's not a NAS, but you could hook it up to a low-power device and share it. I've got one connected to my primary machine and love it. Super fast storage.

Side note: One of the m2 chips that I got from Amazon was an obvious fake that I might not have caught if I hadn't ordered four together and one obviously didn't match.

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/express-4m2

Even if it was 5 drive 2.5" to hold SATA SSDs would be great for me. As networked mass storage I don't always need NVME speeds.

There is good reason for size of such NAS devices. HDDs are just better to maintain your not corrupted data when not connected, as NANDs needs to be refreshed from time to time. The best you could do is to use SSD as a fast cache.

I've got a PNY XLR8 CS3140 8TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD with an M.2 adaptor in my MacBook Pro 2014, and it works well.

I also have an external one for backup purposes, and it works well in a Thunderbolt enclosure but has been a little unreliable (random disconnects) in a USB-C enclosure.

You can get 15TB U.2 NVMe drives and use a PCIe U.2. adapter! Whether it fits in a SFF is going to depend on the specific chassis, but anything larger and it's fine.

You can also use an external PCIe Thunderbolt enclosure for macOS.

Kinda like saying you wish your Lamborghini had a big truck box.

Not really. SSDs are silent, and have greater storage density. Both very attractive attributes for a home NAS. Even if the SSDs only do 250MB/s, four of them will saturate a 10GbE link.

SSDs are maybe not so great for long term data retention, I've found even nice brands of sata SSDs left in a drawer for 5 years coming back full of read errors. :(

If you can hook up some U.2 drives, they come up to 15Gb and are “relatively cheap” on eBay.

Anyone in the industry able to tell me where WD sits in the flash space? I use WD for my HDDs pretty exclusively but had assumed their SSD offerings were mostly white label drives they slapped their name on, are they a real competitor in the space?

WD is the real deal, they design their own SSD controller silicon in-house.

They acquired Sandisk and HGST so there's a lot of expertise under their roof.

> they design their own SSD controller silicon in-house

And they've been leaning into RISC-V[1] due to this.

[1]: https://blog.westerndigital.com/risc-v-swerv-core-open-sourc...

WD SN850(X) is pretty much the best consumer SSD.

These are for making raid systems with higher speed for graphing systems, possibly for high speed swap memory for frontier model cpu inference.

If it’s for raid system, I would be less reserved about QLC.

Interesting. Are we finally reaching the point where ssd are bigger than hdd ?

How many years before price/GB gets better too ?

I think there have been large ssds in DC it’s just cost.

There have already been 32.72TB ssds for a while now, which is larger than all HDDs expect the upcoming 32TB SMR WD drive.

how big is the market of people who have money to burn?

or is it that some people mistakenly believe that bigger devices are more cost-effective?

this part of the release is interesting: https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library...

This is targeted for enterprise/cloud/hyperscale customers and density is often a big deal in those applications. I know that 61.44TB SSD have been selling very well exactly for this reason.

Drive bays cost money so in some cases it could be cheaper to use a smaller number of more expensive drives.

There are applications and workloads where storage density is a key consideration, and the set of data models isn't that small as a subset of the market. Networked storage is not a substitute for NVMe when working with very large storage volumes due to the poor storage bandwidth. For some workloads you also cannot substitute a single high-density server with multiple low-density servers for effectively the same reason (low bandwidth to remote storage). For these workloads, ultra-high density storage can definitely be cost effective within reason.

It bears keeping in mind that most popular open source software is not designed to be effective for storage densities anywhere near this high. If you are working with data at this density then you are likely using one of the closed source storage engines designed to work at this scale running straight off of the raw block device.

This is also useful for power-constrained systems - 128T x 35W is less power than 2 x 64T x 35W which gives a larger power budget for whatever h100-type device you have connected to these drives

Picture a company with its own on-prem bare metal servers. Over the years they have had space to expand but projections show that soon either a new data center will be needed, either in addition or to move to. Doing so would require a huge capex to either migrate the existing hardware to the bigger space or to reachitect their topology to work on a multi-DC setting. Or you can look at the oldest servers in the fleet, that are scheduled to be decommissioned in the next N years, that have HDDs that are a small fraction of the capacity of the new ones. If you crunch the numbers, it can start to make sense to just say "we just pay the premium for physical density and increase the time before we're in the same position by M years". If M is large enough, people will jump on that option as fast as you can draft the Purchase Order.

>QLC

In a 128Gb SSD? Welcome to BitRot city.

I’ll stick to SLC as long as I can, thanks.

No price announced?

I think this probably falls under "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".

aka a boomer scam

everything has a market price

I believe pricing (in quantity, these usually do not sell by single pieces) is around 6 cents a Gig so about $7680. I could very well be wrong though, it's been a while since I heard pricing of DC SSDs.

To be honest, that doesn't seem unreasonable. Obviously it's steep for a homelab project but I could see small-medium sized businesses buying that for on-prem needs.

It's much better than not unreasonable. If that price is accurate it's competitive with consumer drives. The big clouds would charge you 6 cents per gigabyte per quarter. Add on RAID and you still break even after four months.

the 128 also looks to be in proof of concept stage. The rest of the articles seem to be for consumer being 8/16TB SSD drives and 30TB spinning. With 64 being the the data center sizes for this set of announcements.

You can get a 30TB nvme at about $3k. So that’s probably four times that? I would guess around $15k.

This is for enterprise gear, the drives might cost something like that but whatever storage array these go in will be at least 6 figures on its own with a 3 year support contract.

Does anyone have any clue whether the new e3 and e1 form factors will ever make it to the consumer sector?

There is a huge price:cost disconnect in the SSD and HDD market, and always has been.

The floor price for 2TB SSD is basically stuck on USD100.00 for reputable brands. Less reputable brands are significantly cheaper but the good ones are self-policing around the floor price.

People like Tom's Hardware say "oh its the NAND shortage" but thats bullshit. It's the last vestige of not-really-illegal collusive pricing behaviour by a bunch of highly profitable manufacturers.

Demand (price) is driving this. Cost has nothing to do with it. "it's the market" is true, because if somebody dropped the floor to USD80 or USD70 I am willing to bet they'd make a killing for a very short while until the others come on board but while they can make book on $100 they're not going lower.

the other SSD sources are very dodgy. There's a lot of risk in going for the super cheap brands right now, you only have to read the reviews to see they come up far more often in post-purchase failure and inevitably problems with replacement. Not to say the majors never fail, but nobody much complains about their RMA on the failure.

Pricing of 2.5" HDD are now predominantly driven by SMR or not SMR as far as I can see it. Shucking is no longer much use to anyone. I expect some of the shuckable drives to migrate slowly to SSD and not bother saying so except indirectly "shockproof" or somesuch. It would actually be better for them not to admit they used SSD, than have to break the de-facto price barriers here.

If you want 4TB or higher, you are paying a premium, its more than 2x the cost of 2TB. The unit price of a 1TB does seem a bit more malleable and the sub TB units are now cheap as .. chips. You burn PCI lines or USB ports to glue these into RAID structures. Nice if you have the slots. Highly reliable with all those discrete media units but you need loads of them to get back to the 5-10TB scale effective filestore size. DO NOT USE USB MEDIA IN RAID IF YOU CAN AFFORD NOT TO

(I don't think M.2 or SATA 2.5" FF has much to do with this)

I think it's also that spinning disk storage isn't really a consumer product anymore. And the enterprise market is characterized by high shelf prices that are deep discounted for large volume purchases.

Of course you can still buy external HDDs but they've become much more of a niche with most people subscribing to cloud storage.

I think that lack of interest is stopping the market driving prices down. In fact a 14TB here is now over 300€ and before the pandemic I'd buy them for 219€. Really annoying.

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