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Comment by adastra22 | Hacker News Reader

Also the capacities for SSDs have barely budged. Many years ago I went all-out and equipped my PC with a 4TB SSD. Just last week I went SSD shopping for the first time in ages.. and 4TB was the largest drive anyone had. It's a few generations later and the new NVME/PCIe standards mean faster, lower-latency drives. But where are the 8TB, 12TB, or 24TB drives?

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They exist but definitely more painful to use at a home setup since their formats are more server oriented, like U.2/U.3 or E1S and few others. And for course the prices - you can get 30,60 TB (and even more), but it’s gonna be >$4k.

And versus the normal M2 drives, the larger server grade are more annoying. For example, I got recently a 15.36TB Kioxia Cd6-R in U.3 format, for $1.3k, which is not bad for ssd prices. After getting the right adapters and fitting it inside a minisforum ms-01. It’s working fine, but it immediately reached its “critical” temperature (while doing nothing) so I had to attach a big fan and cool it. All the larger SSDs which are meant for server rooms will expect lots of cooling.

https://www.serversupply.com/SSD/PCI-E4.0/15.36TB/KIOXIA/KCD...

Why not get 4x 4TB drives and stripe?

MS-01 doesn't have enough space

I agree this would work, and yes backups are important, but you're now at 1/4 reliability plus raid issues reliability.

The upthread may be able to hug that, but I like a quiet night in, not an unreliable wildcat.

RAID 0, ok (but that's a bit dangerous). As soon as you add some redundancy, you pay either a massive price in term of capacity or in term of performance, pretty much any implementation you look at (ZFS, MD, Windows storage space, etc). Larger SSDs means less components which can fail, less power consumption per TB.

I fail to see how 16TB of chips spread across 4 PCBs is significantly different in risk than the exact same number of chips being collocated on one PCB.

I think the argument would be all the extra support electronics, in particular capacitors.

And the controllers

You can also look up the rated idle power in the datasheets to know beforehand. Anything over ~5w needs cooling and usually they are 10+w (at least the ten or so I have here at home). Some of my disks have a low power more (still 7w) which you can enable with vendor tooling or the correct sas command but ymmv. Check the datasheet, it almost always states max 45c ambient and continuous airflow required.

I had found Samsung 9100 NVMe to be a massive improvement, especially so at 4 TB as that more than doubled up the effective iops for random writes (vis-a-vis its massive 4 GB cache) I bought two for roughly 400 euro apiece. 9100 also supposedly comes in 8 TB, but I'm yet to see it in the wild.

The capacities for SSDs have barely budged in the consumer space, but they're going upwards a lot for enterprise and 2nd hand enterprise drives.

ie: https://www.ebay.com/itm/186355513308

There are heaps on Ebay, but you'll be paying $$ for the larger sized drives.

There's a couple 8TB options, but with the twin constraints of M.2 size and price nobody is really bothering to go bigger for consumer parts.

And the technologies for fast connections to 2.5" drives keep failing to get a foothold in consumer products.

> And the technologies for fast connections to 2.5" drives keep failing to get a foothold in consumer products.

Not surprising, considering the vast majority of consumers don't need more storage than you can easily fit in an M.2 form factor. Why mess around with expensive enterprise U.2 drives when it gives you zero benefit and gains you the hassle of dealing with extra wires and finding space for an ugly bulky rectangle?

Once you get to storage sizes where 2.5" becomes a need, you are well beyond the consumer price range. Very few people are willing to spend more on a single SSD than on the rest of their gaming computer combined.

With individual games being hundreds of gigabytes and growing, I'm not convinced that you're right.

The "vast majority of consumers" are not PC gamers who keep a dozen AAA games installed at a time. They have work PCs and laptops.

I never said that the vast majority of people need large SSDs.

I said that the set of people who need large SSDs is big enough such that its complement does not necessarily constitute the "vast majority".

Obviously what you mean by "vast majority" is somewhat subjective, and there is absolutely room to disagree with my statement. But argue against the right thing.

4TB is what currently fits easily into the M.2 form factor, and 8TB has been possible for years without much extra expense in custom packaging. I'm quite confident that it is fair to say the "vast majority" of consumers do not need 8TB or more of storage in their laptops.

If local storage becomes too cheap, how can companies push their cloud storage subscriptions? Imho it’s sad that ssds haven’t gotten much bigger. A spinning disk can now house dozens of tb. If 8tb can fit on an m.2, it could feasibly fit even more into an SSD form factor. Not as fast as nvme, but still faster and somewhat more resilient than hdds. I have a strong desire for ssds like this… but my only option is super expensive u.2, and I don’t need it to be that crazy fast. Just faster and smaller than hdd would suffice

It pains me so much. I would love a laptop with a 4TB or 8TB SSD. But the 3.5 extra TB to go from a 0.5TB SSD to a 4TB SSD costs 1758 USD if I want an Apple laptop (which I do, for all sorts of other reasons). It's absolutely wild.

If you're worried about price and pricing Apple, you're doing it wrong. You could put the SSD in a Thunderbolt enclosure and it'll be just about as fast, if a little awkward to carry around and plug in often.

There are plenty of non-Apple but good manufacturers with flexibility. Hell, I don't like Dell for their price points, but all of the laptops I've seen from them have upgradeable RAM and storage. If you want even more customization there are things like Framework.

Well, I am worried about doubling the price of the laptop for 3.5TB. External SSDs are a significant extra and (technologically) completely unnecessary complexity and inconvenience.

> There are plenty of non-Apple but good manufacturers with flexibility.

I disagree. The laptop market is tragic.

> But where are the 8TB, 12TB, or 24TB drives?

Kioxia has them for servers [1]. You'll pay for that privilege though, 12.8 TB will set you back a healthy 1.600 € [2] and 30 TB 4.100 € [2].

[1] https://europe.kioxia.com/de-de/business/ssd/enterprise-ssd....

[2] https://www.primeline-solutions.com/de/kioxia-12-8-tb-cd8-v-...

[3] https://www.primeline-solutions.com/de/kioxia-30-72-tb-cm7-r...

There are 8TB drives, and (ignoring QLC ones) 18 months ago you’d have paid over $1200 for either of the two models available (Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus or Inland Performance Plus). Then WD released a 8TB version of their SN850X at an initial price of $850. These days I regularly see it for $650 or below (Amazon actually has it for $600 right this moment), which is a positive but tolerable premium over buying 2×4TB of the same (admittedly high-end) model. The other two options have also come down in price, though the Sabrent still hovers just below a thousand.

Be extremely careful of buying WD (NVMe) SSDs if you're intending on using them with Linux: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/14793

Many _serious_ reports of problems there, across many models and firmware revisions. It's an ongoing problem, and WD is ignoring it entirely.

It's just a brand. The SN770 shares nothing technical with, for example, the SN8100.

Well, "the brand" is ignoring the problems across several SSD models.

The reports in that thread you linked to are clustered around several models that do have substantial shared technology: a DRAMless design using an in-house SanDisk controller, and difficulties arise with the NVMe Host Memory Buffer feature that is only applicable to DRAMless drives. But the high-end SanDisk drives aren't DRAMless, and the SN8100 in particular doesn't even use an in-house SanDisk controller.

Thanks! I see that the people reporting problems with the (DRAMless) SN770 there also report no problems with the SN850X, but that might not be indicative either way—AFAIU the 8TB SN850X has somewhat different internals compared to its lower-capacity brethren. (It does put Framework’s decision to ship SN770—now SN7100—SSDs in their laptops as standard in an unfavourable light.)

I mean, isn't it obvious? There is no demand for massive SSDs. The current "average consumer" capacity has stabilized at 1-2TB for a system drive. It's also what you buy for your PS5s etc. There's just not that many (popular) use cases for larger SSD. Even with gaming, which is probably the most widespread use case for "fast and big" drives, people found out that there's only so many AAA 150GB behemoths that they can play at the same time...

photo and video use case?

As an average consumer/data hoarder, why not store those on cheap spinning HDD's? They can stream the data fast enough, and modern NAS hardware gives you easy RAID too. You don't really need super-quick random access to multiple TB's of data, so HDD storage is probably good enough.

HDD is really not fast enough if you're going to be doing a RAID rebuild with a 18TB HDD

It's plenty fast enough for my N+2 ZFS Raid, but I'll admit that that time is still measured in days.

I’m running several that large or larger in a Synology.

Adding a drive takes a week. Replacing a drive a slightly quicker, but rebuild times are no joke.

I think you're confusing cause and effect - 1-2 TB is the most common for PS5s because it's still where the price-per-GB sweet spot is. I bought a 2 TB because it was the cheapest per GB at the time, figuring I'd come out ahead financially even if I replaced it with a 4 TB in 2-3 years.

Alas, prices have not come down like I expected. And sure, there's only so many I can play at a time, but I also don't want to have to wait through a reinstall each time I change it up.

If consumers were offered the same space for half the cost or same cost for double the space, I find it likely at least 30% would pick each of those bins.

It's not that people don't want larger drives, it really is that this is what the market is willing to bear and there is NOT sufficient competition to keep prices low.

> There is no demand for massive SSDs.

Then why can I buy 22TB spinner by disks so easily?

I’d love to go solid state, but the cost should be phenomenal.

Judging by comments here, the server options also require a lot of cooling, and keeping the noise down is the point for me (along with keeping heat + power down, and speed).

The 22TB HDDs are good for archival and long-term storage.

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