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Comment by radicality | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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

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