Are hard drives dead? 8TB M.2 SSD

[Emily Young]

SSDs have come a long way since the early SATA II days, but capacity has always lagged behind hard drives... Enter Sabrent Rocket Q. But can QLC be any good?

 

 

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[MartinIAm]

They will never die. Datacenter and if your drive fails you still have the disk with possibility to repair.

[SupaKomputa]

1 minute ago, MartinIAm said:

They will never die. Datacenter and if your drive fails you still have the disk with possibility to repair.

never say never. if ssd can match price per gb and durability, no reason to stay with hdd. takes less space than an archaic 3.5 disk.

space and power consumption is everything in datacenter environment.

[Drama Lama]

If they get a lot  cheaper they’ll avoid death for mid future but if not not

[kelvinhall05]

2 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

if ssd can match price per gb and durability

Highly doubt this is gonna happen in the near future. We're gonna be stuck with hard drives for a lot longer than everyone thinks.

[SupaKomputa]

2 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

Highly doubt this is gonna happen in the near future. We're gonna be stuck with hard drives for a lot longer than everyone thinks.

 

Yep...

[Dutch_Master]

No worries, on Newegg it's only 1500 bucks!

 

Hey Linus, how about updating that NVMe server?

[Kilrah]

Shows up 25% cheaper here

 

[Nystemy]

Using SLC flash for speeding up writing is a rather nice trick.

Though, with 8 flash chips, we could theoretically have much higher bandwidth between the controller and the flash chips than what we have between the controller and the rest of the system.

 

For an example, lets say that each flash chip provides us a 23.2 Gb/s interface, and we have 8 chips, that means we have a bandwidth of 185.6 Gb/s between controller and our storage. _{(23.2 Gb/s is the bandwidth of a UFS3.0 interface used on flash chips. Though, the chips on the device in the video might use UFS 2.0 that provides only 9.6 Gb/s. UFS 3.0 were only released back in 2018, so its still a bit new.)}

Our 4x gen 3 PCIe interface will only give us 32 Gb/s of bandwidth. So the other 153.6 Gb/s of bandwidth our flash chips technically can provide us would currently be unused.

Now some of that bandwidth will be used for things like wear leveling, and generally shuffling about data...

But we can also use it to shuffle data from our SLC flash over to our QLC storage, meaning that we can transfer a certain amount of data into QLC flash, meaning that it will now take us longer to fill up the SLC flash.

Though, it wouldn't directly surprise me if SSD manufacturers doesn't implement this...

[Kilrah]

I think that's why Linus didn't hit the "cache cliff", the SSD being fed with "only" 450MB/s from the 5Mbit/s USB3 left it ample time to flush some of the cache to QLC even during the transfer.

 

And yes everybody does it like this already, just the size here allows for a lot more margin everywhere, and maybe their controller is a bit more powerful than average.

[The Torrent]

my normal rocket 1tb before corona cost the same amount as this qlc crap

[MartinIAm]

1 hour ago, SupaKomputa said:

never say never. if ssd can match price per gb and durability, no reason to stay with hdd. takes less space than an archaic 3.5 disk.

space and power consumption is everything in datacenter environment.

What happens if the individual component on the ssd dies (controller for example)? You can't do much with the rest of the data. On a hard drive at least you have a platter and if something fails like the head, you can still have a possibility of restoring most of your data. Same thing goes with storing important info on cassette tapes.

[Luscious]

Putting two of these (16TB) in that new Dell XPS 17 would make it a sweet rig for sure, the only problem is that two of these at $3000 cost more than the laptop itself.

 

Given the crazy pricing it's hard to recommend anything over a 2TB drive ATM. Yet with so many newer laptops ditching 2.5 inch bays altogether you effectively hit a storage wall if your needs go over 4TB. I'd make the argument to add more NVMe slots but then you hit a lane limitation of the chipset/CPU. Some laptops DO let you add as many as four m.2 drives but they are a rare find.

 

Still, it's crazy to think that with four of these you can cram 32TB of storage into a laptop. The mobile NAS has arrived.

[SupaKomputa]

6 minutes ago, MartinIAm said:

What happens if the individual component on the ssd dies (controller for example)? You can't do much with the rest of the data. On a hard drive at least you have a platter and if something fails like the head, you can still have a possibility of restoring most of your data. Same thing goes with storing important info on cassette tapes.

I don't know, if you can transplant the same controller from a donor drive, i think it will work, why not? 

it's not like the storage chips are registered exclusively to the broken one.

 

anyway back to datacenter, most will use redundant array anyway, so if anyone broken, they will hot swap it with a new one, no need for fixing shit. they don't have the time for that. imagine a 1U server can store 100 nvme drives in a single case, that would be revolutionary.

 

In the future i think ssd will surpass hdd in terms of price, they are basically easier and cheaper to make. Just need some time and volume.

[Kilrah]

57 minutes ago, MartinIAm said:

What happens if the individual component on the ssd dies (controller for example)? You can't do much with the rest of the data.

Anyone with a bit of sense has backups and a dead drive is just a minor inconvenience.

[Dutch_Master]

1 hour ago, Luscious said:

Still, it's crazy to think that with four of these you can cram 32TB of storage into a laptop. The mobile NAS has arrived.

Linus showed a PCIe card not that long ago that could hold 4 M.2 drives. Provided you have enough PCIe 16x slots, large storage capacity in SSD is already here.

 

Mind, this particular device is a 2280 form factor. I wouldn't be surprised if 10 or even 12 TB NVMe SSDs will be launched before the end of the year in 22110 size. The next logical step would be to integrate the DRAM cache into the controller chip, which will increase in size but less then the now separate components take up space. This allows more real-estate on the PCB for extra Flash storage chips, increasing capacity or wear-levelling (and thus life-expectancy).

[TempestCatto]

1 hour ago, MartinIAm said:

What happens if the individual component on the ssd dies (controller for example)? You can't do much with the rest of the data.

The NAND Flash can be removed and soldered onto a new PCB, and a controller can be flashed with the right firmware to recover most data.

[Dutch_Master]

Just now, TempestCatto said:

The NAND Flash can be removed and soldered onto a new PCB, and a controller can be flashed with the right firmware to recover most data.

Theoretically, yes. But at what price? Ensuring your backup strategy is current is a lot cheaper, especially if the data you've lost on that failed SSD is essential for your business. Or your customers business...

[Dj CuCu]

.

[Valkyrie743]

What happens when you have say 80% of the drive full and it starts chewing into the 25% used for SLC cacheing. How bad are the writes going to be. Because if I buy a 8tb drive but say i have a good chuck of it loaded with files does that mean that the drive is just going to tank in performance? 
 

[Kilrah]

Normally the SLC cache size gradually gets reduced as the SSD fills up so there is still some, but obviously less and less as it continues filling.

[GodAtum]

Wouldn't buy from some random Chinese company. Will wait for Intel or Sandisk

[Tan3l6]

Your wallet must be made of platinum if it challenges ~1700€ SSD.

[spartaman64]

1 hour ago, GodAtum said:

Wouldn't buy from some random Chinese company. Will wait for Intel or Sandisk

which are both made in china maybe by the same company that makes the sabrent chips

[johneestan]

Now lets put 8 of these in the Liqid LQD4500 Honey Badger.