Where are all those 2/4/8 TB SSDs that every company was talking about

ChineseChef · February 19, 2015

All the big companies were talking about having 2 TB SSDs by the end of last year, and 4 TB by Q2 this year, and 8/12/16 TB by the end of this year. Where did all those drives go? Why hasn't any company released a 2.5" model with more capacity than 1TB? There has to be some real market for it, especially in the enterprise world where in place upgrades would be nice. PCI SSDs are cool and all, but I can't just rebuild all my servers with them. I know it isn't a technical problem or physical size limitation. So is there really just no market for it? Does no one want 2/4/8 TB drives than can go at 6/12 Gbps (using SAS)?? The markers could easily make a killing in the 2.5" space since magnetic drives are maxed out around 2 TB and they aren't the fastest drives out there. It just boggles my mind that no company has jumped on this full force.

kameshss · February 19, 2015

No body needs that much fast drives which can be used as just as storage.

For DataCentres, they use PCI SSDs as cache. HDDs are best when you actually want more storage at less price. Less investment More yield.

No Consumers needs SSDs which are more than 1TB. People who buy 1TB SSDs, they must be highly professionals or Prosumers.

Normal consumers uses 256 or 240 GB ssds.

ChineseChef · February 19, 2015

No body needs that much fast drives which can be used as just as storage.

For DataCentres, they use PCI SSDs as cache. HDDs are best when you actually want more storage at less price. Less investment More yield.

No Consumers needs SSDs which are more than 1TB. People who buy 1TB SSDs, they must be highly professionals or Prosumers.

Normal consumers uses 256 or 240 GB ssds.

I beg to differ. We have a few servers where I work that we were looking at putting SSDs in because we run a lot of VMs off of them. Yes SSD cache would improve things, but we wanted to go full SSD, but can't due to max sizes on SSDs. Really hard to fit 16 PCI SSDs into a 2u server, but easy to fit 16 2.5" drives. Plus our hardware wouldn't support the fancy features of PCI SSDs, but could easily take advantage of the generic speed benefits of SSDs. Yes we should design the layout, but it is often easier to get more costly yet simpler upgrades than tell management we need to bring the whole system down for a bit to upgrade it, time is worth more than the money. Just from my experience anyways.

wpirobotbuilder · February 19, 2015

All the big companies were talking about having 2 TB SSDs by the end of last year, and 4 TB by Q2 this year, and 8/12/16 TB by the end of this year. Where did all those drives go? Why hasn't any company released a 2.5" model with more capacity than 1TB? There has to be some real market for it, especially in the enterprise world where in place upgrades would be nice. PCI SSDs are cool and all, but I can't just rebuild all my servers with them. I know it isn't a technical problem or physical size limitation. So is there really just no market for it? Does no one want 2/4/8 TB drives than can go at 6/12 Gbps (using SAS)?? The markers could easily make a killing in the 2.5" space since magnetic drives are maxed out around 2 TB and they aren't the fastest drives out there. It just boggles my mind that no company has jumped on this full force.

What would they do with them?

If you need to store 10's of TB of data that absolutely must be accessed quickly, then you probably are working with large media files. Mechanical hard drives do a really good job with large files. You would be hard pressed to find a use case where someone is creating 10's of TB of little files, which is where SSDs really show their potential.

When I worked for Equallogic, the largest all-SSD appliance we sold was the PS6210 which held 24x2.5" drives that could be outfitted with 800GB SSDs. That's a little under 20TB, and it would set you back a fortune. If you were working with large files, you could get 24 1.2TB hard drives for a much lower price, or buy a different storage appliance with 3.5" drives which would be much less expensive and perform just as well for large files. Caching also helped bump the random speeds up a lot, to the point where you really don't need all-SSD storage. An application for the all-SSD machine might be in military field operations, where it is likely to be subjected to bumps that could destroy mechanical drives.

The bottom line is that having huge SSDs doesn't make much sense except in some very narrow applications. We will see them eventually, but it'll require demand from significant market segments.