24 TB PCIe x4 SSD?

[WMGroomAK]

I know we all need tons of extremely fast storage, so who wants a 24 TB PCIe x4 SSD?  NGD Systems is preparing to launch such a massive drive called the Catalina SSD.

 

 

According to the Anandtech article (http://www.anandtech.com/show/11146/ngd-launches-catalina-a-24-tb-pcie-ssd):

Quote

The NGD Catalina is a large add-in-card with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface that also supports a Mezzanine connector. Rather than have the NAND on the main card, instead the card uses multiple M.2 modules with Micron’s 3D TLC NAND. The 24 TB version of Catalina carries 12 of such modules, whereas lower capacity SKUs will use a fewer modules. According to NGD, the Catalina consumes only 0.65 W of power per Terabyte (which means ~15.6 W for the 24 TB SSD), but the card still has a 4-pin auxiliary power connector.

 

Of course with the price for current PCIe SSDs, I can only imagine that this will be limited to enterprise data centers, like Google for the forseeable future, but who wouldn't want Linus to get ahold of one (or more) of these to put in the Server Room he's been cleaning up...

Edited February 27, 2017 by WMGroomAK
Wrong source quoted, should be Anandtech, not Ars Technica

[AnonymousGuy]

It'll probably be enormously expensive, but fuck me I've been bitching at Intel for a year to stop fucking around and put out a high capacity 3D TLC drive.  But noooooo, they still live in a fantasy world where 1TB is all that a consumer could need.

[vanished]

5 minutes ago, AnonymousGuy said:

It'll probably be enormously expensive, but fuck me I've been bitching at Intel for a year to stop fucking around and put out a high capacity 3D TLC drive.  But noooooo, they still live in a fantasy world where 1TB is all that a consumer could need.

I think it's one of those things like quad cores only for the mainstream line up that, for 99%, it is all they need.  Once someone unveils an affordable alternative though, things will quickly change as people realize how nice it is, even if it's only a nice to have.

[RAM555789]

It will probably range for around 15-20k if we base it off current PCIe SSDs

[Dylanc1500]

9 minutes ago, AnonymousGuy said:

It'll probably be enormously expensive, but fuck me I've been bitching at Intel for a year to stop fucking around and put out a high capacity 3D TLC drive.  But noooooo, they still live in a fantasy world where 1TB is all that a consumer could need.

Well considering their top dog DC P3608 still tops out at 4TB. Granted it is 5000/3000 read/write, and it's PCI-E x8. That thing runs $9k

Now that I think about it I don't think that they have anything over 4TB. I haven't checked though.

[WMGroomAK]

What I find interesting on this is the scalability of the actual card.  It looks like you are getting a PCIe x4 card that you can scale with multiple 2TB M.2 chips on board so that may actually help with the price.

[AnonymousGuy]

3 minutes ago, Dylanc1500 said:

Well considering their top dog DC P3608 still tops out at 4TB. Granted it is 5000/3000 read/write, and it's PCI-E x8. That thing runs $9k

Now that I think about it I don't think that they have anything over 4TB. I haven't checked though.

16TB P4500 that is about to launch, but it'll probably be a million dollars or some absurd figure.  The consumer side is going to top out this year at 1.5TB.

[Doramius]

For home storage, I'm running in the 40TB range.  I do a lot of work with videos and also have a Plex server.  I wouldn't be able to afford something like this once released, but the fact that it is there will drive the cost of other technology down making my storage requirements much cheaper to implement and expand.  I only recently was able to afford an SSD cache for my RAID setup.  AMAZING difference in accessibility.  40TB on a budget is not easy.  Trying to access it at reasonable speeds, within a budget, is just barely on the border of fantasy.

[MakeAMDGreatAgain]

2 minutes ago, Doramius said:

For home storage, I'm running in the 40TB range.  I do a lot of work with videos and also have a Plex server.  I wouldn't be able to afford something like this once released, but the fact that it is there will drive the cost of other technology down making my storage requirements much cheaper to implement and expand.  I only recently was able to afford an SSD cache for my RAID setup.  AMAZING difference in accessibility.  40TB on a budget is not easy.  Trying to access it at reasonable speeds, within a budget, is just barely on the border of fantasy.

40TB SSD in total storage? Jesus christ.. 

[Doramius]

1 minute ago, MakeAMDGreatAgain said:

40TB SSD in total storage? Jesus christ.. 

I wish it was all in SSD.  I only have a 2TB SSD cache for the 40TB RAID.  If I had 40TB of SSD....well, then I'd know where my money has been going.

[Stefan1024]

I only know the Mezzanine connector from high end FPGA boards.... Anyone knowes if it's used somewhere else?

[Dylanc1500]

3 minutes ago, AnonymousGuy said:

16TB P4500 that is about to launch, but it'll probably be a million dollars or some absurd figure.  The consumer side is going to top out this year at 1.5TB.

It will definately be expensive. I hadn't heard about that specific one though. 

 

However this one looks to basically be a controller card with a crap ton of m.2 slots on board. Good for expandability, also takes away a lot of the need for giant back planes and a lot of cables.

[Doramius]

10 minutes ago, Dylanc1500 said:

It will definately be expensive. I hadn't heard about that specific one though. 

 

However this one looks to basically be a controller card with a crap ton of m.2 slots on board. Good for expandability, also takes away a lot of the need for giant back planes and a lot of cables.

Hopefully one of those m.2's doesn't fail.  What a B*#ch to replace on a live system.

[kladzen]

It will be good... but not good enough.... with only 4 lanes... its a waste to have all these m.2 drives in... look at the 960 evo or 960pro.. they MAX the pci 3.0 4x lanes.... so now there is no more bandwith for the rest of the SSD attached???? what a complete waste... what they should have done is to make it 16x lanes.. to "attack" 4 SSD's at full speed! this is useless

[Dylanc1500]

8 minutes ago, Doramius said:

Hopefully one of those m.2's doesn't fail.  What a B*#ch to replace on a live system.

I thought the same thing. It would be great if you could run it 12/12 raid 1. At that point you would get some kind of redundancy. Then again most that would get something like this, would get multiple.

[WMGroomAK]

5 minutes ago, kladzen said:

It will be good... but not good enough.... with only 4 lanes... its a waste to have all these m.2 drives in... look at the 960 evo or 960pro.. they MAX the pci 3.0 4x lanes.... so now there is no more bandwith for the rest of the SSD attached???? what a complete waste... what they should have done is to make it 16x lanes.. to "attack" 4 SSD's at full speed! this is useless

While the drives will be limited to around 3.9 GB/s read/write performance, supposedly they will be optimized for read tasks.  My guess is that they will mainly be deployed to something like Netflix and other media servers where read performance is going to be a major factor. If NGD uses their In-Situ computing architecture on the card, it may allow for better access to the media since part of the data search and access tasks are off loaded from the CPU to the card.

[kladzen]

4 minutes ago, WMGroomAK said:

While the drives will be limited to around 3.9 GB/s read/write performance, supposedly they will be optimized for read tasks.  My guess is that they will mainly be deployed to something like Netflix and other media servers where read performance is going to be a major factor. If NGD uses their In-Situ computing architecture on the card, it may allow for better access to the media since part of the data search and access tasks are off loaded from the CPU to the card.

Now this is the card they need....

 

http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/enterprise-storage/solid-state-drives/nytro-xp7200-nvme-add-in-card/#features

 

10GB/sec read - 3.6GB/sec write - 8TB... they would just expand the so there are more space for more SSD m.2 drives

[iamdarkyoshi]

1 hour ago, AnonymousGuy said:

It'll probably be enormously expensive, but fuck me I've been bitching at Intel for a year to stop fucking around and put out a high capacity 3D TLC drive.  But noooooo, they still live in a fantasy world where 1TB is all that a consumer could need.

I'm fine with my 500GB drive... Hell, I never filled my old machine's 256GB drive

[WMGroomAK]

13 minutes ago, kladzen said:

Now this is the card they need....

 

http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/enterprise-storage/solid-state-drives/nytro-xp7200-nvme-add-in-card/#features

 

10GB/sec read - 3.6GB/sec write - 8TB... they would just expand the so there are more space for more SSD m.2 drives

While this would also be nice to have, the biggest issue would be the scalability of it.  Yes, you get 10 GB/s on PCIe x16, however, if you use 3 of these cards to reach the ~24 TB of the NGD solution, you begin to saturate the PCIe lanes of a server. I guess the question for NGD would be why they decided to go with a x4 solution over x16...

[Doramius]

2 minutes ago, WMGroomAK said:

While this would also be nice to have, the biggest issue would be the scalability of it.  Yes, you get 10 GB/s on PCIe x16, however, if you use 3 of these cards to reach the ~24 TB of the NGD solution, you begin to saturate the PCIe lanes of a server. I guess the question for NGD would be why they decided to go with a x4 solution over x16...

It's possible they did it for the card form factor.  16x requires the use of a full length slot.  I've seen a lot of the flash caches with boards using slots for 8x or 4x.  This is possibly for space, cost, or both.  I can see it making sense for budget enterprise in small closets.  I'm only speculating.  I, too, was wondering why it wasn't 16x, though. :shrug:

[Stefan1024]

26 minutes ago, Doramius said:

It's possible they did it for the card form factor.  16x requires the use of a full length slot.  I've seen a lot of the flash caches with boards using slots for 8x or 4x.  This is possibly for space, cost, or both.  I can see it making sense for budget enterprise in small closets.  I'm only speculating.  I, too, was wondering why it wasn't 16x, though. :shrug:

Making a controller that can deliver 16x the speed of a single M.2 SSD would be difficult and expensive.

[kladzen]

6 minutes ago, Stefan1024 said:

Making a controller that can deliver 16x the speed of a single M.2 SSD would be difficult and expensive.

They do exist... for enterprises.. due to the massive speeds... see my post.. 10GB/sec read and 3.6GB write... so not's difficult... its just expensive because its for enterprises... they have a different demand

[Doobeedoo]

I mean, all great. But I just hope to see SSD prices continue to drop and drop more significantly, hopefully won't have to wait too long.

I want to get 1TB and not the cheapest option, but more like 850 Pro heh.