3.5 inch SSD?

[barondeau]

I have never seen a 3.5 inch SSD, but I have seen a 2.5 inch HDD. I understand the reason for having a larger form factor for HDD than SSDs, but why do we never see a larger SSD. Couldn't you get more performance out of that larger space, without having to make any new technology, or making current tech smaller?

[r2724r16]

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/M2sKHx/ocz-internal-hard-drive-oczssd32cls460g

[Sakkura]

SSDs just usually don't require that much room. Many 2.5 inch SSDs don't even have the PCB taking up the whole space inside.

 

Enterprise-oriented 3.5 inch SSDs do exist, but they're uncommon and very expensive.

[Origami Cactus]

We need an 5.25 inch 48TB ssd!

[barondeau]

Is it the controller that limits the size? IE I would still need better stuff to control the amount of flash memory I have added

[Electronics Wizardy]

11 minutes ago, barondeau said:

Is it the controller that limits the size? IE I would still need better stuff to control the amount of flash memory I have added

Its the flash chips that take up space in side the drive, and there aren't manu controllers that can drive that many chips where are 3.5 in drive is needed, and not many people want to spend that much on a drive.

 

You can already get 30+tb in a 2.5 in drive, and it makes more sense normally to get multiple 2.5 in drives.

 

Also there is only a sata and sas standard for 3.5 drives, no pcie, and with 30+ tb drives, you want a faster interface.

[DocSwag]

13 minutes ago, barondeau said:

Is it the controller that limits the size? IE I would still need better stuff to control the amount of flash memory I have added

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say.

[barondeau]

2 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say.

The controller on the sdd, not being able to deal with the amount of flash chips you can fit into an sdd in the 3.5 inch form factor

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

19 minutes ago, barondeau said:

The controller on the sdd, not being able to deal with the amount of flash chips you can fit into an sdd in the 3.5 inch form factor

 

Technically they could, simply RAID multiples in the same box, but it would be a huge waste of performance and expensive which is why that is only done on PCIe models.

 

There is simply no good reason to do it for a SATA drive when most systems able to take a 3.5" drive would also have space to fit a PCIe version that can achieve the full speed of such a unit.

[Jurrunio]

16 minutes ago, barondeau said:

The controller on the sdd, not being able to deal with the amount of flash chips you can fit into an sdd in the 3.5 inch form factor

 

you could always build a more complex controller for that, it won't grow anywhere near as fast as the size taken up by NAND flash memory modules.

[DocSwag]

17 minutes ago, barondeau said:

The controller on the sdd, not being able to deal with the amount of flash chips you can fit into an sdd in the 3.5 inch form factor

 

The controllers right now don't have enough channels for a ton of chips so in a sense, yes. There are things (I forget the name atm) that can interleave nand chips though and make them appear as 1 to the controller though. But this becomes unnecessary, because more flash chips = more cost both in flash as well as complexity of the controller, and when we can fit multiple terabytes in a 2.5" drive nowadays there's little reason to go for 3.5"

[Alex Atkin UK]

37 minutes ago, r2724r16 said:

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/M2sKHx/ocz-internal-hard-drive-oczssd32cls460g

Ugh, Sandforce.  So far two out three Sandforce drives I own have failed.

Looking at the price, I'm guessing that unit is quite old, before 500GB 2.5" units were practical.

[DocSwag]

5 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Ugh, Sandforce.  So far two out three Sandforce drives I own have failed.

Looking at the price, I'm guessing that unit is quite old, before 500GB 2.5" units were practical.

IIRC it was just a RAID 0 of two drives hence why it's so big.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Just now, DocSwag said:

IIRC it was just a RAID 0 of two drives hence why it's so big.

Pretty much what you'd expect.

[barondeau]

5 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

IIRC it was just a RAID 0 of two drives hence why it's so big.

wait so built in RAID on a drive?

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, barondeau said:

wait so built in RAID on a drive?

 

basically, so more flash chips can be used.

 

Not needed these days as flash chips have gotten much bigger.

 

 

[tikker]

Well there is this guy:

https://nimbusdata.com/press/nimbus-data-launches-worlds-largest-solid-state-drive-100-terabytes-power-data-driven-innovation/

[barondeau]

1 minute ago, tikker said:

Well there is this guy:

https://nimbusdata.com/press/nimbus-data-launches-worlds-largest-solid-state-drive-100-terabytes-power-data-driven-innovation/

This is what I have been looking for! Now all we need is 5.25 inch HDDs!

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, barondeau said:

This is what I have been looking for! Now all we need is 5.25 inch HDDs!

why?

 

there are lots of problems just making it bigger. The amount of wobble of the platter increases, and you can't spin it as fast or pack as many platters in. Also latency will be even worse.

 

It normally makes much more sense to have more drives than a bigger drive.

[tikker]

Just now, Electronics Wizardy said:

why?

 

there are lots of problems just making it bigger. The amount of wobble of the platter increases, and you can't spin it as fast or pack as many platters in. Also latency will be even worse.

 

It normally makes much more sense to have more drives than a bigger drive.

I also doubt datacenters would be happy having to adapt to 5.25" formfactors.

[barondeau]

it was a joke

[Lady Fitzgerald]

34 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

...It normally makes much more sense to have more drives than a bigger drive...

Why?

[barondeau]

Just now, Lady Fitzgerald said:

Why?

Would you rather have two average people working on something or one slightly above average person working on something?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Lady Fitzgerald said:

Why?

other than the problems with bigger sized hard drives.

 

Raid rebuilt time is longer. and speed per gb is slower. and since with ssds the dollar per gb is about the same, might aswell just get tons of 2.5 15mm drives. That seems to be the go to current data center formfactor.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

5 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

other than the problems with bigger sized hard drives...

HDDs up to 4-6TB are just as reliable as the smaller ones. Even that doesn't matter since you should have proper backups (and RAID by itself is not a backup!).

 

5 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

...Raid rebuilt time is longer. and speed per gb is slower....

It depends on the kind of RAID. Different kinds of RAID have different amounts of failure tolerance; greater tolerance means more time available to rebuild a RAID. Not all redundancy is RAID. Also, most non-commercial users don't need RAID.

 

5 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

...since with ssds the dollar per gb is about the same, might aswell just get tons of 2.5 15mm drives....

That's fine only if you have the hardware to support "tons" of drives. Also, the more drives you have, the more points of failure you have, increasing the chances for failure.

 

5 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

...tons of 2.5 15mm drives. That seems to be the go to current data center formfactor.

Data center needs and consumer needs are darastically different. Also, when data centers replace HDDs with SSDs, they tend to use larger SAS drives since the suport hardware is already in place. Comparing data centers to non-commercial users is comparing apples to kumquats.