SanDisk Announces 4TB SSD, Plans For 8TB Next Year

Lucas123 (935744) writes "SanDisk has announced what it's calling the world's highest capacity 2.5-in SAS SSD, the 4TB Optimus MAX line. The flash drive uses eMLC (enterprise multi-level cell) NAND built with 19nm process technology. The company said it plans on doubling the capacity of its SAS SSDs every one to two years and expects to release an 8TB model next year, dwarfing anything hard disk drives can ever offer over the same amount of time. he Optimus MAX SAS SSD is capable of up to 400 MBps sequential reads and writes and up to 75,000 random I/Os per second (IOPS) for both reads and writes, the company said."

Comments

Oh goody

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you can pay $4000 for a drive that won't last 2 years! Yeah.. sign me up.

Re: Oh goody

[Anonymous Coward]

My primary OS is running on an SSD going on 4 years old now... Out of 5 that I have only one had had issues, which was actually it's controller catastrophically failing and not a NAND issue - could have just as easily happened to a HDD.

Re:Oh goody

[beelsebob]

Assuming you write an average of 100GB a day to this drive (which is... an enormous overestimate for anything except a video editor's scratch disk), that's 40,000 days before you write over every cell on the disk 1000 times. Aka, 100 years before it reaches its write limit. So no... SSDs are far from the 2 year proposition that people who bought first gen 16/32GB drives make them out to be.

Re: Oh goody

[Bryan Ischo]

False. Your one anecdotal story does not negate the collective wisdom of the entire computer industry.

As far as anecdotal evidence goes, here's some more worthless info: I've owned 8 SSD drives going all the way back to 2009 and not a single one has ever failed. They're all currently in use and still going strong. I have:

- 32 GB Mtron PATA SLC drive from 2009
- 64 GB Kingston from 2010 (crappy JMicron controller but it was cheap)
- 80 GB Intel G2 from 2010
- 80 GB Intel G3 from 2011
- 2x 80 GB Intel 320 from 2011
- 2x 240 GB Intel 520 in my work computer, it gets pretty heavily used, from 2012
- Whatever is in my Macbook Pro from 2012
- Just purchased a 250GB Samsung 840 Evo

Not a single failure on any of them, even the old 32 GB Mtron and the piece of crap JMicron controller Kingston.

But this evidence doesn't really matter; it's the broad experience of the industry as a whole that matters, and I assure you, SSDs have already been decided as ready for prime time.

For a recent example, linode.com, my data center host for like 10 years now, just switched over to all SSDs in all of their systems.

Re: Oh goody

[shitzu]

We have ~100 SSDs installed in our company, workstations, laptops and servers. Over five years only 3 of them died, all Kingstons. Samsung and Intel have been spotless. All of those that died had the following symptoms - if you accessed a certain sector the drive just dropped off - as if you switched off its power. The drive did not remap them as it always dropped off before it could do so. Otherwise the drive remained functional. Got them replaced under warranty.

Re:Oh goody

[Tapewolf]

If you only write infrequently (use for image editing) and then backup storage - how many years would the SSD maintain values?

If the drive is powered down, I wouldn't bet on it lasting the year. Intel only seem to guarantee up to 3 months without power for their drives: http://www.intel.co.uk/content...

Note also that the retention is said to go downwards as P/E cycles are used up. For me, I think they make great system drives, but I don't use them for anything precious.

Re: Oh goody

[Anonymous Coward]

It's highly unlikely that his parents were fucking yours.

Not in my experience.

[aussersterne]

Anecdotal and small sample size caveats aside, I've had 4 (of 15) mechanical drives fail in my small business over the last two years and 0 (of 8) SSDs over the same time period fail on me.

The oldest mechanical drive that failed was around 2 years old. The oldest SSD currently in service is over 4 years old.

More to the point, the SSDs are all in laptops, getting jostled, bumped around, used at odd angles, and subject to routine temperature fluctuations. The mechanical drives were all case-mounted, stationary, and with adequate cooling.

This isn't enough to base an industry report on, but certainly my experience doesn't bear out the common idea that SSDs are catastrophically unreliable in comparison to mechanical drives.

Where are the 3.5" SSDs?

[swb]

Why do SSD makers only make 2.5" SSDs? It seems like a lot of the capacity limitation is self-enforced by constraining themselves to laptop-sized drives.

Why can't they sell "yesterday's" flash density at larger storage capacities in the 3.5" disk form factor? For a a lot of the use cases, the 3.5" form factor isn't an issue. More, cheaper flash would enable greater capacities at lower prices.

The same thing is true for hybrid drives -- the 2.5" ones I've used have barely enough flash to make acceleration happen, a 3.5" case with a 2.5" platter and 120GB flash would be able to keep a lot more blocks in flash and reserve meaningful amounts for write caching to flash.

Re:Where are the 3.5" SSDs?

[Amouth]

there are a few reasons they don't make 3.5's

1: physical size isn't an issue, for the sizes they release that people are willing to pay for it all fits nicely in 2.5
2: 2.5's work in more devices, including in desktops where 3.5's live. if noting is forcing the 3.5 usage then it would be bad for them to artificially handicap them selves.

now for your commend on larger physical drives being cheaper. Flash does not work the way that normal dries to.

Normal platter drives the areal density directly impacts pricing as it drives the platter surface to be smoother, the film to be more evenly distributed, the head to be more sensitive, the accurater to be more precise, all things that cause higher precision that drive up costs as it increases failure rates and manufacturing defects causing product failure.

Now in the flash world. they use the same silicon lithography that they use for making all other chips. there are two costs involved here.

1: the one time sunk cost of the lithography tech (22nm, 19nm, 14nm...) This cost is spread across everything that goes though it. And in reality evens out to no cost increase for the final product because the more you spend the smaller the feature the more end product you can get out per raw product put in.
2: the cost of the raw material in. It does not matter what level of lithography you are using the raw material is nearly exactly the same (some require doping but costs are on par with each other). So in fact your larger lithographic methods become more expensive to produce product once there is newer tech on the market.

No please note that in the CPU world where you have complex logic sets and designs there is an added cost for the newer lithography as it adds to the design costs. but for flash sets there is nearly zero impact form this as it is such a simple circuit design.