Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Intel and Micron Partnership Soon To Launch 10TB SSD For Enterprise Market (hothardware.com)

Posted by yaelk on from the word-on-the-web dept.

MojoKid writes: Intel and Micron have been tag-teaming various storage and memory technologies and word on the web is that the fruits of that partnership is a 10-terebyte SSD that's right around the corner. The largest SSD in Intel's stable at the moment is 4TB, which itself is pretty large. However, both Micron and Intel are of the opinion that typical planar NAND flash memory has gone about as far as it can go, and that 3D stacked Flash memory is the future. They've also developed a "floating gate cell" design - a first for 3D stacked memory - resulting in 256Gb multi-level cell (MLC) and 384Gb triple-level cell (TLC) die that fit inside of a standard package. The two companies are targeting gumstick-sized SSDs reaching 3.5TB and regular 2.5-inch SSDs hitting (and even surpassing) 10TB. Apparently that's about to become a reality.

71 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. spell check? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Never trust reporting from a source that can't spell "Terabyte" correctly. It proves they not only didn't proofread, they didn't even run spell-check.

    1. Re:spell check? by Luthair · · Score: 1

      Its shameless self promotion. MojoKid submits articles from HotHardware everyday, I wonder if he's a shill!

    2. Re:spell check? by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

      MojoKid IS hothardware. He owns the site.

    3. Re:spell check? by dave420 · · Score: 1

      aka David Altavilla, Hot Hardware's editor-in-chief. He's been doing this for ages. Not disclosing his affiliation is rather sketchy to say the least.

  2. Re: Almost there... by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

    What do you all want to make a bet all the items will still include mechanical disks to keep them slow so people keep on the upgrade treadmill?

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  3. Re: Almost there... by houstonbofh · · Score: 1

    No need. We will always need more space. If only for the constant Windows updates...

  4. Is this based on 3D Xpoint? by swb · · Score: 1

    The new Intel/Micron "flash successor" that's supposed to be faster and more durable?

    1. Re:Is this based on 3D Xpoint? by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 5, Informative

      The new Intel/Micron "flash successor" that's supposed to be faster and more durable?

      It's not. Both from this announcement and from the original announcement covered here on Slashdot just under a year ago, we see that it's MLC and TLC nand flash. Multilayer (a.k.a. 3D! Now with more Ds!) rather than single layer, but otherwise still bog standard nand flash. Evidently it took a while to get the yields up. Looks like they intend to crater the price per gigabyte of flash-based storage while simultaneously offering up XPoint as the (higher priced) upgrade. And it sounds like Samsung anticipated them doing exactly that, and is working to unload their single layer inventory as fast as they can.

  5. Re: Almost there... by sims+2 · · Score: 1

    Won't matter they will just make windows slower to compensate...

    --
    Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
  6. Hard Drives are dying by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've said for a while now, that Spinning Hard Drives are dying breed. This is just another nail in the coffin, as SSD sizes start to surpass traditional HDD. The last remaining bit that HDDs have over SSD is cost per MB. However if you include OTHER costs associated with HDDs (Watts per drive) even those advantages shrink (or go away).

    IMHO once these higher density SSD drives arrive, there will be little or nothing for me to recommend standard HDD, for any application. None. There is barely any reason to have spinning drives right now.

    --
    Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    1. Re:Hard Drives are dying by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

      Well one reason to keep hard drives around is because their capacity can be measured in terabytes, instead of SSD's which are apparently measured in terebytes.

    2. Re:Hard Drives are dying by bobbied · · Score: 1

      How true.. If I worked for a drive manufacturer that builds spinning HDAs, I'd be looking for another job, FAST. Makes me happy that I didn't take that job at Maxstore a decade or so ago. Even if I survived the mergers and buyouts since then, I'd be in a world of hurt now.

      --
      "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
    3. Re:Hard Drives are dying by swb · · Score: 2

      I think the enterprise storage vendors *want* to hang onto HDDs as long as possible because it lets them keep marking up SSDs to stratospheric heights, in addition to charging a whole bunch extra for magic tiering/caching systems so the 6 SSDs you can afford to put into the thing will actually have a chance of getting used.

      I also think they're somewhat scared of the evidence of greater durability that SSDs seem to have because a big part of their justification for increased cost for their enterprise SSDs involves using SLC flash.

      Now, to be fair, based on what I've seen the vendors are right that you only "need" a subset of your data to live on flash because the rest of your data is a lot colder, and yes, SLC flash has a lot more write durability.

      That being said, if MLC/TLC flash is generally more durable than we've seen (I've seen an endurance test that put 6+ PB on an 850 Pro) *and* fairly inexpensive, then even if it has double or triple the failure rate of spinning rust the value proposition still leans towards all flash storage because of the huge increase in performance across an array, decreased power consumption, need for fewer hot spares or parity disks due to faster rebuild times.

      Overall storage system prices could be lower, too, because all that caching/tiering management takes real CPU/RAM, resulting in more expensive controller hardware with more complex and costly software.

    4. Re:Hard Drives are dying by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 2

      For example, if you're going to be writing to a particular sector over and over and over, SSD wears out. You no doubt will bring up that all the wear evening that SSDs use but remember those only work if the drive isn't near capacity.

      For example, your example makes no sense. Wear Leveling does change it so that you CAN'T do what your initial postulation suggested. AND if you're at "near capacity" AND doing that many "writes", might I suggest that you're using the wrong size. EVEN if you were writing video streams, you'd be better off using larger capacity.

      Under almost no conditions, short of "archiving" would standard HDDs perform better. And having pulled an archival HDD out of storage to have it NOT function (bearings seized do to not being used) I can assure you that even THAT application has its own problems. My suggestion is to have your data archived on a system that is always on and monitored, rather than "guessing" that it works and finding out that it doesn't.

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    5. Re:Hard Drives are dying by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 1

      I don't know anyone that uses tape anymore. Too much data, too much time to backup. We stopped using tape 10 years ago because the backups took longer than the day was long. Are they used still? I am sure someone somewhere still uses tapes, but have you even looked at tape drives these days?

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    6. Re:Hard Drives are dying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Disclosure: I work in this field but I won't tell you who I work for.

      Regarding endurance, the myth that HDDs have greater endurance than flash (even MLC and TLC) is just that - a myth. Every HDD will die eventually, frequently when they have to be turned off and won't start up again because all of the grease has been spun out of the motor bearings.

      See this: https://www.micron.com/about/blogs/2016/february/the-myth-of-hdd-endurance

      SSD density (at 4TB in 2.5" x 7mm or 9mm high) is already more dense per square inch than HDDs (10TB in 3.5" x 1" high). Power consumption is much lower too. Combined with the fact that HDDs today are slower per megabyte than ever (10TB drives spin at the same 7200 RPM that 120GB drives did), the near future holds the end of the HDD in the majority of applications.

      That said, we have been calling for the death of the mainframe for years, as well as the death of tape for years, and neither have died. HDDs will continue to have a place in the world, but they will be by and large replaced with flash. In the enterprise space, changes in software also mean that most of this flash will be server attached rather than part of a SAN.

    7. Re:Hard Drives are dying by Jeremi · · Score: 4, Funny

      Well one reason to keep hard drives around is because their capacity can be measured in terabytes, instead of SSD's which are apparently measured in terabytes.

      The Terebyte is a common unit of measurement for Imperial bytes.

      Imperial bytes are similar to standard bytes, except that they were invented before the widespread adoption of Arabic numbers, so instead of storing the bits as 0's and 1's, they store them as I's and II's.

      --


      I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
    8. Re:Hard Drives are dying by dgatwood · · Score: 2

      IMHO once these higher density SSD drives arrive, there will be little or nothing for me to recommend standard HDD, for any application. None. There is barely any reason to have spinning drives right now.

      Except that we're nowhere near that point, at least from my perspective. A 1 TB laptop SSD starts at $240. $150 will buy you 3 TB of laptop-sized spinning storage (as long as your computer can handle a 15mm drive, otherwise 2 TB for $95). More importantly, no amount of money will buy you a laptop-sized 3 TB flash drive. (You can, however, buy them in a PCIe form factor for about $30,000.)

      That last part is a major problem. Everybody is building flash drives to hit price points, ignoring the fact that flash drive capacity is still basically flailing around at 2010 hard drive capacities. In a decade, we've gone from flash drives being a decade behind hard drives capacity-wise to being six years behind. And we've gone from being 10x the price per TB to only 6x the price per TB. At this rate, the break-even point on capacity won't be until probably at least 2030, and maybe 2040, and the break-even point in cost-per terabyte is probably at least a decade away, too.

      Of course, ten years ago, I'd have expected us to have passed the break-even point already. As best I can tell, the main reason we haven't is that the rise of smartphones has put a tremendous strain on the flash manufacturing industry, and they still haven't caught up. I'm starting to wonder if they ever will. If and when they actually do, then I would agree that spinning drives should go away. I'm not counting on that happening any time soon, though. I hope I'm wrong.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    9. Re:Hard Drives are dying by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

      Tape is a pretty good example, but it's not quite the same. Both tape and hard drives have the attribute that they need a huge R&D investment to keep advancing and that has to be recouped. Tape has slowly moved to the high end with an ever diminishing customer base, who are willing to pay the premium because tape has good archival properties, but at the same time that premium will keep going up. Each new generation of tape (or disk) costs more to research than the previous one and as fewer people are paying that cost it translates to sharp per-unit price increases for each generation. The price of an entry level tape drive has gone up by about an order of magnitude in the last decade. Eventually, the cost-benefit ratio stops being in the right direction, more customers migrate away, the per-unit price goes up too much for the next group and you're in a death spiral. Most of the customers of tape now have such long upgrade cycles that they'll still be buying the same stuff in a decade, but that doesn't help much with financing the next iteration.

      Disk is different though. Currently, the only reason to prefer spinning rust to SSDs is price per GB. Disks are less reliable, slower (a bit slower for linear transfer, much slower for random access), use more power, are physically bigger, are no more useful for long-term offline archiving. If you made SSDs for the same price per GB as disks today, then there wouldn't be enough people buying spinning rust to make it worthwhile producing new disks.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    10. Re:Hard Drives are dying by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 1

      Your example of Laptop is interesting, as my #1 reason to go to SSD on a Laptop isn't size, it is battery life. Spinning drives suck juice, and SSD's offer up substantially longer life without needing a plug. I'm talking a couple extra hours. The second greatest benefit is that powering down and back on is much quicker, so that you're more likely to shut a machine off when not in use, saving even more power (than sleep), because boot to desktop is measured in seconds, not minutes.

      While there may be applications where you need 3TB of data on a laptop, those applications are few and far between. And in many of those cases, having a boot drive be SSD and external HDD of the size you need might make more sense.

      And as more of the FLASH tech improves, and competition and demand increase, (16 TB SSDs due this year) and the problems with spinning drive capacities (theoretical limits), you are going to be flat out wrong on when costs equalize. AND you're not counting the cost to run HDDs in power and cooling as part of the cost of ownership.

      Lastly, you're not even considering the cost of actually waiting for spinning drives to deliver the data to the processor. Spinning drives have a best case of around 900 IOPs, while SSDs are masured in the 100,000 IOPs, Now if you don't value your time, that is fine. IMHO there is almost NO reason to have a spinning drive as a primary drive. If you're dickering over a couple hundred dollars, amortized over the life of the system, you're too stupid to realize you're being too cheap.

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    11. Re:Hard Drives are dying by swb · · Score: 3, Informative

      That said, we have been calling for the death of the mainframe for years, as well as the death of tape for years, and neither have died. HDDs will continue to have a place in the world, but they will be by and large replaced with flash. In the enterprise space, changes in software also mean that most of this flash will be server attached rather than part of a SAN.

      I think the death of tape hasn't happened because there isn't a functional replacement for it for high capacity, long-term archiving. HDDs don't work well in changers, are more fragile and I don't think anyone trusts their powered off shelf life.

      I know that clustered/distributed/server-local storage is becoming a competitor to centralized SAN, but I think it will be something of a limited market. Virtualization and CPU improvements have cut node counts significantly, making it harder to obtain redundant node counts necessary for this to see a lot of adoption.

      Even the vendors with decent products now charge so much for licensing that they're not remotely competitive on pricing. I saw a price analysis of VMware vSAN that put it more expensive by 2-3x over a conventional SAN. MS Storage Spaces isn't really flexible enough yet although it's clear MS wants it to go this way, but it doesn't seem like it will be there or agnostic enough for heterogeneous workloads for years.

    12. Re:Hard Drives are dying by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 1

      Our view is that vSAN is "beta" quality. If we could get our money back, we would. What a waste.

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    13. Re:Hard Drives are dying by EndlessNameless · · Score: 1

      Wrong.

      All modern SSDs have overprovisioned capacity, so they continue to wear level even when they are full.

      They can even move old, untouched data onto the high-wear sectors in the background while servicing new I/O requests on the overprovisioned space.

      You can never guarantee that writes issued to the same sector will be performed on the same flash cell.

      This is why secure erase functionality is absolutely critical to organizations with confidentiality requirements---you cannot simply overwrite every OS-visible sector and assume it's gone because there is a layer of abstraction between sectors/LBAs and physical cell addresses.

      --

      ---
      According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
    14. Re:Hard Drives are dying by swb · · Score: 1

      I haven't run into it at a client yet, the guy I work who has says it really sucks and he had a lot of problems with it.

      I guess I don't see what problems it solves, either, although I think it's an interesting idea.

    15. Re:Hard Drives are dying by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      I mostly agree with what you're saying, and for a primary drive, you're absolutely right. But your original post didn't limit it to primary drives. That was my objection.

      Don't get me wrong. I love my SSD's performance. It makes the laptop much, much faster than my pre-retina MBP. I don't want a spinning drive in lieu of an SSD. I want an internal spinning drive in addition to the SSD. Basically, the frequently used data (OS, apps, current projects) would live on the SSD, and bulk data (photo library, audio and video recordings, etc.) would live on the spinning drive, which would be spun down most of the time, but still available inside the computer for when the data is needed, without the clumsiness of an external drive.

      External drives on portable machines are a royal pain in the backside. That's what I'm doing now as a workaround for the inadequate storage on my laptop. It means that every few months, I offload half a terabyte of photos from my laptop to that hard drive, and whenever I want to do anything with the older photos, I end up having to grab that hard drive. It isn't unusable by any means, but it isn't nearly as convenient as it would be if I could actually buy several terabytes of flash storage, or even a modern Mac laptop with a 3+ TB fusion drive setup. If I had that setup, my photos would go onto the spinning storage from day one. As for battery life, Lightroom uses so much battery even with an SSD that the extra battery hit probably wouldn't be a big deal. So when I'm running that app, my battery life would suck, but that's the price of working with RAW photos. :-)

      What really bugs me is that my current laptop (a retina MacBook Pro) has the same disk capacity as I had in my laptop back in 2010 (and a third less storage than I had at various points in between). While my storage has been stuck at 1 TB, desktop hard drives went from 3 TB to 8 TB, and laptop hard drives went from 1 TB to 2 TB (or 3 TB if you have room for a 15mm drive).

      I love the performance of SSD, but hate with a fiery passion the fact that capacity growth, at least in the laptop world, has ground to a halt for the past six years, while my actual storage needs are increasing at an ever faster pace. I just want my laptop to be able to hold my entire personal photo collection without having to connect external hard drives, and to not have to constantly delete things that I would prefer to keep around because I'm running out of disk space.....

      With that said, for non-laptop purposes, I wouldn't expect power to be a significant piece of the equation, at least if you compare SSDs against modern enterprise spinning storage. An 8 TB HGST helium hard drive draws about 9.1W typically, which is only 80 kWh per year, or ~$28 per year in power costs at PG&E's top tier (which is some of the most expensive power in the country). Cooling is typically about a third of the total power consumption, so that's still under $40 per year difference for an 8 TB drive even if we assume that the flash drive uses zero power.

      I mean yes, power factors in, but until your cost per drive of comparable capacity is within tens of dollars, it shouldn't be enough to erase the difference in hardware costs. Other factors, like capacity per unit of physical space are likely to be far more important, because that determines when you need to add an additional machine. So it will be interesting to see what happens with these 10 TB SSDs in that regard.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    16. Re:Hard Drives are dying by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 1

      It was a creative way to use commodity drives as a virtual SAN across physical boxes. The problem is, if a drive goes offline, the systems that depend on it get wonky. no data loss, just goofy not working virtual systems.

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    17. Re:Hard Drives are dying by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 1

      Combined with the fact that HDDs today are slower per megabyte than ever (10TB drives spin at the same 7200 RPM that 120GB drives did), the near future holds the end of the HDD in the majority of applications.

      "Slower per megabyte than ever"? What does this even mean?

      If you're packing data more densely within a track, you'll be able to read it faster at a given rotational speed, unless your hardware can't keep up and you have to fall back to interleaving (or, perhaps worse, multiple reads to correct errors). I didn't think drives had been interleaved in years.

      My own disclaimer: it's been many years since I paid close attention to drive transfer rates, so I have no idea what actual rates you get out of the new drives. They claim 250/225MBps read/write speeds. I don't remember what was claimed for the 120GB drives, but I don't think they approached 100MBps in the real world.

  7. Re: Almost there... by Blaskowicz · · Score: 1

    I believe people still value 500GB or 1TB storage in a laptop instead of 32GB or 256GB.

  8. Re: Almost there... by Krojack · · Score: 1

    I thought the new method was to shorten the support forcing people to update or risk getting exploited from un-patched windows. Android phone manufactures (Samsung being one of the worse) have been doing it for a few years now.

  9. Re:A bit of an impromptu survey by bobbied · · Score: 1

    Just a little bit more... Of course.

    Disk space is like closet space and income. You will eventually use up all you have and need more.

    --
    "File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
  10. Re: Almost there... by sims+2 · · Score: 1

    You can currently upgrade from the last two editions of windows to the latest one for pretty much free.
    Windows 7 will still get security updates until Jan 14, 2020.
    by upgrading to windows 10 you get another 5 years until Oct 14, 2025.
    Dropping the ability to install new versions on older hardware is mostly just a phone thing.

    As for samsung my samsung convoy 3 (a stupid phone) is still receiving updates nearly 2 & 1/2 years after release. From what I hear a lot of smartphones have no support after that amount of time.

    Hey even the nearly 5 year old ipad 2 will still update to the latest version of ios yeah I know its slow as hell on ios 9 but you can install it if you want to.

    --
    Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
  11. Terebyte? by gstoddart · · Score: 1

    Really? A terebyte?

    Come on guys, at least try.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    1. Re:Terebyte? by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

      I agree if they don't stop making these tereble mistakes I am going to leave!

  12. Re: Almost there... by sims+2 · · Score: 1

    Not as rare as a laptop with dual batteries but finding a laptop with space for two HDDs and a disc drive is still pretty friggin rare. Best of both worlds nice.

    --
    Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
  13. Re:Almost there... by Cramer · · Score: 1

    And "spinning rust" (which is a bad analogy as they don't use iron oxide anymore) scales very well... just stack more platters. That's how we did it back in the good old days.

  14. Re:Almost there... by roc97007 · · Score: 2

    > It might even suck so bad that no-one gives a shit about $/GB any longer, for 95% of all applications. Perhaps, minus all those cat pictures, we're almost there already.

    Right. At some point it's enough for most people. I repair laptops as a side business for non-computer-savvy who have gotten fed up with offshore "support", and one thing I've noticed is that most people don't even begin to touch the capacity of the original drive. I on the other hand, as a photographer, can't get enough storage (my current machine has five terabytes -- one two and one three -- and is full up) but the average user couldn't fill up a 128 GB drive with cat photos over the life of the machine.

    There are exceptions of course. A friend wants to double his laptop capacity and switch to SSD when the price comes down a little more. But I suspect it's for pr0n.

    --
    Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
  15. Re: Almost there... by rsborg · · Score: 1

    [quote]You can currently upgrade from the last two editions of windows to the latest one for pretty much free.[/quote]
    Yeah, if you consider paying with all your freedom and privacy as "free".

    Fortunately most computers available today are upgradable to Linux...

    Free as in shackles. I love it.

    --
    Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
  16. Re: Almost there... by rsborg · · Score: 1

    I believe people still value 500GB or 1TB storage in a laptop instead of 32GB or 256GB.

    You know that Samsung and others sell 500GB SSDs (in several form factors) that are under $250? 1TB is like $580 (a deal I saw several times in the past month).

    I bought a 500GB Crucial m4 SSD a while back at $500, it's now less than half.

    Once you get to that size, most folks have no issues going full SSD.

    --
    Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
  17. Re:Almost there... by AbRASiON · · Score: 1

    Rather than blow my mod points on you.
    What the heck are you even talking about?
    Have you SEEN the areal density increases on platter disks in the last 3 to 5 years?
    Things are slowing down, BADLY and when they do squeeze more in, it's with tricky, performance hampering and complicated methods like SMR and Helium.

    3D Nand however has opened many new doors and new methods of storing data seem to be coming out weekly.
    Disks are dying out, finally.

  18. Problems with SSD storage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    One advantage is duration of information storage with the power off.

    SSD have a temperature dependent decay probability of the bits.
    It is shorter than the persistence of the magnetic bits.

    So my plan is a 1TB SSD, that gets backed up to a 1TB rotating disk that is powered off most of the time.

    "The statements are actually completely accurate, but a bit misleading. First, this is about what JEDEC requires, not what actual SSDs deliver. Second, this is when SSDs are stored in idle at 55C. And third the JEDEC requirements for minimum off-time data-retention are only 3 months @40C for enterprise-grade SSDs and only 12 months for consumer SSDs at 30C. These are kind of on the low side, although I have lost some OCZ drives that were off for just about a year. (Never buying their trash again...)"

    http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/05/10/0936213/enterprise-ssds-powered-off-potentially-lose-data-in-a-week

    1. Re:Problems with SSD storage by m.dillon · · Score: 2

      That standard is for a flash cell that is at its wear-limit (basically at its end-of-life). A brand new flash cell that has only been written a few times has 10x the shelf life.

      Those numbers are also quite misleading, because in addition to the above, a powered SSD will rewrite cells when their data becomes weak. So data retention for a powered SSD is going to be a very long time. Since SSD flash cell life is based on write activity, if you don't wear it out from writing your SSD to its limit and you leave it powered most of the time, it will retain your data and probably last a very long time (well in excess of 10 years, probably in excess of 30 years, possibly even longer).

      SSDs don't eat very much power, a data warehouse would be workable.

      HDDs on the other-hand wear out whether they are powered or not. Corrosion, stress (even if not doing anything), lubricant issues, and any number of other factors. A HDD on a shelf isn't going to last even 5 years in any reliable sense. You might be able to recover the data from the magnetic media, but the expense would become stratospheric if you have more than one drive to recover.

      -Matt

  19. Re:Almost there... by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

    Density is now up to and surpassing "spinning rust" and durability is arguably as good or better. But price per gig is not quite there yet. However, I suspect it is coming!

    Slowly. The nice thing is Moore's Law basically states how fast - transistor density doubling means you can get twice the storage for the same price, or the price of the drive halves.

    So price per gig will roughly halve every 18 months or so. Given you can get 2TB drives for under $100 these days, it's roughly 3-4 generations away, or maybe 5-6 years.

  20. Re:Almost there... by darkain · · Score: 1

    Oh, no, density of SSD is already far surpassed that of spinning disks. This is just Intel playing catch-up at this point.

    http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

  21. Re:Almost there... by avandesande · · Score: 1

    It will die first for consumers- I really think there is going to be a 'peak storage' where everything is online and people won't store stuff locally (I am not going to argue if that is a good idea, just that this will happen)

    --
    love is just extroverted narcissism
  22. Re: Almost there... by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 1

    I got a Crucial 960GB SSD for $270 at Newegg last April. Sub-$300 for around a TB was the price point I was waiting for. I'm a bit surprised I haven't seen much better since.

  23. Target market by Mal-2 · · Score: 1

    What's the target market for something like this? CERN? Arecibo? I would have thought that for speed reasons, anyone needing to store terabytes of data in a big hurry would use RAID arrays, in which case using fewer drives for the same capacity might actually slow them down.

    --
    How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
    1. Re:Target market by guruevi · · Score: 2

      Anyone these days. 10TB isn't all that much anymore. If you need 200TB in the enterprise world today, you can get 4TB reliably (6 and 8 exist but are double and quadruple the price respectively and require heavy tradeoffs) so you need ~110-120 drives (RAID10+spares) and that's for 3.5", 15W.

      Enterprise SSD's typically scale evenly with size so I expect these to cost ~5k each, 45 of these would do the job, at 0.2W and 2.5", those things save you first year in both power and space.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    2. Re:Target market by fnj · · Score: 1

      10TB isn't all that much anymore. If you need 200TB in the enterprise world today, you can get 4TB reliably (6 and 8 exist but are double and quadruple the price respectively and require heavy tradeoffs) so you need ~110-120 drives (RAID10+spares) and that's for 3.5", 15W.

      Enterprise SSD's typically scale evenly with size so I expect these to cost ~5k each, 45 of these would do the job, at 0.2W and 2.5", those things save you first year in both power and space.

      A single RAID10 is an extravagant waste, as well as piss poor redundancy. You lose the wrong 2 drives simultaneously out of your 100+ and you've lost the entire array. Anybody with an ounce of savvy would use ZFS with a number of RAIDZ3's, each one, say, 7-9 drives and 16-24 TB. That gives you triple redundancy, so you have to have 4 simultaneous drive failures in a single array of 8 in order to lose data. You can then tie those RAIDZ3s together in any kind of superarray you want. You could have a RAIDZ3 of RAIDZ3s. A RAIDZ3 superarray of thirteen 8-drive RAIDZ3 subarrays would be 104 drives total and astronomically higher odds against data loss than your RAID10.

      Those 104 drives; say 117 with some spares tossed in, would total about $17,500 - $35,000 depending on how crazy you get about chasing gold-plated "enterprise" sucker bets.

      Now, I don't know how you figure 45 four TB SSDs could do the same job. Actually it would take 50 even with no redundancy whatsoever, which would be a complete epic career-ending FAIL to do. With the same RAIDZ3 of RAIDZ3s you would of course need the same 104 (+ spares) SSDs. By your own reckoning, that would cost you over 117 X 5000, or $585,000 - up to 33 TIMES as much as the HDs.

      Now, 4 TB HDs take more like 8 W average than your figure of 15. 113 of them would consume a total of 936 watts, or 8200 kWh per year - $820-$1640 at typical retail electric rates; I would guess substantially less at industrial rates. It will take you a HELL of a long time to make up the cost difference. Centuries, actually.

  24. Re: Almost there... by unixisc · · Score: 1

    What do you all want to make a bet all the items will still include mechanical disks to keep them slow so people keep on the upgrade treadmill?

    Won't happen. While semiconductors are getting to a point where process shrinking is no longer less expensive, the densities are catching up. Except for Comp Sci applications - taking logs of all computer activity forever, there is nothing that will fill up 10TB of space - even all the movies in the world won't fill it. In the meantime, NOR flash will reach those densities - they are typically 3 orders of binary magnitude below NAND, so chances are that there will be 1TB of NOR flash for applications where reliability is critical.

  25. Re: Almost there... by unixisc · · Score: 1

    With Windows 10, 32GB is very inadequate - the OS alone eats up 12GB, and if one was actually upgrading - either voluntarily or automatically by Microsoft's updates - it requires twice the space, or 24GB. That's a whole lot right there. So I'd say 64GB is a bare minimum, and once one is >100GB, one is comfortable w/ all applications that are downloaded, as well as all files.

  26. Re:Almost there... by edmudama · · Score: 1

    it's not economical to go past 4-5 platters these days, and the manufacturing sweet spot will likely be a 2-platter 4-head drive for a long time

    --
    More data, damnit!
  27. Re: Almost there... by unrtst · · Score: 1

    Not as rare as a laptop with dual batteries but finding a laptop with space for two HDDs and a disc drive is still pretty friggin rare.

    While I do have an older laptop with 2x 2.5" bays (and 3x mini pcie, dvrw, 1920x1080 screen), nowadays it's not too uncommon to find laptops with a 2.5" and room for a mini pcie (or m.2, or similar) SSD. I used a port labeled for a wifi module, and it works fine - YMMV. My only real point here is that the GP's 120gb SSD + 1tb HDD may be that sort of setup, and not necessary 2x 2.5" bays.

  28. Re:Almost there... by dgatwood · · Score: 1

    Unfortunately, the average user doesn't need much at all, but probably 5–10% of users want/need way more space than is currently available. So the options are either making radically different models with radically different capacity and annoying the high-end users with the price difference or using larger capacity everywhere so that economies of scale drive the price down for everyone. Hard drive manufacturers have always done the latter. For some reason, with flash, everybody is doing the former.

    The worst part is that the difference between lightweight users and pro users is more than an order of magnitude. As a photographer, I desperately want to be able to buy a laptop with 5+ TB of capacity. That way, I could use the computer for 3–5 years before I fill it up completely. I could then clone everything onto an external drive, and start fresh with the next machine. Instead, my MacBook Pro has an appallingly inadequate 1 TB of flash storage, and I'm constantly having to micromanage things to keep my laptop in a usable state. I ran out of storage within the first six or seven months, and that was starting almost fresh, without cloning the contents of my previous laptop (which already had almost a terabyte of photos on it). I'm about to dump another ~700 GB of photos onto an external hard drive pretty soon, but that won't buy me more than a few months before I have to repeat the process all over again. And heaven help me if I actually want to write software on the thing. A single git checkout of WebKit takes something like forty or fifty gigabytes between the source and binaries. It is really easy to run out of space when you only have a terabyte to work with.

    The current state of laptop storage is already way past annoying. Up until recently, each laptop I bought, I moved up to at least 4x the capacity through replacement hard drives by the time I stopped using it, then replaced it with a new model that had still greater capacity. Then, about 2010, all the improvements in capacity suddenly stopped. My black MacBook had a 1 TB hard drive in it by the time I replaced it. The largest drive I could get in the pre-retina MacBook Pro was also 1 TB, and the largest capacity I could get in the Retina MBP that replaced it was also 1 TB. I have literally not been able to upgrade my hard drive capacity for SIX YEARS. I could move back to the pre-retina laptop, swap out the optical drive, and end up with 4TB of capacity. I'm seriously considering it, because as nice as the retina screen is, I'd rather have enough storage to be able to function.

    I'm seriously fed up with computers at this point. I haven't been this unhappy with the disk capacity of any Mac since the mid-1990s, and back then, I was unhappy because I couldn't afford more storage, not because it wasn't available. Now, I'm sitting here with disposable income, telling Apple "take my money!", and I still can't buy a new computer with enough storage to meet my needs at any price.

    IMO, the computer industry is a great candidate for disruptive innovation. Too bad nobody seems interested in innovating anymore. Just saying.

    --

    Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  29. Re:Almost there... by cas2000 · · Score: 1

    No matter what the marketing wankers and control freaks ("we own your data and we own you") at google, apple, amazon etc would like you to think, cloud storage will never replace local storage.

    cloud storage may be OK for (relatively slow) backups for people who don't care about the privacy or security implications or the secret and/or warrantless access by spooks and LEAs, but it will never be a substitute for large, fast local storage.

    ADSL or cable speeds (or even FTTP over many and varied hops across the internet) just don't compare to 500+Mbps for sata3 or double or triple that for pci-e/m.2 local SSD speeds.

  30. Re:Almost there... by roc97007 · · Score: 1

    > Now, I'm sitting here with disposable income, telling Apple "take my money!", and I still can't buy a new computer with enough storage to meet my needs at any price.

    I know the feeling. My understanding is that you're supposed to put everything "in the cloud" now. How that's supposed to work on location with no network connection is anyone's guess.

    For applications like this, a desktop unit is still somewhat necessary. On location, my laptop is a place where I can sort through the day's shots and get a leg up on post processing work. When I get home, the files get transferred to the desktop machine.

    I have pieces still in boxes for a rack mount machine that will be a Linux based NAS, several terabytes of RAID available on my home network. Then it won't matter so much what machine I actually do my work on. I hope to start standing up that server soon.

    --
    Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
  31. Re: Almost there... by khelms · · Score: 1

    "there is nothing that will fill up 10TB of space - even all the movies in the world won't fill it." Ahem. A blu ray disc holds 25-50GB of data. 10,000GB (10TB) is only enough to hold 200-400 blu ray discs.

  32. Re:Almost there... by dgatwood · · Score: 1

    I know the feeling. My understanding is that you're supposed to put everything "in the cloud" now. How that's supposed to work on location with no network connection is anyone's guess.

    Yeah, that's a nice theory and all, but in practice, I neither trust cloud providers to be secure nor reliable. For example, last week, I was forced to move several hundred GB of public photos from a major ISP to my own server because they suddenly decided that unlimited storage for web pages wasn't unlimited, and wanted several times as much to store the photos in some idiotic object-oriented nightmare. And that's with an actual ISP hosting account. I can't imagine ever trusting any random cloud-based photo site when I'm publicly making available hundreds of GBs of photos. It is just laughable.

    Not to mention that even if I could get past those problems, when you're talking about RAW files that are 25 MB apiece, over a 3 Mbps DSL connection, that comes out to more than a minute apiece just to retrieve them (and several times as long to upload them). The cloud is for tiny little bits of data that have low value. It is great if the only data you care about are your Facebook posts. It is tolerable for email messages. It's a joke for photos, and always will be until we have ubiquitous gigabit to the curb. Maybe even then.

    For applications like this, a desktop unit is still somewhat necessary. On location, my laptop is a place where I can sort through the day's shots and get a leg up on post processing work. When I get home, the files get transferred to the desktop machine.

    I'd love to go that route. Unfortunately, Apple's desktops are almost as bad as their laptops capacity-wise. So if I have to use an external hard drive anyway, I might as well just use it with my MacBook Pro. *sigh*

    --

    Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  33. Re:Almost there... by urdak · · Score: 1

    No matter what the marketing wankers and control freaks ("we own your data and we own you") at google, apple, amazon etc would like you to think, cloud storage will never replace local storage.

    You can also have private cloud storage, namely NAS: In my home I already have a 3 TB NAS attached to the home network, and all the devices in my home (computers, streamers, cellphones, etc.) can use movies, photos, music, etc. stored on that shared disk. This made it un-important for individual computers to have huge hard disks: My wife's computer has a 2 TB hard disk, which remains 95% free, for example.

    So it makes sense that in the future you'll have the really big (and chip low $/GB) disks only in NAS devices, and all other computers, devices, etc., will have smaller disks with less concern to the $/GB and more concern for reliability, speed, power consumption, etc.

  34. Re:Almost there... by KGIII · · Score: 1

    I don't actually store much of anything on my computer(s) any more. Not really. I have something between a SAN and a NAS, depending on how you look at it and how you approach it. Everything gets stored there, replicated, and sent out in various backup schemes. I don't keep a whole lot on the drive that's actually in the computer. I can always pull an image back to play with it. I've got access to huge amounts of storage (TB after TB - in large disk arrays). It's sort of like cloud storage but it's under my control. I even have a backup network connection to get in via remote.

    There's a few ways to access, from SSH to VNC. I don't even care if I've got an OS installed, I can just as easily run a Live USB and it takes like five minutes to get it configured enough to use it well enough. From there, I just VNC into something and do my "work" there. I load up a VM via remote to go along with it - toss it onto a separate virtual desktop, and things like that. I haven't stored any data locally in a long time.

    Well, not entirely accurate. There's a few unimportant things held locally. It's stuff I don't really care about, need access to from remote, can afford to lose, or I'm working on at present.

    I don't know when the change happened and it wasn't an intentional change. I just stopped storing stuff locally more and more. I changed the download location to prompt and just started saving stuff right over the network. I started using VMs more and more and wanted to have access to stuff from outside the VM so stuff got saved on a networked share. I started saving "work" that I'd done to shares across the network, putting them in different spots, and things like that. It wasn't a plan - I didn't plan on stopping the local storage. It just kind of happened and it turns out to be pretty nice. My ISP lets me run a server so I can connect in a variety of ways. I've been pretty happy with it.

    --
    "So long and thanks for all the fish."
  35. Re:Almost there... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 1

    I have two words that should explain why this is not such a great idea: IBM Deathstar.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  36. Xpoint by nhat11 · · Score: 1

    Glad a researched tech that took years to developed is finally hitting production even though there's no consumer release yet.... so hopefully it will be out and see what the price point for it is.

  37. Re: Almost there... by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

    I thought the new method was to shorten the support forcing people to update or risk getting exploited from un-patched windows. Android phone manufactures (Samsung being one of the worse) have been doing it for a few years now.

    This is one area I am in the minority and agree with Microsoft. Desktop support for an OS for 10 years is INSANE. Good luck trying to get NVME on 7 without issues.

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  38. Re: Almost there... by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

    I believe people still value 500GB or 1TB storage in a laptop instead of 32GB or 256GB.

    You can get a 256 GB for just $116 these days. It is approaching quite rapidly and for a higher end laptop there is no reason to go mechanical unless the OEM wants to make them start slow so they can sell you a new one in 2 years

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  39. Re: Almost there... by Gazzonyx · · Score: 1

    I can burn 10 TB of disk just installing VMs for a test environment (say, a couple of clusters). I snapshot at pre-install, post-install and pre/post test. And that's for simple things like a db cluster, some test data, a couple of servers/clients and an application or three. If one of the VMs is my dev desktop, a reasonable gross rate of churn is probably in the neighborhood of 20 GB/day on that VM alone; when I start running Docker, the disk space just burns.

    --

    If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.

  40. Re:Almost there... by roc97007 · · Score: 1

    Yeah it's too bad. My last Mac was a G4, which I had continued to use way past the point of unsupported. I never made the transition to Intel Macs, instead gritting my teeth and switching to Winders so I could use a purpose-built computer (built, as it happens, by me) and upgrade it as needed, instead of being stuck with whatever Apple thought I needed. I'm currently trying to make the leap to Mint, but there are still issues to iron out. I hate Winders but it's a necessary evil right now.

    Used to be, Apple was the go-to brand for content creation. I guess that's still true if "content creation" is Instagram. But pros probably need to look elsewhere. Unfortunate.

    I sometimes forget that there are areas of the world where DSL is still the only option. I was an early adopter of fiber to the house, have been on it for years now. The *lowest* tier is 30Mbps down and 30 Mbps up, and 100 Mbps both ways is available (at more than I want to spend). But -- interesting thing -- the service through which I sell my photos also offers (at the tier I'm currently on) to keep all my original digital negatives "in the cloud" (on their servers) so I don't have to burn up local disk, and even at 30/30 the transfer time is too slow for that to be practical. "The Cloud" seems only to be practical for starlet naked selfies and the like.

    --
    Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
  41. Re:Almost there... by avandesande · · Score: 1

    Your middle paragraph describes 90% of users.... so the market is going to shrink.

    --
    love is just extroverted narcissism
  42. Re: Almost there... by EndlessNameless · · Score: 1

    Most ASUS and MSI gaming laptops have multiple drive bays, upgradeable RAM, and easily replaced wifi adapters.

    If you're not into expensive gaming machines, look at the entry-level model that uses the same chassis for under a grand.

    --

    ---
    According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
  43. Re:Almost there... by EndlessNameless · · Score: 1

    Moore's Law has been running out of steam lately.

    Intel had trouble with their last several process nodes. TSMC and UMC had... more than trouble.

    We'll still see progress, but we're hitting the wall on what silicon can do. Maybe alternative materials will be the answer, but even then the reason they haven't been used before is the cost to manufacture.

    Chris Mack wrote a relevant article about it here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semic...

    He doesn't mention the need to move to alternative materials, which Intel has said elsewhere will need to happen by 7nm.

    Moore's law has been slowing down. We're still seeing benefits, but I expect the industry to slow down at least a bit in this lifetime.

    --

    ---
    According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
  44. Re: Almost there... by rsborg · · Score: 1

    I got a Crucial 960GB SSD for $270 at Newegg last April. Sub-$300 for around a TB was the price point I was waiting for. I'm a bit surprised I haven't seen much better since.

    Is that a 2.5" form factor? That's pretty damn good.

    --
    Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
  45. Re: Almost there... by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 1

    Yep. I'd seen them sub-$300 once or twice before, but hadn't pulled the trigger. This time there was some sort of 10% off deal on top of everything else. I don't think I've seen anything quite that low since, but I do believe they still dip below $300 occasionally.

    Can't speak to performance relative to other SSDs, but for a laptop running an older version of OS X, it's been quite a step up from the 500GB 5400RPM drive it replaced.

  46. Re: Almost there... by rsborg · · Score: 1

    Yep. I'd seen them sub-$300 once or twice before, but hadn't pulled the trigger. This time there was some sort of 10% off deal on top of everything else. I don't think I've seen anything quite that low since, but I do believe they still dip below $300 occasionally.

    Can't speak to performance relative to other SSDs, but for a laptop running an older version of OS X, it's been quite a step up from the 500GB 5400RPM drive it replaced.

    Yeah, I have a 2010 MBP running a fusion drive with a 1TB drive and 500GB SSD, and was looking to replace spinning rust with a 1TB SSD (or replace both with a 2TB SSD).

    Fusion drive is great since I grew past 500GB, but El Cap is a bit slow now so I'd like to get back to pure SSD.

    --
    Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting