Samsung Starts Mass Producing an SSD With Monstrous 30.72TB Capacity (betanews.com)

Brian Fagioli, writing for BetaNews: Samsung says it is mass producing a solid state drive with monstrous capacity. The "PM1643," as it is called, offers an insane 30.72TB of storage space! This is achieved by using 32 x 1TB NAND flash. "Samsung reached the new capacity and performance enhancements through several technology progressions in the design of its controller, DRAM packaging and associated software. Included in these advancements is a highly efficient controller architecture that integrates nine controllers from the previous high-capacity SSD lineup into a single package, enabling a greater amount of space within the SSD to be used for storage. The PM1643 drive also applies Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology to interconnect 8Gb DDR4 chips, creating 10 4GB TSV DRAM packages, totaling 40GB of DRAM. This marks the first time that TSV-applied DRAM has been used in an SSD," says Samsung.

Comments

Re: RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

RAM is far faster than flash, and far more tolerant to being written lots. Itâ(TM)s used as a cache to both speed up the drive, and reduce wear on the actual flash.

Re:Price?

[dgatwood]

The extrapolated cost of this 30TB drive is less than the burdened monthly cost of a single engineer.

And if your company is small enough that a single 30 TB SSD is enough to meet your entire storage needs, then you probably aren't big enough to be so desperate for speed that you would buy a 30 TB SSD. I'm expecting most of these will be used for the most frequently accessed data for companies that are Google-scale, not companies whose total data capacity needs are rivaled only by my home RAID array. :-)

Furthermore, if disk I/O is your bottleneck, then moving your DB from HDD to SDD is likely to give you far more speedup than fiddling with your schema.

But "fiddling with your schema" so that tables that get hit frequently are indexed on SSDs or DRAM drives (and, if necessary, stored in their entirety on those drives) means you get most of the speed win without the expense of storing your *entire* data collection on an SSD. The more you can separate out the frequently accessed data from the rarely accessed data, the easier it is to keep your costs sane. And the bigger your total storage needs, the more that design decision matters.