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

That 0.02 TB made the difference.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Originally I thought the capacity was 30.7 TB. I was like, meh! not impressed.

Then I looked at the fourth significant digit. it is 2. Yes, it is actually 30.72 TB. That 651 parts per million more than my what I originally thought. Now I am all ears, looking at it carefully, camping outside Alibaba container terminal to be the first one on the block to get it.

Very well done Dear Headline Writer, always provide very precise information. Next time, why stop with the fourth significant digit? You could be even more amazingly accurate and provide six, seven... why not go all the way to 11 significant digits! Most people have just 10 digits, so go for 11, that is a good number hard to beat.

Re:That 0.02 TB made the difference.

[Jason Levine]

They claim it's 30.72GB but all you really get is 30.1415926535GB of space.

Re:RPM of drive?

[Freultwah]

As SSD means "Super Spinning Disk", it probably goes to at least 30k.

Re:Just rolls off the tongue

[WilliamGeorge]

"PM1643, why aren't you at your post? PM1643, do you copy?"

Re:Only $25,000

[ctilsie242]

I would assert they will be used in the usual RAID 1/10/6 configurations. They are fast, but because there is so much data on them and I/O hasn't kept up, RAID 5 would likely not be used, but would be used for RAID 6. Of course, RAID 1 and RAID 10 will definitely be alternatives.

I do wonder what the real world failure rate on these will be. From what I've seen, SSDs have definitely been more reliable than HDDs.

Re:Price?

[Nostalgia4Infinity]

In my experience running IT for a large department the cost saved in not having to replace drives, and worse, restore data is worth the cost of SSDs, probably just in labor costs but also the additional peace of mind.

Also:
"For most corporate workloads, the acquisition cost of flash storage is still significantly greater than for HDD storage. However, when operating costs are factored in, the TCO for SSDs may actually already be lower than for equivalent HDD arrays. Use of SSDs reduces data center costs for power, cooling, floor space, rack space, and maintenance. And as SSD purchase prices continue to fall, the TCO disparity can only grow greater over time."

https://www.zadarastorage.com/...

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.