More 128TB SSDs are coming as almost no one noticed this launch — another SSD controller that can support up to 128TB appeared paving the way for HDD-beating capacities

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 414 points – More 128TB SSDs are coming as almost no one noticed this launch — another SSD controller that can support up to 128TB appeared paving the way for HDD-beating capacities
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More 128TB SSDs are coming as almost no one noticed this launch — another SSD controller that can support up to 128TB appeared paving the way for HDD-beating capacities::Phison quietly revealed an updated X2 SSD platform at CES

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as almost no one noticed this launch

That's because we're having trouble just getting food. A shiny new and expensive SSD isn't even on the list at this point.

At that size they are certainly targeting enterprise and cloud servers. Cool that they are getting that big, but they probably cost as much as a house.

At that size they are certainly targeting enterprise and cloud servers

Dunno, have you seen the new Medal of Honor?

That’s cool and all, but the only reason I would want that capacity is to store stuff that I would want to store for much longer than a lifespan of an SSD. Only HDD’s have that kind of lifespan. Like a gigantic video library/archive. I guess these aren’t for me.

But if they drive down the price of high capacity, HDDs, all the better. 

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I remember that SSDs lifespan mainly depends on how much you overwrite the drive. For 128TB, it should take you a very long time to overwrite the entire drive, let alone couple hundred or thousand times to kill the drive. I know that bit rot also happens on SSDs, but that applies to HDDs as well, and good drive maintenance practices should alleviate the issue. Though for archival purposes/cold storage, tape drives are probably better.

The lifespan of your data isn't nearly as long as the lifespan of the cells storing your data. Due to leakage of of power from the cells, and the more and more dense these cells are being packed (leading to smaller differences between what voltage maps to what binary value), SSDs have issues with bitrot. With a disk this size you would need to have data regularly checked and refreshed (rewritten) to ensure the data being stored was still correct and not corrupted.

All storage has issues with bit rot. There haven't been any studies to show that SSD is disproportionately affected.

In 2016, HDDs were more reliable (MTBF).

In 2022, for the first 5 years, SSDs are looking more reliable. With more of a constant failure rate (1%/yr), than the increasing failure rate of HDDs after 5 years.

(Caveat: not just bit rot, but general failure data.)

There's a caveat there. We've had some new tech in SSDs come out very recently, new enough not to be in those charts will still have to see.

What is bit rot?

When bits of data on a storage medium goes bad for seemingly no reason. If you've ever had a library of files and all of a sudden there's a file that won't open even though you haven't touched it.

If they are loading the drive up with media for archival purposes how much overwriting are they going to be doing, anyways? Theoretically the drive should last a very long time for that purpose.

Right, but if the point isn't for the drive to be actively used, and instead just hold data for archiving, then there's little reason to spend more money to get an SDD for that purpose when an HDD will hold that data just as well and for much cheaper.

The benefits of SSD over HDD are almost entirely in performance, so if SSD can develop further to provide a tangible benefit over HDD for long term storage, and do it for cheaper, then we can fully move away from it. But I don't think we're quite there yet.

SSD lifespan is expressed in terabytes written (TBW), wherein yeah they can sustain so many writes to the flash chips before they can't anymore.

Really depends on the content, type of use, architecture, and the file system. You’re not wrong, some situations would take centuries to wear this guy out.

It’s not for you. It’s for enterprises, but I can drive down the prices of shit you would use. No noise, better performance, less energy; it’s a win-win.

HDDs typically don’t last as long as SSDs due to their mechanics failing. Data is there but it just won’t spin. I’ve yet to have an SSD actually fail. Every HDD I’ve ever owned, save one, has.

I had one fail three weeks ago....but I been using it nonstop since 2013. Yeah, it was 128gb

This has not been my experience at all, nor is what I know from general knowledge— that, due to rewriting, SSDs become unusable within 3-5 years, whereas the typical lifespan of an enterprise HDD is 5-7 years, perhaps longer.

In my own use, SSDs of mine seem to crap out around 5-ish years, whereas HDDs get 7+, and the $/GB ratio makes it a no-brainer, esp for video library/archive storage where it’s mostly read/write no rewrite and long-term storage with no need for very high-speed access (like for editing 4/8K).

I buy enterprise HDDs that never spin down and last forever— they use more power, but I don’t pay for that. SSDs wear out just by reading and writing and become unreadable over time.

If I were editing giant chunks of video in 8K, and needed enormously fast cache rates and transfer speeds over thunderbolt 4, obviously, I’d go with the SSDs, especially if I had a studio I was working for that could afford to replace them when they were out. But that’s not my use case.

I've had at least 8 SSDs fail in various ways personally.

I care about affordable stuf not luxury .

These are not intended for you anyways. They are designed for servers.

It's still interesting though and server hardware eventually makes it way down to normal people.

I’m holding out upgrading for the holographic nano dark matter drives that have infinite storage capacity and RAID data into 3 alternate universes for security.

Some high tech alien's porn stash is embedded in the fabric of our universe and that's the reason we exist.

This is why I feel like an interdimensional cumshot all the time.

Realistically, a couple of 10TB drives would have me covered for like a decade at least. If these massive drives bring down the price of much smaller ones, I'm a happy boy.

Yeah I have an old pc. Built it 6 or 7 years ago with a 1080 FTW2 card that is still going strong. For storage I have a wd 1tb drive and a 250gb ssd with windows on it. I've been fine for the most part since I don't watch 4k tv and only really play older games anymore.

That's some nice density you got there. While you're at it...

Can I get a 12.8TB drive 1/10th the physical size (m.2 2230) and has a steady transfer rate of 2.4GBs that costs <$200 dollhairs? Pretty please 🙏

Unless you're using a NUC or similar, M.2 is the worst form factor - and consumer grade drives are all shit. If you're in the market for storage I'd recommend looking at used enterprise U.2 drives in the 0.5-1 DWPD range. Adapters (PCIe or M.2 to U.2) are super cheap.

Edit: 12.8TB is gonna be a stretch, obviously, but even Solidigm TLC drives are quite a bit better than any consumer grade drives and I've seen some of the 7TB models go for surprisingly cheap.

How expensive are they, $100,000 or maybe more?

$4.5k from a quick search.

Edit: I HAVE NO CLUE WHERE THAT NUMBER CAME FROM LAST NIGHT

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-128tb-petabyte-storage

This states that a 32tb ssd costs roughly $7000

≈$35/TB or ≈3.4¢/GB Actually not a bad deal at all, consider the current SSD prices.

Hmm. As a personal user, 9k to not worry about storage space or redundancy, for at least a decade seems like a pretty great deal.

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Do you think the normal consumer would care? All that matters is for SSD to become as cheap or cheaper than HDDs or nothing

What's the biggest HDD out there? I mean at sizes this big it's a lot of data to lose in one go if it dies. Even if you have backups or whatever that's a lot to have to restore.

I like 8TB drives for media. I know the rules of safe backup say you should have 3 copies, but I just have another 8TB drive for each one that's in use and I do a sync every few months. The backup drives, when not hooked up to sync for backup, sit safely in anti static bags inside the boxes they came in, in a file cabinet drawer.

Who sells 80TB HDDs? None on the market that I know of.

I've seen SSDs hit 100TB, but those are $40k+. And more "reasonable" options like 64TB for $10k or so.

HDDs just reached 30TB, but I don't think those are widely available yet. 24TB is the biggest you can expect to see for sale.

Man I has to read that 4 times before it registered. Fucking he'll shits nuts

Call me when they somehow fit this on an SD card in another 10 years

Whatcha talking bout? There are many ads for 128 Tb drive on TEMU and Ali Express! Like for cereal man, they show proper sizes and everything!

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/s if ya didn't get it

Given how many years its been since the first 100TB SSD released, anything short of 200TB seems kinda meh. Honestly kinda figured we'd be past the 400TB mark at this point, but I guess those sizes simply aren't that interesting from a business perspective even if just as a halo product not meant to actually sell much.

My laptop has a 256GB SSD, and even this still feels plenty to me. Not sure what I'd even do with 500 times that much space.

Store 3 new AAA games?

don't exaggerate. Stores 2 AAA games.

Store one AAAA game. Ubisoft seems to have started making those.

This gave me my first legit lol today thank you

Should've added that I don't use this laptop for gaming. I also don't store multiple AAA games in parallel. But I get your point.

Games eat up my SSD at an alarming rate. I could see myself using several TB easily.

My steam deck typically has one big game installed at a time. At this point, I just want to finish baldurs gate 3 so I can delete it and put on some other games.

Simple things. Lemmy, for instance, has grown to ~60GB since June las year. And that's just the db and federated media since I don't really havr any uploads. The big instancea are easily into the hundreds od gigs - I know lemmy.ca had over 300GB of media alone last autumn.

On a more consumer level - high quality 4k media eats up storage pretty fast. The phones taking pictures and video in higher and higher quality - space requirements will only ever go up.

Lemmy federates media other than text?

Sort of. If you check the url of thumbnail images - they'll all be from your local instance.

Some images are also federated. Take this post, for example. The link is to lemmy.world, but the thumbnail and image itself are served by lemmy.cafe.

I've never really delved into what exactly decides whether to federate a particular bit of content or not, but there's definitely more than just text being stored.

Curious. That was not the case when I started using lemmy. It was page after page of thumbnails served by remote instances, showing up as empty frames since I block off-site media.

Since you mentioned it, though, I just checked: some of the images from remote posts are now showing up, hosted by my local instance.

This is an encouraging trend for users who care about privacy (and admins who don't want their servers bearing the load of remote users). I wonder if it's a configuration change that makes the difference, or a new feature in recent lemmy versions.

I know sdf had issues with media storage before, but that was late last year/early this one. There's noy been an update to lemmy in the week that you've joined.

Also - welcome aboard!

But there have been updates since I started using lemmy, and since I often ignore thumbnails, an update might have changed this behavior while I was on a previous instance without my noticing.

welcome aboard!

Thanks!

that's for enterprise use; also plenty of uses in a data-driven world to run predictive models on.

Clearly you are not a data hoarder

Not at all, but I see that lots of Lemmy users are into self-hosting and like to set up their own media boxes, where I can see how large SSDs could come in handy.

That's cool and all. How many levels per cell? Can I have it in SLC? No? Ok then I'm good.