Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Tuesday August 07 2018, @11:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the good-fast-cheap dept.

Samsung is about to make 4TB SSDs and mobile storage cheaper

A couple of years ago, Samsung launched its first 4TB solid state drives, which might as well not have existed given their $1,499 asking price. Today, the company announces the commencement of mass production of a more — though it's too early to know exactly how much more — affordable variant with its 4TB QLC SSDs. The knock on QLC NAND storage has traditionally been that it sacrifices speed for an increased density, however Samsung promises the same 540MBps read and 520MBps write speeds for its new SSDs as it offers on its existing SATA SSD drives.

Describing this new family of storage drives, which will also include 1TB and 2TB variants, as consumer class, Samsung will obviously aim to price them at a level where quibbles about performance will be overwhelmed by the sheer advantage of having terabytes of space. Any concerns about the reliability of these drives should also be allayed by the three-year warranty promised by Samsung. The launch of the first drives built around these new storage chips is slated for later this year.

What's the endurance of QLC NAND again?

Also at Engadget.

Related: Toshiba's 3D QLC NAND Could Reach 1000 P/E Cycles
Samsung Announces a 128 TB SSD With QLC NAND
Micron Launches First QLC NAND SSD
Western Digital Samples 96-Layer 3D QLC NAND with 1.33 Tb Per Die


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Wednesday August 08 2018, @03:58PM (3 children)

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 08 2018, @03:58PM (#718825) Journal

    Even if you doubled or tripled [hard drive prices], it's going to be a lot cheaper than the equivalent in SSDs. For some years.

    Since the beginning of time as it's counted in the home computer and PC market until the foreseeable future, the ability to store data on fast chips or in magnetic bubbles or some such instead of on hard drives has been more expensive, in fact.

    CPUs get faster, memory gets faster, communications busses get faster, input/output interfaces get faster with time. Over the decades that we have had mini- and personal computers, these things have gotten faster and faster at a rate ranging from impressive to terrific.

    Hard drives, on the other hand, are still very slow (and high-latency) relative to all the other data-moving and holding components and technologies. They get faster with time, sure, but they are still the device that has the greatest potential to create a performance bottleneck by orders of magnitude of slowerness.

    It used to be that the single upgrade component that would make the most performance difference in a computer was adding memory--which would reduce reliance on a swap partition/file on the slow mechanical storage device. But now, it's adding an SSD. Boot is faster, programs start much faster, the storage is suddenly fast like everything else is. There are still bottlenecks, but they're much smaller and more complex--this is the last bit of low-hanging fruit.

    The original computers that were built worked from moving parts, not silicon, and hard drives are the last holdover from that slow, clunky, but technologically exciting time. SSDs are not as fast as DDR-n memory, for example, but they represent a complete breakaway from the mechanical and into the solid-state.

    So I guess it's fair that they cost a little more.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday August 08 2018, @04:43PM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday August 08 2018, @04:43PM (#718848) Journal

    It used to be that the single upgrade component that would make the most performance difference in a computer was adding memory--which would reduce reliance on a swap partition/file on the slow mechanical storage device. But now, it's adding an SSD. Boot is faster, programs start much faster, the storage is suddenly fast like everything else is. There are still bottlenecks, but they're much smaller and more complex--this is the last bit of low-hanging fruit.

    This point is already covered in my comment, although you expanded on it.

    At $0.10 to $0.15/GB, a 1 TB SSD would be $100-$150. This is where hard drives start to look bad because the smallest hard drives don't get much cheaper than $40. And the SSD is a product that greatly increases the performance of the computer compared to an HDD. Most people could live with 1 TB as their primary drive.

    ---

    So I guess it's fair that they cost a little more.

    There are different views on whether this will stay the case.

    Updated IDC SSD forecast sees 44 per cent capacity CAGR 2016-2021 [theregister.co.uk]

    IDC sees the SSD $/TB price premium over disk drives reducing over the 2016-2021 period. It sees a general 7.2x premium in 2016 reducing to 2.2x in 2021.

    If price/capacity was only 2x higher than HDDs rather than an order of magnitude, then HDDs would become a niche product fast. Especially given that SSDs are going to reach much higher capacities than HDDs can in the near term. Producing a 100 TB HDD would be incredibly difficult within the next 5 years, but producing a 1,000 TB SSD would not be that hard.

    Hard Drive Cost Per Gigabyte [backblaze.com]

    The change in the rate of the cost per gigabyte of a hard drive is declining. For example, from January 2009 to January 2011, our average cost for a hard drive decreased 45% from $0.11 to $0.06 – $0.05 per gigabyte. From January 2015 to January 2017, the average cost decreased 26% from $0.038 to $0.028 – just $0.01 per gigabyte. This means that the declining price of storage will become less relevant in driving the cost of providing storage.

    (Also see graph [backblaze.com]) So Backblaze confirms what OP was saying. There has been a flattening, which can be traced right back to the Thailand floods.

    However, when WD announced MAMR [anandtech.com] (Seagate later confirmed it is sticking with HAMR), WD projected [anandtech.com] that HDDs could maintain an order of magnitude price/capacity advantage over SSDs (e.g. $10/TB for HDDs vs. $100/TB for SSDs).

    The problem is that their projection graph looks very unrealstic. They forecast $/TB for SSDs declining 16-20% over 5 year periods. But it's probably more like 30% over 2 year periods from what I've read elsewhere. They have QLC hanging out in 2022-2028 when it will actually be shipping next year. I doubt the future of technologies over 4-bits-per-cell (although there has been interest [theregister.co.uk]) but by the time 2022 rolls around the amount of layers could be drastically increased to past 128 [soylentnews.org]. There has also been a lot of innovation in stacking many dies/packages [soylentnews.org]. Layers of layers. Which is why a 1 petabyte SSD is very feasible in the near future. Although massively increasing capacities doesn't necessarily result in a massive decrease in $/TB, it will help.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @07:58PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 08 2018, @07:58PM (#718962)

      thanks for all comments.

      the jab at the country was just to point out that some countries manufacture products andthen just export them.
      it is super strange that the HDD factories here in thailand don't have a small table outside the factory where
      each and every HDD they manufacture can be bought ...
      it would be strange also, if, living in 'murika, you would have to order that "special" AMD or intel cpu from alibaba, non?

      tho i guess it's hard to make a case for that table-outside-the-factory if it is surrounded by low lying rice marshes ;
      owning a HDD doesn't magically make your rice grow faster ...

      anyways, i must admit that the WD HDDs i have lying around are still working as promised, so thumbs-up for reliability.

      on the other hand i have had some early SSDs in the 20-40 GB range die on me.

      also one last point: energy usage.
      the 2.5" HDD are about in the same ball park as their 2.5" SSD brethren; not so the 3.5" big brother.
      if you have a few (5?) 8TB 3.5" HDD then that combo is using as much as one of those big CPU in the >80 W TDP range?
      if a 500GB SSD uses as much energy as a 50TB SSD ... then ...

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday August 08 2018, @08:54PM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday August 08 2018, @08:54PM (#718989) Journal

        I think the big SSDs tend to use more energy than their smaller counterparts (due to more packages... compare to the M.2 [wikipedia.org] chewing gum-like form factors). However, when it comes down to a home user with an SSD, even a power-hungry SSD will probably use less energy than an HDD since it completes random operations very fast and is also faster at sequential access. So it ends up completing reads and transfers and going back to idling.

        One recent advance has helped HDDs reduce power consumption somewhat: helium-filled drives. Which are apparently available to consumers [anandtech.com] these days.

        Maybe multi-actuator technology [soylentnews.org] could also reduce power consumption in some scenarios.

        --
        [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]