The Reality of SSD Capacity: No-One Wants Over 16TB Per Drive
One of the expanding elements of the storage business is that the capacity per drive has been ever increasing. Spinning hard-disk drives are approaching 20 TB soon, while solid state storage can vary from 4TB to 16TB or even more, if you're willing to entertain an exotic implementation. Today at the Data Centre World conference in London, I was quite surprised to hear that due to managed risk, we're unlikely to see much demand for drives over 16TB.
Speaking with a few individuals at the show about expanding capacities, storage customers that need high density are starting to discuss maximum drive size requirements based on their implementation needs. One message starting to come through is that storage deployments are looking at managing risk with drive size – sure, a large capacity drive allows for high-density, but in a drive failure of a large drive means a lot of data is going to be lost.
[...] Ultimately the size of the drive and the failure rate leads to element of risks and downtime, and aside from engineering more reliant drives, the other variable for risk management is drive size. 16TB, based on the conversations I've had today, seems to be that inflection point; no-one wants to lose 16TB of data in one go, regardless of how often it is accessed, or how well a storage array has additional failover metrics.
Related: Toshiba Envisions a 100 TB QLC SSD in the "Near Future"
Samsung Announces a 128 TB SSD With QLC NAND
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @12:12AM (10 children)
If you have 16tb on a drive, and you back it up, and the drive dies, then you don't lose any data. Same goes for a 160tb drive. Do not underestimate the ability of SoylentNews users to collect porn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @01:50AM (1 child)
Another dog-slow and short-lived QLC idiot toy?
If a "storage device" needs constantly be backed up onto another reliable one, let's call the second one "storage" and the first "cache", and stop reinventing the square wheel.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday March 15 2019, @02:26PM
>If a "storage device" needs constantly be backed up onto another reliable one,
Except that's true of *every* storage device, regardless of reliability, because there's no such thing as a truly reliable device.
There's only two kinds of data in the world: that which you've already backed up to an independent storage device (preferably off-site), and that which you are obviously willing to lose.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday March 15 2019, @03:38AM (2 children)
If I had a 16TB drive and it died, I'd just re-download all the porn... uhh, restore all the data that was on it from public sources. So no big loss really.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @05:25AM (1 child)
How fast can you download 16TB?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @05:37AM
Torrents at 10 megabytes per second total? Filled in less than a month.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @05:23AM (4 children)
Given the enormous amount of free porn on the 'net, why would one want to collect it? Just stream it when it's desired/required(?).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @05:27AM (3 children)
If you want something, you should download a copy if you ever want to see it again.
Try streaming the Brenton Tarrant Facebook live video. Possible, but not so easy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @12:02PM
Okay. If that's the kind of stuff you masturbate with, I guess I can understand.
There's *plenty* of (pretty kinky) stuff I'm into online, so I'm set thanks. I even get to have sex with actual women on a regular basis. The same one even. I'm sorry. Does that make you jealous?
Shooting people (at least with guns) doesn't turn me on at all.
(Score: 3, Touché) by DannyB on Friday March 15 2019, @02:59PM (1 child)
True. I am concerned [wikipedia.org] that I might not be able to find Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up".
People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday March 15 2019, @03:50PM
Yep. I'm really worried about that too [bit.ly]. Hopefully, we can make sure that doesn't happen.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr