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: 5, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 15 2019, @12:18AM (2 children)
You know, I used to do that. Then I found out how much faster /dev/null's write speed is and never looked back.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by jbruchon on Friday March 15 2019, @02:21AM (1 child)
You're welcome. [youtube.com] Relevant bit is at 2:00-2:15, but watch it all for maximum enjoyment.
I'm just here to listen to the latest song about butts.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday March 15 2019, @03:03PM
That ignorant video suggests that you cannot shard /dev/null in order to gain superior write performance.
Here are helpful tips for the skeptics.
Make /dev/null scalable in case you are doing too much IO to /dev/null!
Shard /dev/null into multiple nodes.
Create a /dev/null1 like this:
$ sudo mknod -m666 /dev/null1 c 1 3
$ ls -la /dev/null*
Or a loop to symlink:
$ sudo for i in count(2-19) ln -s /dev/null$i /dev/null
People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.