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posted by martyb on Thursday March 14 2019, @11:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the a-bit-of-an-overstatement? dept.

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


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by NateMich on Friday March 15 2019, @12:35AM (9 children)

    by NateMich (6662) on Friday March 15 2019, @12:35AM (#814558)

    You may not "lose" the data, but the real issue they are probably talking about is that any given machine is out of service until the data is put back.
    Of course, a better system is one where these drives are in an array, and when one fails you just change it out and keep going. No downtime required.

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  • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Friday March 15 2019, @12:41AM (5 children)

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Friday March 15 2019, @12:41AM (#814563)

    Is there any commercial application where a drive would not be part of an array? Maybe as an offline backup I suppose.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 15 2019, @01:08AM (4 children)

      Small businesses. Anyone who moves enough cash to afford someone who knows how to set up an office IT structure has no excuse for not doing so though.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Friday March 15 2019, @01:35AM (3 children)

        by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Friday March 15 2019, @01:35AM (#814587)

        Now you point that out I've realised you're right of course.

        In fact I have turned down a job setting up a server for a small business because it very quickly became clear that they didn't want to spend enough to do it properly.

        I probably wouldn't have been paid enough to make it worth my while either.

        • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 15 2019, @03:52AM (2 children)

          Depends on how important the server was to their business. Or at least how important they thought it was. You can occasionally get a small business that has a genuine need for a server and knows it but either quality is somewhat rare. Most can get by just fine with like half a dozen low-end-workstation-spec boxes or less but the ones that can't will find that out sooner or later.

          --
          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 15 2019, @01:12AM (1 child)

    Like I said, if it's important data that's only on one drive, you failed right from the start. RAID and two sets of backups should be the bare minimum for most anything.

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    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday March 15 2019, @02:03AM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Friday March 15 2019, @02:03AM (#814595) Journal

      Yes, and if you actually care about data integrity in RAID and in those backups, you probably want ECC RAM and a filesystem that can detect and correct random errors and bitrot, like ZFS for example.

      Once we're talking about data the size of 16 TB, data degradation is likely to happen over time statistically, even due to random bit flips.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by darkfeline on Friday March 15 2019, @03:48AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Friday March 15 2019, @03:48AM (#814649) Homepage

    If you're talking about personal machines, restoring 500 GB to a 16 TB drive isn't any slower than restoring 500 GB to a 1 TB drive. If the 16 TB isn't too expensive it would definitely be a good option for data hoarders.

    If you're talking about servers, it's all in the cloud and datacenters. No one cares if a drive goes down. Hell, regular disaster testing involves the simulated equivalent of knocking out random rows of racks of servers or entire datacenters and watching the entire system gracefully work around that. If you're one of those wondering what all this newfangled containers and Kubernetes and cloud fad is all about, THAT is what it's all about. Losing a 1 TB drive here, losing a few PB datacenter there, no big deal, the system shifts the containers and storage around, someone's going to be working harder to restore the lost redundancy, but otherwise business as usual.

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