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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @12:38AM (2 children)
I didn't notice a difference in real life read/write times between a usb 3.0 external SSD and a NVMe m.2 SSD. Did I do something wrong?
(Score: 3, Informative) by DrkShadow on Friday March 15 2019, @02:54AM (1 child)
Yes (https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820250099 [newegg.com]).
The USB 3.0 bus is limited to 5Gbps. Most USB SSD's are sata, adapted to USB, so at most SATA3 (6Gbps) for USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 (ugh, that article). The disk posted above, PCIe 3.0 x4, is rated at 3400MB/s (27Gbps). I have little doubt that it will actually give you this performance.
You get what you pay for. It costs 2.5x as much as other NVMe disks of the same capacity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @03:10AM
Well I tried it. I put my data I wanted to read on the NVMe m.2 drive and timed it. Then I did the same from the external, it made almost no difference. Maybe for my task the actual reading of the data wasn't the bottleneck or something.