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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @12:49AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @12:49AM (#814567)

    This is all assuming that rebuild failures aren't a thing, and that the odds of them don't increase astronomically as the capacity of your drives increases.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 15 2019, @01:10AM (3 children)

    There are viable redundancies to eliminate most any worries available for every level of complexity you can name. Not using them is bloody stupid.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @01:17AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @01:17AM (#814581)

      There are viable redundancies to eliminate most any worries available for every level of complexity you can name. Not using them is bloody stupid.

      Unless of course you've already crunched the numbers and figured out running 2x8TB drives provides less risk of drive failure and subsequent downtime for your particular application. Redundancy is only as good as the time it takes to get your data back online, I can think of plenty of businesses where lower risk of drive failure and reliability is more important than drive density. I find it alarming that you think such a scenario doesn't exist.

      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 15 2019, @04:01AM (1 child)

        There is no properly designed situation where losing a drive of any size is a significant annoyance. If you find yourself in such a situation, you built your shit wrong. Now most people are not going to want to buy the largest drives because they're pricey as all fuck, they want something about one or two steps down for the sweet spot on price/dollar. That is for people who need to worry about up front costs though, not those who have the luxury of looking at lifetime costs. And, let's face it, if you're worried about up front costs, you're going to put your shit on someone else's hardware anyway.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @02:12PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 15 2019, @02:12PM (#814763)

          There is no properly designed situation where losing a drive of any size is a significant annoyance.

          You are so wrong that it hurts and I really don't understand why you keep doubling down on such a stupid position. Even with perfect redundancy, losing a drive means decreased read/write speeds. There are several, very valid reasons why people who actually host large amounts of data would choose lower capacity drives; they are outlined in the article if you bothered to read it.