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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: 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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