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Japanese manufacturer Fixstars is releasing a 6 terabyte 2.5" solid state drive in July. The drive uses 15nm MLC NAND. 1 TB and 3 TB models are also available, but only the pricing for the 1 TB model is known: $820. The drive is not particularly fast; it uses the 6 Gbps SATA 3 interface to achieve 540 and 520 MB/s sustained read and write speeds.
For comparison, the highest capacity 2.5" hard disk drive is currently Toshiba's 3 terabyte MQ03ABB300, which uses four 750 GB platters. The Fixstars SSD is 9.5 mm thick, while the Toshiba HDD is 15 mm thick.
It's about time to bring the HAMR down.
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6 Terabyte 2.5" SSD Coming in July
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(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Sunday May 10 2015, @11:33AM
Doesn't HAMR have moving parts and a spinning platter? That would be a huge leap backwards. I am entirely done with drives that have moving parts. Because margins have become razor thin on the old technology hard drives, quality seems to be slipping badly. (I'm looking at you, Western Digital.)
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 10 2015, @11:38AM
attaching flash to SATA doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
Why not plug it into the memory module sockets?
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday May 10 2015, @11:54AM
Because memory sockets vary way more than S-ATA. And if you pick up random computer. Chances you find a S-ATA connection is way higher. And if you don't, there's a lot of adapters.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 10 2015, @12:05PM
Granted that just about every computer has SATA. But I would expect that by now, the storage industry would have come up with a connectivity specification that was optimized for flash.
Consider that rotating media can only read the bits that are passing under the head. If you want to read a whole sector, you have to wait for the disk to rotate a little bit.
Modern memory controllers can read and write data in much wider chunks then the CPU registers, for example my Core Quad Xeon e5420 access four FB-DIMMs in parallel, to load a cache line all in one go.
There should be a connection standard that works like that for flash.
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(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday May 10 2015, @12:10PM
Industry and coming up with a smart solution. No that doesn't happen particularly fast. So until that happens, expect to wait and suffer.
(USB is an industry creation.. and it really suck when it comes to smart design)
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Sunday May 10 2015, @06:23PM
There were PCI-e based SSD drives, but from what I heard these were not terribly reliable. But really I don't think SATA is the problem here. I believe the current SATA spec is still faster than the fastest SSD drives.
USB certainly isn't the solution. It is no where near reliable enough for permanent storage on a computer.
RAM sockets are not really it either. The way the computer interacts with RAM is much more different than permanent storage.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Sunday May 10 2015, @07:36PM
It's called NVMe. It can allow SSDs to read/write more than 2 GB/s.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9090/intel-ssd-750-pcie-ssd-review-nvme-for-the-client [anandtech.com]
There's a reason I wrote that this 6 TB drive is "not particularly fast", and it's called NVMe.
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(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday May 10 2015, @11:19PM
Yeah, PCI-e is probably fast enough to make a serious difference. And it's a standard to. Otoh.. perhaps not much faster than S-ATA. BUT it can be utilized with many parallel channels.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 11 2015, @10:16AM
The fastest SATA is 6 Gbps. PCIe3 is 8 Gbps per lane. An x16 slot is 128 Gbps. PCIe4 will be twice as fast as PCIe3.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Sunday May 10 2015, @07:22PM
attaching flash to SATA doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Why not plug it into the memory module sockets?
The DDR sockets are optimized for super-fast, synchronous, random access to DRAM cells, with minimum unit of storage being one byte. SATA is accessing an asynchronous block device - one that consists of a bunch of storage sectors that are read and written as a whole, and the access time is not guaranteed. The DRAM controller handles refresh, which Flash has no need for. The ATA controller implements DMA from/to the RAM, and many can do RAID. Those are quite different technologies.
(Score: 1) by EETech1 on Monday May 11 2015, @03:22AM
www.zdnet.com/article/flash-dimms-hit-server-market/
I believe IBM has them, if you can afford it!
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday May 10 2015, @11:39AM
Which manufacturer is the king of quality right now?
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Sunday May 10 2015, @12:21PM
I hear Samsung is getting good reviews and I myself have Crucial (Micron Technology Inc) 500GB-980GB SSD's that haven't failed in 4 years' of home use. But all I can offer is personal anecdote.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tynin on Sunday May 10 2015, @04:35PM
We have several thousand 1TB Crucial M550 drives at work (and are getting ready to buy ~8k more in the near term, we've been very happy with them). Without having any numbers to work with, the failure rate I've noticed has been extremely low (lower than the HDDs). Before that we experimented with OCZ, but they were garbage and were failing out so often we couldn't keep the environment stable.
For home use, I picked one up a 1TB M550 and I've continued to be pleased with it (used camelcamelcamel.com to watch the price, when it fell to $300 I picked it up). Prior to that for home use I was only buying Intel SSDs (X-25M, and two 520's), of which I've had zero failures.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday May 10 2015, @11:25PM
I really referred to mechanical disks ;)
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Sunday May 10 2015, @06:45PM
For spinning disks? I don't know anymore. Certainly not Western Digital, though. I have had 3 out of 4 2T drives fail in a year. and two of those were DOA.
But I have 2 SanDisk SSDs for one for over a year and the other for a few months. Both have been operating wonderfully. My work has several more Sandisk and Samsung drives in our database servers, and I have never actually seen a failed SSD yet. The ones at work get hammered pretty hard and have been for a couple of years, so I can say those work.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday May 10 2015, @11:37PM
Yeah, spinning. are you sure it's WD thats bad and not just the cutting edge harddisks?
And I read that SSD doesn't degrade gracefully. It's a complete mess to recover if even possible in any meaningful way.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday May 12 2015, @03:12AM
My backup strategies do not cover recovering a disk. I always have mirrors of everything I care about, and if a disk fails it gets pulled and replaced. (Though with my current WD Raid0 failure, I am using the ghetto rsync solution to a different drive.) If the mirror itself fails, that is what offline backup is for.
I had been using WD drives for quite a long time now, but it has only been this recent batch that have had failures. My guess is that the rise of SSDs and consolidation has really put a pinch on profits, and WD has let quality slip. Things with moving parts are bound to fail eventually, but this has been quite absurd.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday May 12 2015, @08:31AM
Any replacement vendor recommendation?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday May 10 2015, @04:21PM
As long as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. continue to use HDDs, you still are, and there's no better consumer option for offline bulk storage. No SSDs, tapes, BD-XLs.
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