We have previously run stories about 2 TB, 4 TB, and 6 TB Solid State Drives (SSDs) and their seemingly inevitable but gradual increase in capacity over time. Samsung just announced a HUGE increase in drive capacity, leap-frogging all other storage devices out there — including spinning hard disk storage [takyon: a 6 TB 2.5" drive already leapfrogs spinning disk]!
Ars Technica is reporting that Samsung unveils 2.5-inch 16TB SSD: The world's largest hard drive. The third-generation 3D V-NAND is now up to 48 TLC layers and 256Gbit per die. From the article:
At the Flash Memory Summit in California, Samsung has unveiled what appears to be the world's largest hard drive—and somewhat surprisingly, it uses NAND flash chips rather than spinning platters. The rather boringly named PM1633a, which is being targeted at the enterprise market, manages to cram almost 16 terabytes into a 2.5-inch SSD package. By comparison, the largest conventional hard drives made by Seagate and Western Digital currently max out at 8 or 10TB.
The secret sauce behind Samsung's 16TB SSD is the company's new 256Gbit (32GB) NAND flash die; twice the capacity of 128Gbit NAND dies that were commercialised by various chip makers last year. To reach such an astonishing density, Samsung has managed to cram 48 layers of 3-bits-per-cell (TLC) 3D V-NAND into a single die. This is up from 24 layers in 2013, and then 36 layers in 2014.
Though claimed capacity is 16 TB, actual available storage is 15.36 TB (providing 640 GB of over provisioning.) The drive is 15mm high so it is geared to the enterprise market; it probably won't fit in your laptop where 9.5mm is an unofficial standard.
In case you were wondering, by some estimates this capacity is enough to store 1.5 copies of the uncompressed textual data in the print collection of the US Library of Congress (LoC).
It boggles my mind to consider such large storage capacities. Given the global population is about 8.3 billion, just one of these drives would be sufficient to store 1.8 KiB on every human being on the planet, never mind an entire rack of these drives.
What practical use is there for such capacities? What would you do with one (or more) of these? How would this fit into your "Big Data" application?
Related Stories
SanDisk and Samsung have announced 19nm server-grade SSDs at impressive capacities or impressive speeds (but not both at the same time). In particular, SanDisk has unveiled the 4 TB Optimus MAX, a 2.5" solid-state drive (SSD) packed with 19nm eMLC flash, connected via 6 Gbit/sec SAS. The Optimus MAX is rated for 75,000 random read IOPS, 15,000 random write IOPS, and 400 MB/sec sequential read and write.
For those who would prefer speed and endurance over capacity, SanDisk also announced the Lightning Ultra Gen. II SSDs. With capacities of 200/400/800GB, these drives employ a SAS 12Gb/s interface and are rated at up to 1000/600 MB/s (4KB sequential read/write) and up to 190K/100K random read/write IOPS.
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.
Big things can come in small packages. According to Computerworld, Samsung has released the world's first 2 TB consumer SSDs:
Samsung today announced what it is calling the first multi-terabyte consumer solid-state drive (SSD), which will offer 2TB of capacity in a 2.5-in. form factor for laptops and desktops.
[...] The 850 Pro is designed for power users and client PCs that may need higher performance with up to 550MBps sequential read and 520MBps sequential write rates and up to 100,000 random I/Os per second (IOPS). The 850 EVO SSD has slightly lower performance with 540MBps and 520MBps sequential read/write rates and up to 90,000 random IOPS.
The 2TB model of the 850 Pro will retail for $999.99 and the 850 EVO will sell for $799.99.
The 1TB EVO SSD will retail for $399; the 500GB for $179; the 250GB for $99 and the 120GB for $69. The 1TB 850 Pro will retail for $499; the 512GB model for $259; the 256GB model for $144.99 and the 128GB model for $99.
[...] Samsung guarantees the 2TB 850 Pro for 10 years or 300 terabytes written (TBW), and the 2TB 850 EVO for five years or 150 TBW.
To put that in perspective, there are approximately 7 billion people on earth. One of these drives has sufficient space to keep about 285 bytes of information on every single person on the planet! Put another way, that is over 6 KB for every single person in the USA.
(Score: 2) by dltaylor on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:31PM
There's the NSA, GCHQ, ... folks, of course, but think of all of the requirements, both business and governmental, for data retention.
How much email in a Fortune 500 should be archived (yeah, I know most of it is "LOOK! KITTENS!", but filtering is risky).
How much data logging for all to/from for phone, network, ...?
How much can Google, Bing, ... learn from storing more data? They're going to be able to follow decades-long trends and, maybe, make business predictions on those cycles; same thing for credit card companies and retailers.
How many 4K movies can I store at both a high resolution AND color depth, with multiple language tracks in the stream?
Mirroring huge amounts of storage cost less rack space.
add your favorite ...
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday August 19 2015, @12:52AM
Even with 22.2 audio, it would take translating the movie into all known languages to even start being noticeable compared to your other examples
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday August 19 2015, @11:05AM
A/V applications like multitrack editing and mastering? Yeah that could use up that much space as you are usually working with WAV files AND it could benefit from the speed because of the large temp files you create and work with. I know that is the reason I doubled the space on my system from 3TB to 6TB and added a Blu Ray burner, when I get moved and can have my own little digital studio set up full time I can see I'm gonna be using up some serious space and being able to offload alternate takes and mixes that I'm not gonna be messing with for awhile will help save some serious gigs.
So there will always be somebody that can use the extra space, just look at how much space A/V work can take up. I know that talking to a local filmmaker I've gotten to be friends with he can never have enough space, shooting HD video just eats through TBs of space like they were nothing.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 4, Informative) by mhajicek on Wednesday August 19 2015, @01:18AM
Iterative backups?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by meustrus on Wednesday August 19 2015, @01:11PM
How much email in a Fortune 500 should be archived (yeah, I know most of it is "LOOK! KITTENS!", but filtering is risky).
As little as necessary to continue getting work done, because you never know what...improper business practices the ignorant office grunt or idiotic middle manager might be espousing to their peers.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @04:46PM
Imagine one of those places that scan huge amounts of paper documents and have many users who need to upload/download those scans quickly.
Or high res MRI/CAT scans.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:34PM
Well at least this should finally put to bed that ridiculous cloud storage fad. With this much compact storage at their fingertips, surely no-one will still take seriously paying for the bandwidth to transmit and later re-download their private data to a third party who could discontinue the system and erase (or not) the data without notice. Surely, right? Right?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:55PM
By the time you've acquired a couple of hundred of the latest 3D media rich games, and a few hundred hours of high definition video, I'm sure you'll be well on the way to filling it up.
Until a hard drive can hold an extremely high resolution 3D scan of the entire surface of the Earth, someone will always find a way to provide more rich and varied and space hungry media. 4k movies will need a lot of storage but extend that idea to recordings of fully navigable 3D environments and you'll need a lot of gigs. In a limited sense this is what some of the latest 3D games are. GTA V for PC already weighs in at over 60 Gigs for example.
Apparently [wikipedia.org] by 2012 Google had captured 20 petabytes of street view data so you'd need 1333 of these drives to store that. I wonder how much storage they use for the final processed street view database.
Now cue the jokes about people's pr0n collections.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:19PM
Look ma... rancid randy has a dialogue with herself... no hands!
Somebody help him!
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:28PM
Uhh yeh, it's called a mistake, just like yo momma told me you were. That's why I fixed it by making a redundant copy of the exact same post where it should have been to begin with.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:46PM
You should look at datahoarder on reddit. One of the (former?) moderators there has 2 PETAbytes of pornography, but I can't remember the url offhand where you can browse it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Tork on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:21PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:38PM
That's still only strictly necessary for an organization that's so small it's only got one site for its servers. I get that there's an advantage in outsourcing backups or load balancing to a third party that specializes in it. The cloud term has been used by marketing departments to mean far more than just that though. It's being pushed hard onto the home user for just the purposes I described. These concepts all existed before the term took off anyway. Cloud is just internet.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday August 19 2015, @02:09AM
It's being pushed hard onto the home user for just the purposes I described.
That's exactly the point I'm taking issue with: No, this is not the case. The people who are using the cloud for backups are people who are using services like DropBox. Basically DB is a syncing app, not some bottomless pit of storage so you don't have to keep it on your computer. In fact you have to go out of your way to store something on DropBox that isn't on your computer. What I think you're talking about, i.e. the cloud acting as a large hard drive for the masses, are services like iCloud which is basically used to re-download iTunes purchases so you can temporarily clear space on your memory-limited iDevices. A large hard drive on their computer wouldn't negate this.
No, this won't kill 'the cloud'.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday August 19 2015, @08:08AM
I was also thinking of things like Microsoft's OneDrive. Their web apps push people to save files directly to it rather than downloading them.
I know more storage won't really put an end to the cloud. I just wish it would because I don't like big businesses getting their hands on people's data (and being able to make it unavailable when you later find you do need it). More storage always makes it easier for an individual to perform more backups. If you're a home user and you want an off site backup you could always just swap external hard drives with a friend periodically. OK, there are still trust issues but at least they're hopefully not focused on profit.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 22 2015, @03:32PM
I know people, people that are tech people, that are ok with the default of saving their phone pictures right onto google drive or onedrive and having shared access across their... desktop and phone/tablet.
These are the same people that, like me, set up a file server locally to do just that.
I do not understand why they have accepted the idea that it's OK to give your data to a third party and then download it again, using your (most likely tiered or metered) internet connection multiple times to do this... when you could just save it locally.
If worried about the server exploding and all data going into ruinous unrecoverable territory, then back it up via any conventional method... but to surrender so easily, just because its a default...
Many of the same people are upset that their jobs are being diminished due to a lack of local server work and the remaining pool being reduced more and more. These same folks helped migrate companies to office 365 and google docs and such, because everyone else is doing it, because the licensing for a local version is too high, and because their managers get a kickback for each conversion and to retain partner status they have to promote cloud over local. And yet they choose to do nothing about it and use the same services that ultimately undermine their employability.
I don't understand why they aren't at least resisting it. Perhaps they are just adopting to their new quiet desperation. As for me, I got out of server work a while ago, but I still have them running around the home... just because I can put years of data behind a EULA that promises me slow access to all of my data for as long as the vendor lets me use it, doesn't mean I will submit to it for free.
Many of them drank the koolaid that if the server is old then its old and so must be replaced. I dunno, the file shares are acting the same way... if you're worried about security issues on your file server because someone on the itnernet can infect its flash, I must ask why flash is running on your file server, and further, why the file server is visiting websites that need flash and then running the flash code.
People think I am strange to ask--I am asked who actually has a server at home that isn't used to actually surf the web as part of what its for?? and therein lies a problem.. the server serves. I don't visit other servers with the servers, unless you count email.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday August 22 2015, @08:10PM
I do not understand why they have accepted the idea that it's OK to give your data to a third party and then download it again, using your (most likely tiered or metered) internet connection multiple times to do this... when you could just save it locally.
The process is automatic and phones are easily lost and or stolen.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday August 19 2015, @07:49AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday August 19 2015, @08:54AM
Now that's a legitimate use of it. The only way around that is if the company ever gets big enough and decides it's cost effect enough to bring the tech in house.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Wednesday August 19 2015, @09:27AM
Whatever, it pays my beertab.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @11:05AM
Cloud storage was never about capacity (there's only so much that you can send through an average internet connection in a certain time). Rather it's about availability (you can access the data from your main computer as easily as from your tablet or your phone).
Not that there wouldn't be other solutions for that which don't need a third-party server, but a big capacity drive is certainly not the game changer here.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Wednesday August 19 2015, @11:57AM
Yeah, I get the point. I guess, for me, it seems just as easy to copy a file from my PC onto my phone to take with me as it is to upload it to the cloud. If you always have your phone or tablet with you, you can always plug it into (or use bluetooth or wifi) the PC to transfer files (or set up an automatic sync if you really need it). You can't do this when you're away from the PC but then neither can you upload files from the PC to the cloud if your PC is off at home.
For those that say the phone storage is to small to hold all the files you might want to access, then you're making the argument be about storage capacity again.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:36PM
Store 1.85 KB of tracking data for every human being on the planet.
Combine this with stacks of 16 dies [soylentnews.org] and you have a 256 terabyte SSD (or 245.76 TB with the same proportion of over-provision).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:37PM
(if CIA would have the same environmental mind and stop waterboarding, maybe it will help solving the California water shortage)
(Score: 2) by TrumpetPower! on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:40PM
That's a couple hundred thousand 50 megapickle RAW files as the come off a Canon 5Ds. Might sound like a big number...but it's pretty typical for a pro photographer to shoot at least a few hundred pictures per event (wedding, sports game, whatever) -- meaning this drive wouldn't even store a year's worth of images from a modest-size studio. And that's before you get into the edited files, RAID, and on and on and on.
...and then there's video...I'd have to look up the bitrates involved, but I bet that your typical Hollywood blockbuster sneezes out this much data without thinking much about it.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:53PM
One pickle is about 65 grams [self.com].
Here's an estimate [esbtrib.com] that says 455 exabytes can be stored in a gram of DNA. Let's call that the lower limit for the data storage in pickle matter.
65 * 455 EB * 50,000,000 = 1,478,750 yottabytes = 1.47875 nonillion bytes
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:36PM
Did you know a cucumber is 96% water?
Did you know that, as acid one would like to call the DNA, it isn't sour enough to make a pickle?
Did you know the estimate of the average DNA in the human body is roughly around 0.6-0.7 kg [metafilter.com]?
The relevant conclusion: I think I'll donate my body after death to a pro photographer to store her/his Canon 5D raw pictures using my DNA.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:43PM
I actually wanted a figure for the theoretical limits of storage in matter itself, not DNA, but I couldn't find it. For example, like this [wikipedia.org] for computation:
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 19 2015, @01:13AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 19 2015, @03:59AM
I actually wanted a figure for the theoretical limits of storage in matter itself, not DNA, but I couldn't find it.
That's actually a key limit. Surface area not matter is the upper limit. The universe is thought to have negative curvature due to "negative energy", that allows for a certain maximum information density throughout the universe without collapsing the universe.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:26PM
You're not supposed to keep all those photos. Most of those wind up being deleted for lack of space because they aren't usable. What you fail to consider here is that the best photographers are the ones with the highest standards. Which means that most of the photos won't be up to their standards. Name a photographer and I'm sure you'll find that they've either got a considerable number of botched shots or they take such a small number that it isn't an issue. I've never met a photographer, ever, who took a huge quantity of perfect shots. It just doesn't happen.
You're also neglecting just how much trouble it is to manage that many files in terms of not just the tagging, but the backup. And in most cases a 50 MP image is going to be way too large for use anyways. They're great for working on, but the final product is usually going to be much smaller. Even a magazine isn't going to be printing 50mp pictures.
Personally, I keep all of my photos, but they're relatively small and I'm not shooting hundreds of photos a week any more. So, the storage requirements aren't a problem.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:55PM
They need to store the bad photos at some point, and as others have pointed out, the storage requirements for uncompressed RAW 4K and 8K video are massive, easily wrecking a measly 15-16 TB drive. Animated/CGI-heavy films especially need a lot of dense and fast storage to handle rendering, and big capacities for archival storage:
Titanic (1997): 5 terabytes [sandisk.com]
Avatar (2009): 1 petabyte [thenextweb.com]
Rise of the Guardians (2012): 250 terabytes to 3 petabytes [hp.com]
54 Disney Animation films: currently 5 petabytes [pcmag.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TrumpetPower! on Wednesday August 19 2015, @01:40AM
Nevertheless, if there's no marginal cost in keeping everything, the smart move is to keep everything.
Sure, only a couple / few dozen images make it into the album that the couple take home with them. And only one or two of them get framed and printed big enough to make use of the full resolution.
But a wedding photographer who can field a random question a year later about the book some random guest was holding, and answer it by a quick scan through the full archive and look like a CSI genius in the process...well, that photographer is going to generate more warm fuzzies and thus get more referrals than the one who says, "Sorry, but I deleted everything five minutes after I sent the files to the printer."
And there's another advantage to today's high resolution cameras that people are only now starting to play around with and take advantage of...you can sometimes get multiple very different compositions out of a single wide-angle exposure. There's the whole frame, of course, and then maybe a couple different quarter-frame crops, each of which stands on its own, and then head-and-shoulders crops for everybody...and those sorts of opportunities can lurk in photos where the first impression of the overall composition is that it's junk. And the files are such high resolution that even extreme crops can be more than enough for smaller prints and especially Web and email usage. I expect there'll be photographers who see sales potential in that, and who hire interns to do a secondary after-the-fact culling of the full-resolution photos to put together a bonus upsell to clients even after the initial final product has been delivered.
Build it and they'll buy it. They always have...
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Wednesday August 19 2015, @02:50AM
That's not generally how that works. And no, it's not a smart move. You're paying hundreds and maybe even thousands of dollars to store and backup photos on the off chance that somebody wants a copy quite a bit later. And you're not just storing a copy, you're storing the original of photos that weren't good enough to give to the client. The client isn't likely to be upset if you can't do that for them, and they might get the warm fuzzies, but if they weren't already going to recommend you to their friends, this isn't likely to change their mind.
If you're only doing it occasionally, that might make sense, but it's a waste of time and money that you then have to ask the client to cover on the off chance that they might need it.
You're not going to delete the photos immediately, but once the conversions have been done, there's absolutely no reason to keep those originals around. And that's assuming that you're shooting RAW, which some professionals don't.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Wednesday August 19 2015, @01:54AM
Megapickle? Just what kinds of pickles are you photographing? The pervert in me is really wondering. Some pickles are longer than others.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by calzone on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:40PM
video and audio production. that gobbles up data in a heartbeat. in particular, some pros might want to raid these puppies because video and audio data is precious, as well as a performance-hog.
Time to leave Soylent News [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:50PM
That's for that imagery,
I'm now imagining a redundant array of independent (inexpensive) puppies.
A RAIP no less, not sure how I feel about swapping out puppies.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday August 19 2015, @03:54PM
I only make redundant arrays of inexpensive Parrots. Swapping them out when dead is well documented.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:58PM
By the time you've acquired a couple of hundred of the latest 3D media rich games, and a few hundred hours of high definition video, I'm sure you'll be well on the way to filling it up.
Until a hard drive can hold an extremely high resolution 3D scan of the entire surface of the Earth, someone will always find a way to provide more rich and varied and space hungry media. 4k movies will need a lot of storage but extend that idea to recordings of fully navigable 3D environments and you'll need a lot of gigs. In a limited sense this is what some of the latest 3D games are. GTA V for PC already weighs in at over 60 Gigs for example.
Apparently [wikipedia.org] by 2012 Google had captured 20 petabytes of street view data so you'd need 1333 of these drives to store that. I wonder how much storage they use for the final processed street view database.
Now cue the jokes about people's pr0n collections.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:01PM
Though claimed capacity is 16 TB, actual available storage is 15.36 TB (providing 640 GB of over provisioning.)
Does that take into the traditional hard drive manufacturer's habit of using kilo-, mega-, giga-, and tera- as powers of 1000, not 1024*?
That puts it at just under 14 what-most-people-mean-when-they-say terabytes.
*yes, I know they are technically correct, but it turns out that's not always the best kind of correct.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:31PM
Those debates ended nearly a decade ago.
1 terabyte = 1 trillion bytes
1 tebibyte = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes
1 gibibyte = 1,073,741,824 bytes
As beautiful of powers of 2 are, the SI prefixes express powers of 1,000.
16 TB = 16,000 gigabytes = ~14.5519 tebibytes = ~14,901.1612 gibibytes = 16 trillion bytes
15.36 TB = 15,360 gigabytes = ~13.9698 tebibytes = ~14,305.1147 gibibytes = 15.36 trillion bytes
If you want nice and neat powers of 2, build a ramdisk.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @05:12AM
> If you want nice and neat powers of 2, build a ramdisk.
Flash is RAM. Slower than DRAM, but it is still RAM.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Wednesday August 19 2015, @12:34AM
I think the adage "build it and they will come" generally applies in the area of computer technology. You build a 15 TB SDD flash drive and people will sooner or later line up at your door to buy them. In this case, probably sooner. In the world of Big Data, 15 TB is a drop in the bucket, and SSD drives are lightning fast, so there are going to be people who are going to buy them by the thousands. (I still question their reliability over the long haul, however). In any case, another attractive aspect of SSD drives is that they consume less power and, therefore, don't generate as much heat. That is a big deal for data centers.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Gravis on Wednesday August 19 2015, @03:21AM
the best use of these may be to integrate them into police cars with "always on" dash cams instead of "on when they choose or turn on their siren" or some other bullshit scheme that misses the action some of the time. with good encoding, this could hold over a year of continuous video. the same goes for police body cameras.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @04:55AM
I regenerate all my data from initial conditions as needed, there is no need to store the whole movie or whatever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @02:02PM
So, no use for you means no use for anyone? Got it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 19 2015, @05:36AM
That was the sound of millions of techies and systems administrators creaming their pants and opening their wallets...