from the better-than-a-shoebox-of-microSD-cards dept.
Seagate has put a new lower limit on the maximum amount of NAND flash that can be crammed into a 3.5" enclosure, by demonstrating a 60 TB solid state drive:
With the Nytro XP7200 moving toward production, Seagate has brought out another SSD tech demo with eye-catching specifications. The unnamed SAS SSD packs 60TB of 3D TLC into a 3.5" drive. In order to connect over a thousand dies of Micron's 3D TLC NAND to a single SSD controller, Seagate has introduced ONFi bridge chips to multiplex the controller's NAND channels across far more dies than would otherwise be possible. The rest of the specs for the 60TB SSD look fairly mundane and make for a drive that's better suited to read-intensive workloads, but the capacity puts even the latest hard drives to shame.
The 60TB SSD is currently just a technology demonstration, and won't be appearing as a product until next year. When it does, it will probably have a very tiny market, but for now it will give Seagate some bragging rights.
Previously: Seagate Unveils Fastest Ever Solid State Drive
Related Stories
Seagate will demo a 10 GB/s (sequential read speed) SSD at the Open Compute Project Summit 2016 in San Jose, California, from March 9-10:
Seagate is going to demonstrate a 10GB/sec PCI flash card that spews out bits like a fire hose on steroids at the coming Open Compute Project Summit.
There will actually be two cards shown: an 8-lane and a 16-lane product. Both are compatible with Facebook's Open Compute Project (OCP), which aims to drive down the costs of IT hardware components for hyperscale data centres. We are not told any performance details at all apart from the 10GB/sec throughput for the 16-lane card, which will make it the fastest SSD available, and a 6.7GB/sec throughput rating for the 8-lane card. Both use an NVMe interface.
Seagate's Brett Pemble, SSD products VP and GM, provided a canned quote: "Whether for consumer cloud or business applications, this SSD will help improve on demands for fast access to information, where split seconds drive incremental value gains."
Potential customers are thought to be large-scale cloud providers and web applications, weather modelling, and statistical trends analysis. It could be used to process data for object storage or real-time needs, according to Seagate.
Also at AnandTech.
Forget the 60 TB SSD. Toshiba is teasing a possible 100 TB SSD:
The Flash Memory Summit saw Toshiba deliver a presentation about quad level cell (QLC) technology – adding substantially to the prospect of a product being delivered in the "near future". We have heard about this QLC (4bits/cell NAND technology) quite recently.
After Seagate tantalised us with a 60TB SSD, along comes Toshiba with a 100TB QLC SSD concept.
Flash Memory Summit attendees saw Toshiba presenters put flesh on the bones and envisage a QLC 3D SSD with a PCIe gen 3 interface and more than 100TB of capacity. It would have 3GB/sec sequential read bandwidth and 1GB/sec sequential write bandwidth. It would do random reading and writing at 50,000 and 14,000 IOPS respectively. The active state power consumption would be 9 watts, the same as a 3.5-inch, 8TB SATA 6Gbit/s disk drive, while the idle power consumption be less than 100 mWatts, compared to the disk drive's 8 watts.
Even if the "near future" isn't so near, or the final capacity does not end up at around 100 TB, it is still interesting to see 3D NAND technology enabling a serious push for 4-bits-per-cell NAND, which would normally face endurance issues.
Samsung will use QLC NAND to create a 128 TB SSD:
For now, let's talk about the goods we'll see over the next year. The biggest news to come out of the new Samsung campus is QLC flash. Samsung's customers set performance and endurance specifications and don't care about the underlying technology as long as those needs are met. Samsung says it can achieve its targets with its first generation QLC (4-bits per cell) V-NAND technology.
The first product pre-announcement (it doesn't have a product number yet) is a 128TB SAS SSD using QLC technology with a 1TB die size. The company plans to go beyond 16 die per package using chip stacking technology that will yield 32 die per package, a flash industry record.
NAND revenue has increased 55% in one year.
Previously: Seagate Demonstrates a 60 TB 3.5" SSD
Toshiba Envisions a 100 TB QLC SSD in the "Near Future"
Western Digital Announces 96-Layer 3D NAND, Including Both TLC and QLC
Toshiba's 3D QLC NAND Could Reach 1000 P/E Cycles
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @10:32PM
I will not hire aussies. Try your luck in Canada or something, thieving bastards.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Tuesday August 09 2016, @10:43PM
Tiny market perhaps, but given the amount of storage that is being sucked up by cloud computing providers, the speed of SSD, and the alleged greater reliability over the spinning rust variety of storage, I suspect that market will quickly get larger fast.
As for myself, I wouldn't mind Seagate donating one to a good cause: me. I could rip my Blu-ray disks and actually have room for them, instead of ripping only my DVDs. I'm needy and it's a good cause.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @11:57PM
Tiny market, yes. I just want 2. Raid-1 setup for safety.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @11:59PM
> I could rip my Blu-ray disks and actually have room for them,
Back them up to usenet, its unlimited free storage, with multiple, independent, redundant copies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @02:17AM
I do the same. I am around 30TB and ~3k in disks ~200 or so with bluray.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Tuesday August 09 2016, @10:50PM
Too bad it's Seagate.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday August 09 2016, @11:12PM
Useless meme. Oooooh, Seagate made some shitty hard drives, that means their NAND SSDs are bad! Show us some data.
The NAND comes from Micron anyway. [seagate.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Touché) by Dunbal on Tuesday August 09 2016, @11:30PM
Yeah that's what happens when you lose your reputation. I'll wait for some other sucker to take the risk in collecting the data.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday August 12 2016, @12:53AM
At least it's not Western Digital...they're currently showing about twice the failure rate of Seagate. Seagate had a couple crappy years but they're not doing too bad lately:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3071180/storage/who-makes-the-most-reliable-hard-drive-latest-backblaze-survey-claims-to-know.html [pcworld.com]
Western Digital is the only brand of hard drive I will no longer purchase under any circumstances. They *always* fail...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @02:31AM
I and several friends have 2-3 decades each of using and supporting computers. Guess which hard drive brand has been consistently crappier than the rest for all of us over those many years and continues to be today. Three guesses, first two don't count.
Micron may know memory, but Seagate has a long-earned reputation when it comes to storage. Let someone else be their guinea pig with this.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2016, @02:45PM
Their biggest customer for this will be NSA. All things considered this may be a "good" thing.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Wednesday August 10 2016, @12:16AM
Yeah, too bad. I've had such horrible luck with Seagate in recent years. Fortunately, I bought the drives from Costco and I can always return them WHEN they crash.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 3, Touché) by TheSouthernDandy on Tuesday August 09 2016, @10:51PM
Seagate has put a new lower limit on the amount of NAND flash that can be crammed into a 3.5" enclosure, by demonstrating a 60 TB solid state drive
I'm pretty sure I can set an even lower limit by cramming 0 TB into a 3.5" enclosure...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 09 2016, @11:08PM
It makes sense to me, but I was sick when I wrote it, and still am.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by butthurt on Tuesday August 09 2016, @11:37PM
Without noticing the ambiguity, I understood your meaning as "...a new lower limit on the maximum amount..."
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday August 09 2016, @11:01PM
We'll need 16.7 million of these drives to store a zettabyte. About one zettabyte is transferred across the Internet in a year.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/02/04/worlds-internet-traffic-to-surpass-one-zettabyte-in-2016/ [telegraph.co.uk]
Data centres will be able to use their space more efficiently.
https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/ [gov1.info]
(Score: 1, Troll) by takyon on Tuesday August 09 2016, @11:07PM
Woohoo! USA #1!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @11:33PM
But you store it de-duplicated.
So since it's all just the same inane crap and pron, one 60TB drive should suffice.
As a bonus the next year might dedup into there too!
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday August 10 2016, @12:34AM
To backup the internet, you only need to store 4 files:
- socialMediaPost_rand.sh
- parameterizableCat.3D
- parameterizableNakedHuman.3D
- hollywoodSequelPlot_rand.sh (the latest version, with added parameters to remove character depths)
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday August 10 2016, @03:00AM
"Netflix to Encrypt its Video Streams with HTTPS" [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday August 12 2016, @01:41AM
Don't you mean pr0n?
(Score: 2) by fishybell on Wednesday August 10 2016, @01:03AM
None of the pictures on that site show the datacenter on fire. That's not very realistic.
(Score: 1) by stretch611 on Wednesday August 10 2016, @04:40AM
I just might be able to fit my porn downloads on just 2 drives. :)
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P