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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?
(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.