The u.2 form factor is slightly larger than a 2.5" drive. I can imagine the entire space in it taken by Flash chips. I can't imagine what cooling scheme do they employ for the chips in the middle.
Apparently TDP is 30 watts¹, according to the product brief. I would imagine it's a single PCB with flash chips on both sides then thermally bonded to the aluminum chassis. That should keep all chips at approximately the same temperature. On its own it could be easily air cooled, but with 24 in a 2U chassis you'll be having some decently hefty forced air over the drives.
1. For comparison, an HDD usually comes in around ~10 watts
The transfer rates limit how much each chip can be active at any given time, so a heat-aware writing allocator can pick the least active blocks for the next writes and distribute the heat accordingly. Even if it’s not heat-aware, the tendency will be that the writes will be distributed over as many chips as there are, and so will be the heat generated.
Now, I would LOVE to see this much SLC flash on a direct to bus attachment setting.
Can someone who knows explain what is the benefit of having all that data in one ssd instead of splitting it up into hundreds of individual drives? Does the single ssd benefit is more performance or does it really tuen out to be cheaper than hundreds of individual drives?
It’s about density in a datacenter. With this you have 1PB in 4 drives, fitting in a 1u rack, which is just incredible. Also these drives don’t use regular SATA or SAS, they use PCIe, so these drives are also quite fast in comparison. Density has a power efficiency aspect as well both in just having fewer drives and requiring fewer servers to put drives into.
You’re actually right, it’s just that datacenters like density and will gladly split your data onto hundreds of these little amazing magical bits of technology rather than hundreds of less magical ones in the same physical volume.
The datasheet shows 3GB/s sequential write, which for 245.76TB means writing the whole drive takes around 22h45m. Odd that the endurance is specified as "1.0 SDWPD", which is almost meaningless since the drive takes roughly that long to write at full speed.
At scale, 1.9 times more energy is required for an HDD deployment
...but those HDDs are going to hold data for far more than twice as long. It's especially infuriating to see such secrecy and vagueness around the real endurance/retention characteristics for SSDs as expensive as these.
On the other hand, 60TB of SLC for the same price would probably be a great deal.
I look forward to have my favourite hyperscaler grant me 1000 "premium" IOPS per VM on this monster.
The u.2 form factor is slightly larger than a 2.5" drive. I can imagine the entire space in it taken by Flash chips. I can't imagine what cooling scheme do they employ for the chips in the middle.
Apparently TDP is 30 watts¹, according to the product brief. I would imagine it's a single PCB with flash chips on both sides then thermally bonded to the aluminum chassis. That should keep all chips at approximately the same temperature. On its own it could be easily air cooled, but with 24 in a 2U chassis you'll be having some decently hefty forced air over the drives.
1. For comparison, an HDD usually comes in around ~10 watts
Given the cost of 24 of them, you can probably buy solid silver heatsinks watercooled with tears of sysadmins.
I was going to say blood of virgins, but tears are probably better heat conductors.
The transfer rates limit how much each chip can be active at any given time, so a heat-aware writing allocator can pick the least active blocks for the next writes and distribute the heat accordingly. Even if it’s not heat-aware, the tendency will be that the writes will be distributed over as many chips as there are, and so will be the heat generated.
Now, I would LOVE to see this much SLC flash on a direct to bus attachment setting.
Would like to see what the internals of this look like, how many flash packages and PCBs are in that tiny chassis?
What is this thing that all pictures of new devices need to come with this black background?
Can someone who knows explain what is the benefit of having all that data in one ssd instead of splitting it up into hundreds of individual drives? Does the single ssd benefit is more performance or does it really tuen out to be cheaper than hundreds of individual drives?
It’s about density in a datacenter. With this you have 1PB in 4 drives, fitting in a 1u rack, which is just incredible. Also these drives don’t use regular SATA or SAS, they use PCIe, so these drives are also quite fast in comparison. Density has a power efficiency aspect as well both in just having fewer drives and requiring fewer servers to put drives into.
You’re actually right, it’s just that datacenters like density and will gladly split your data onto hundreds of these little amazing magical bits of technology rather than hundreds of less magical ones in the same physical volume.
They’ll still have hundreds of individual drives. Of these drives.
And thanks to the density, they won’t need as many racks as they used to.
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High security on this press release.
works for me. akamai doesn't like you
No problems here ...
QLC NAND
The datasheet shows 3GB/s sequential write, which for 245.76TB means writing the whole drive takes around 22h45m. Odd that the endurance is specified as "1.0 SDWPD", which is almost meaningless since the drive takes roughly that long to write at full speed.
At scale, 1.9 times more energy is required for an HDD deployment
...but those HDDs are going to hold data for far more than twice as long. It's especially infuriating to see such secrecy and vagueness around the real endurance/retention characteristics for SSDs as expensive as these.
On the other hand, 60TB of SLC for the same price would probably be a great deal.
You can trivially modulate flash endurance by tweaking the reported space - the less space you report, the more spares you have.
How much is it?
They haven't released details but I was able to find a Solidigm D5-P5336 122.88TB drive for around 40,000 USD, as a guideline. So ... more than that.
Okay, so that 122TB drive costs about $330/TB.
I haven't bought a hard drive or an SSD in at least a decade (I get stuff for free, basically) but…that seems a bit high, right?
Seems like well-rated consumer-level SSDs cost around $250 for 1TB right now.
What accounts for the premium price/TB of these extremely high capacity enterprise-targeted drives?
What accounts for the premium price/TB of these extremely high capacity enterprise-targeted drives?
The word "enterprise".
I fondly remember when i could buy a well-rated consumer-level SSD for a lot less per TB...
I was quoted $18K for a 3.7 TB Dell NVMe disk the other day. I'm gonna guess these drives are literally a quarter million each
You're getting ripped off. NVMe SSDs are expensive, but not THAT expensive. A 4Tb drive should be around $1k even with some "enterprise" markup.
If you have to ask...
I don't think he wants to buy one
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