SSDs - State of the Product?

Mercutio

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Just a warning for anyone looking to run M.2 SSDs, they get hot and will thermally throttle if you don't cool them. I even went so far as to use thermal epoxy to attach large heatsinks to mine

I stuck a heat sink on mine as well. At first I thought mine was just residually hot from proximity to my GPU, but after I read a bit about them I realized it's just one more thing to keep cool. Kind of surprise since mSATA drives really don't get hot at all.
 

mubs

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Do all brands of M.2 SSDs get hot because of the intrinsic nature of the beast, or are you both talking the same brand?
 

Stereodude

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Do all brands of M.2 SSDs get hot because of the intrinsic nature of the beast, or are you both talking the same brand?
They're using vague terminology. They're complaining about a NVMe M.2 SSD. A standard SATA M.2 SSD doesn't have the same heat issues. SATA ones are also much slower.
 

Mercutio

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Do all brands of M.2 SSDs get hot because of the intrinsic nature of the beast, or are you both talking the same brand?

I have a Plextor drive and I believe dd and LunarTunes have Samsung. I've observed both Samsung and Plextor to get hot in the same fashion. It's just something to look forward to next time you put together a PC.
 

ddrueding

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Indeed. I suspect it has to do with the size of the part compared to power consumption and how isolated it is from the rest of the motherboard. When those same chips are mounted to a 2.5" drive it isn't as big a deal.
 

Handruin

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Indeed. I suspect it has to do with the size of the part compared to power consumption and how isolated it is from the rest of the motherboard. When those same chips are mounted to a 2.5" drive it isn't as big a deal.

Well...a little bit of a deal in that the 2.5" drives have large heatsinks on them making them more challenging to fit into some devices. We've run long performance tests on our P3700 and have not witnessed throttling in the results (yet). I also have not been keeping an eye on temperatures of the device. Our dedup engineer is really ecstatic of the performance improvements over the SAS-based SSDs we have. We may attempt another benchmark run today or tomorrow with 4 x P3700 getting us (hopefully) close to 1.6 million iops out of all the drives combined. I'll be curious to see the CPU usage.
 

Stereodude

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It looks awfully thick for a 2.5" drive. That can't be a standard 9.5mm thick drive if that's an actual picture.
 

LunarMist

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It looks awfully thick for a 2.5" drive. That can't be a standard 9.5mm thick drive if that's an actual picture.

It looks like 15mm. The power requirements are more than many 72000 RPM drives, so it probably needs some mounting and cooling.
 

LunarMist

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Someone write make a note of this. Record the statement and the date.

Perhaps that should be amended to state that the form factor is not compatible with portable devices and the cost for 15TB is not worth it for me at this time. Today I would buy a 4TB desktop SSD if it were a normal product with consumer warranty.
 

jtr1962

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This is starting to get really interesting. SSDs are headed towards a factor of four of HDDs in terms of price, and are way ahead in terms of capacity per unit volume. How much longer will spinning disks be around at this rate?
 

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Stereodude

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It just proves that people, even those who run tech sites, are bad at math. From the article, "A solid state drive prototype was showcased at the CES 2016 last week which offered a capacity of 4TB at an estimated retaili price of $0.25 per gigabyte. This US$500 drive is said to be destined for market in Q2 this year."

4000 x 0.25 != 500.
 
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jtr1962

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Either that or someone forget to put a 1 in the price per GB: $0.125. This may actually be the case because ~$500 for a 2TB SSD isn't a great price breakthrough. The Samsung 2TB, which is arguably a MUCH better drive, can now be had for around $650. It'll likely drop to close to $500 by the time this drive comes out.
 

LunarMist

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It just proves that people, even those who run tech sites, are really at math. From the article, "A solid state drive prototype was showcased at the CES 2016 last week which offered a capacity of 4TB at an estimated retaili price of $0.25 per gigabyte. This US$500 drive is said to be destined for market in Q2 this year."

4000 x 0.25 != 500.

More than being bad at math, it shows lack of common sense. :( I'm sure most of us questioned the price simply based on the comparison to current 1 and 2TB SSDs.
 

LunarMist

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According to the Amazon, the release date is July 31.

Meanwhile there is no sign of the Munchkin.
 

LunarMist

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What, the link is funky? I don't understand why it is so difficult.
 

Handruin

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What, the link is funky? I don't understand why it is so difficult.

If you try clicking on it you'll understand. I don't know why this happens mostly to you when you try adding in links but I suspect that's why Coug was teasing you.
 

ddrueding

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The trick to making Amazon links work is to not use your own address bar. On the right side of the product page, above the "Add to Cart" button is a simple link called "Share". This will give you a URL that will work for everyone following it, whether they are logged in or not, or whatever country they are in.
 

sechs

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This is starting to get really interesting. SSDs are headed towards a factor of four of HDDs in terms of price, and are way ahead in terms of capacity per unit volume. How much longer will spinning disks be around at this rate?
You know, considering that we still use magnetic tape, I'm guessing a pretty long time.

As long as they are cheap, there will be space for them in near-line storage and low-end network-attached storage.
 

LunarMist

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If you try clicking on it you'll understand. I don't know why this happens mostly to you when you try adding in links but I suspect that's why Coug was teasing you.

Well, I see that the reference is gone and the link tries to use the word "Amazon" alone, but I don't know what is up with the clipboard. Maybe some other government is interfering on my PC.
 

LunarMist

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The trick to making Amazon links work is to not use your own address bar. On the right side of the product page, above the "Add to Cart" button is a simple link called "Share". This will give you a URL that will work for everyone following it, whether they are logged in or not, or whatever country they are in.

Thanks. It's quite short then. https://amzn.com/B01G844OOO
 

snowhiker

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Probably asked and answered before, but if I took the Samsung 840 Pro out of my computer, put it in an anti-static bag, and stored it in a cool/dry/static-free box, how long could I store the drive then re-attach it and get data off of it? If I stored a spinning HDD the same why which device would still work after 2, 5, 10, 40 years?
 

LunarMist

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Probably asked and answered before, but if I took the Samsung 840 Pro out of my computer, put it in an anti-static bag, and stored it in a cool/dry/static-free box, how long could I store the drive then re-attach it and get data off of it? If I stored a spinning HDD the same why which device would still work after 2, 5, 10, 40 years?

Five years or maybe ten. The vertical flash actually uses larger cells than some of the predecessors, but you should look at some other media for permanent storage. In 40 years maybe you need M-disc or one like that.
 

jtr1962

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You know, considering that we still use magnetic tape, I'm guessing a pretty long time.

As long as they are cheap, there will be space for them in near-line storage and low-end network-attached storage.
We still use tape? I thought tape was obsolete over a decade ago. I used to use one of these for back up but it became obsolete as soon as CD-RWs became common. Now USB drives have long made CD-based backup obsolete.

The open question however is how long will HDDs remain cheaper per GB by a factor of at least ~2 than SSDs? Most of the advances to increase areal density, like HAMR, are expensive. They don't necessarily decrease cost per GB. They only increase the amount of data you can store on a disk. I also seriously question how reliable anything with a spinning disk and magnetic bits a few atoms across is going to be long term. My guess is a few more iterations of vertical RAM and we're within a factor of two of HDDs on price. At that point, given the other advantages of SSDs, there's really not much point to HDDs. There really is no point to them now for most PC users who can get by with a few hundred GB or less. I'm pretty sure the 2TB HDD I bought a few years ago will be the last HDD I'll ever buy.
 

Stereodude

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Probably asked and answered before, but if I took the Samsung 840 Pro out of my computer, put it in an anti-static bag, and stored it in a cool/dry/static-free box, how long could I store the drive then re-attach it and get data off of it? If I stored a spinning HDD the same why which device would still work after 2, 5, 10, 40 years?
Well, that's complicated. Flash gradually loses charge over time. AFAIK, the platters in a HDD do not gradually lose magnetic field strength over time. However, there could be flash or EEPROM used on the HDD's controller that could also go bad over time, so even though the platters might be intact the drive still may not fire up and work.

Basically, I wouldn't plan on either of them being a long term storage medium. Standard Blu-ray discs should last 100+ years since they're inorganic.
 

jtr1962

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Probably asked and answered before, but if I took the Samsung 840 Pro out of my computer, put it in an anti-static bag, and stored it in a cool/dry/static-free box, how long could I store the drive then re-attach it and get data off of it? If I stored a spinning HDD the same why which device would still work after 2, 5, 10, 40 years?
The charge loss rate is less at colder temperatures. While I don't have any numbers, putting the SSD in a freezer would probably increase the storage time substantially. Also, as Coug said, some large fraction of the people here probably don't need to be concerned about what will happen in 40 years. Point of fact, I rarely look at data more than a decade old.
 
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