SSDs - State of the Product?

Mercutio said:
AI is IMO an "Emperor has no clothes" situation but I suspect that dramatic overvaluations send some of big tech into a huge downturn overall once investors realize that they're falling for another VR or Crypto, with the added understanding that everything they've spent money to get is actively killing the planet as quickly as possible. When the downturn finally hits, everyone is going to get punished, even at companies that have absolutely nothing to do with it.
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I surely hope the value of SSDs decreases in 2025. For 2024 I can live with two sets (primary and secondary) of 12+8 TB internally. I really want to go to the U.2/U.3, but that will depend on AMD and iNtel. The 870 aSSMedia 4-lane TB is a huge step down into the toilet.
 
For those worried about the write endurance of their SSDs, this might be enlightening. Sounds like for most people it is unwarranted. I do like data from larger sample sizes, it is still a rare thing.

 
I live in a world where .66 DWpD on a 2TB SSD is pretty goddamned normal so forgive me if I still wanna pay attention to what my enterprise TLC drives are doing.
 
Aren't the datacenters responsible for the hardware as part of MSA with SLA?
I don't know how you would be exceeding the DWPD on personal drives, but the obvious solutions are either to replace the hardware regularly or to use larger drives so the TBW is better matched to the workload.

At what stage of longevity do you have the drives replaced? I only use drives personally and never had one much below 90% that was still large enough to be useful. I'm a pretty light user though.
 
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Depends on one's arrangement with a datacenter. If you buy/rent stuff through an MSP then it's likely taken care of.

Every involvement I have (even now) with datacenters, the small team I'm part of, we manage swapping components when they fail.
 
jtr1962 said:
Probably costs as much as a new car.
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Three would probably be about the average new vehicle assuming ~$15K for 122TB. SSDs prices seem to have stabilized and I expect will be lower in 2025.
I'm more challenged by NAS capacity, so I don't want to put too much into just the convenience of having more onboard storage vs the external hot and relatively slow HDDs in NAS. A populated NAS is about $5K though.
 
I'm not going to lie and say I'll be sad to see the human-drivable car go away. I'm no fan of driving. But I don't see ANYONE allowing this to happen for at minimum the next twenty to thirty years, assuming we can manage not to Fallout ourselves yet by then.
 
One of the great things about giant fast single drives is the simplicity. I don't need to worry about different arrays for different purposes anymore. I have one drive with the OS, apps, data, and everything else on it. That is then backed up to my NAS, and important stuff is further backed up onto one of the cloud services (currently Google Drive, previously AWS).
 
Yes, but that Highpoint thingie is the opposite of simplicity. A single large U.3 PCIe 5.0 SSD would be simpler and probably more reliable.
How do you manage SSD failures with everything on one drive? I suppose the system is down and you have some kind of failover at the whole computer level. Do you have over 100TB of data?

Part of my personal issue is that I don't want all the NAS running most of the times. As we head into the Northern Hemispheres Winter it's less of a concern but the main issue is that I'm always upgrading a bit at a time. My total expenditure is probably more in the long run than doing it piecemeal. It's just sucky that there were never any capacious 2.5" SATA drives to populate a NAS.
 
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I have to assume is just a contrived business decision that we don't see commen 20+TB 2.5" SSDs because it's been proven to be technically feasible. I suspect them building those sized drives just eat their market share for HDDs and also by selling many more smaller sized drives at a premium. They can just continue to keep milking consumers and enterprise with the smaller drives because there's no alternative to disrupt this business.

The sad reality is most consumers don't seem to desire much more than 2-4TB of SSDs and we're among the odd bunch in the middle who want enterprise level drives and sizes but they're insanely priced on the new market.

SSD manufacturers all had plenty of time to ramp up NAND fabrication over the past 10-15 years but it doesn't seem like it's happened that much. Perhaps the majority of it all goes to mobile and tablets anyway. It's also not like we've also seen tremendous technological evolutions past TLC 3D NAND with that small exception from Intel and Optane which sadly fizzled out. I know QLC NAND exists but I relegate it into the same mindset as shingled HDDs and never really considered it an option.
 
I understand that there is a huge gulf between the enthusiast and enterprise markets and the large providers don't want you to hold mass data locally. I suppose we will see some overpriced QLC 16TB M.2 eventually, but U.2/U.3 SSDs still seems better than a bunch of M.2 SSDs.
 
I agree. I think m.2 served it's purpose and is fine for some things but it's time to move on to a more useful form factor so these chips can be cooled better as capacity and performance increases.
 
For me everything local is <100TB. And my NAS is off most of the time, as it is only a backup target or rarely needed stuff. There is no redundancy on my local machine, the NAS is RAID-5, and stuff I really care about is on both Google Drive and AWS. I haven't had an SSD fail in at least 5 years, possibly 10?
 
I've had two SSDs and one HDD die in the past year or so. There were three different brands and three different computers in two locations.
There is nothing in common other than being manufactured in the 2020s, i.e. relatively low usage.

I suppose storing >100TB of data online is not cheaply for a consumer. The last time I checked a few years ago, most of the plans were for backups, not that you could access files like on a mapped drive without high costs. My data is rather dynamic, which I why I rejected it long ago.
 
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Remember when these were over 600.00

HGST WD Ultrastar DC HC530 14TB SATA 6Gb/s 3.5-Inch Data Center HDD -​

Now 120. renewed.
I have stuff going back 25 years, backed up on 3 different 14TB drives.
They are almost full.
I'm in the process of backing up again, and will soon take two of the drives out, and put them in a backup box.
It would be nice if they were SSDS....
Still have the SSD from my old system, and still works fine, 15 years later.
Do you find the larger the m.2, the better the chance it fails(Nervous with 4TB Drive)?
That said, I do use the 4TB to put stuff on, prior to moving to the backups, and need that space.
 
Manufacturers generally rate different HDD and SSD capacities with the same MTBF, but with SSDs the TBW is usually proportional to the capacity.
I would not touch used hard drives with a 10 foot pole, but in a NAS or some kind of array they might be acceptable if you are buying from a good supplier. I'm moving to 8TB M.2 SSDs, but have no problems with the 4TB M.2 drives. You should never lose the data when a drive fails, only the set of data and a limited amount of time.
 
LunarMist said:
Manufacturers generally rate different HDD and SSD capacities with the same MTBF, but with SSDs the TBW is usually proportional to the capacity.
I would not touch used hard drives with a 10 foot pole, but in a NAS or some kind of array they might be acceptable if you are buying from a good supplier. I'm moving to 8TB M.2 SSDs, but have no problems with the 4TB M.2 drives. You should never lose the data when a drive fails, only the set of data and a limited amount of time.
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Got me to read up on the demise of HGST. Love it when WD buys anything;-(
 
I've not personally had any storage device except maybe an SD card fail in years, but in the last year, I've had a handful of drive recoveries I've had to do professionally. Usually they were customers for our BCDR stack so it was just grabbing a new drive off a shelf, restoring the most recent backup (usually taken within a few days of failure, and checked over for inconsistencies before imaging), and having them back up and running usually within an hour.

I might be in the market for a 2TB NVMe drive to replace the 512 gig my main's booting from within the year, I haven't decided yet, it's gotten a tad inconvenient, but my NAS is still going strong on the 3x8TB setup I moved to the year before last(?). I'm using roughly 2TB more than when I built it at ~6TB total, with a free space at just over 9. I might be adding to it next year or sometime later, but at my current rate of growth I might well not need it for a few years yet. I might investigate some kind of SSD caching scheme by that point, but I get perfectly serviceable throughput for what it all cost me.
 
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LunarMist said:
No, I don't have many free PCIe lanes with the consumer chipsets. The only viable option I saw was an 8-lane controller that supported U.2/U.3 and SATA/SAS. https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/raid-controllers/megaraid-9560-16i
Maybe if I play the lottery I can get some 120+ TB drives in 2025. https://blocksandfiles.com/2024/08/16/the-128tb-ssd/
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Ebay is our friend, LM. There are even multiple auctions selling these for around that price.
I'm perfectly happy using drives secondhand but my strategy for getting to SSD nirvana is definitely to get u.2/u.3 compatibility and purchase of older enterprise units rather than whatever is coming off the consumer shovel from moment to moment.
 
Thanks, but that doesn't help with those >$4K 30TB SSDs. The lack of authorized dealers of the enterprise stuff is worrying when spending many thousands.
 
Mercutio said:
Ebay is our friend, LM. There are even multiple auctions selling these for around that price.
I'm perfectly happy using drives secondhand but my strategy for getting to SSD nirvana is definitely to get u.2/u.3 compatibility and purchase of older enterprise units rather than whatever is coming off the consumer shovel from moment to moment.
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Hmmmm.
So, for 500, you have a card that only supports Raid on the machine it's in?
Near 99.9% of the current boxes don't have room, a place, or adequate cooling. Hence why I'm still using a 20 year old Antec 183.
The going suggestion for SATA backup was an external NAS, but how do you connect it to the computer, USB?
I'm having a very hard time getting my head around the design...
 
A NAS has it described in the name, it's a Network Attached Storage...so likely a 1, 2.5, or maybe 10Gb Ethernet
 
Santilli said:
Hmmmm.
So, for 500, you have a card that only supports Raid on the machine it's in?
Near 99.9% of the current boxes don't have room, a place, or adequate cooling. Hence why I'm still using a 20 year old Antec 183.
The going suggestion for SATA backup was an external NAS, but how do you connect it to the computer, USB?
I'm having a very hard time getting my head around the design...
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I do it like this.

The main computer has an INtel X710-DA4 quadratic 10Gb SFP+ CNA (really an NIC). Computer #2 has a dual 10Gb X520-DA2. I'm using the SFP+ with twinax cables, but you can use fiber adapters with some of them for longer runs. The laptops (via USB 3.x adapter) and AssBox 4x4/NUC use 2.5GbE.
 
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I am also curious what's in the NAS boxes. :) Do you have different data tiers? For example one NAS with Optane Enterprise disks for high performance, one with larger volume normal SSD:s, one with spinning disks for huge volumes of historical data?
 
Well, it's all hard drives rather than SSDs. If I had enough SSD capacity then I'd need fewer NAS, or ideally newer NAS.
NAS that uses U.2 drives are expensive. Off the top of my head, I'd get the TS-h1290FX. The NAS is about $7k, but 12x15.36TB SSDs is too expensive.
 
Santilli said:
So, for 500, you have a card that only supports Raid on the machine it's in?
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It's a ~$300 Host Bus Adapter. No RAID functions at all. It treats all the drives connected to it as independent disks. And that's perfectly fine if you have some other way to set up your storage arrays such as ZFS or Windows Storage Spaces (ZFS also works on Windows, by the way. Not WELL, but it does work) or if you don't want to bother with arrays at all in the first place.

The advantage to this card in particular is that it supports all three of the most common enterprise drive interfaces, SAS (a superset of SATA), u.2 and u.3, albeit using cables that some people might call expensive. There are also ways to break these cables out from internal-only connectivity to an external chassis and it's relatively easy to convert 8x SAS ports to 24x SAS using an expander. u.2 and u.3 are 2.5" NVMe drive interfaces. They're basically made out of heat sink and relatively easy to cool because they have a lot of surface area, and it's straightforward and affordable to get larger-than-4TB drives that are still pretty exotic in consumer space. I paid about $400/drive to get a bunch of unused 8TB Intel P4510s early this spring, although those stocks are pretty much gone from the market now.

A down side to this setup is that consumers by and large can't buy SAS/u.2 backplanes for any sort of normal PC chassis. So you have to be willing to cable drives individually, which is messy, or buy a spare backplane for something that can handle the drives and just figure out some godawful way to mount everything. Running NVMe over an HBA like that is probably also bottlenecking the SSDs somewhat.
 
Which 15.36TB SSDs would you buy now to use in a U.2 NAS? The NAS has the backplano internally ,correct?
 
LunarMist said:
Which 15.36TB SSDs would you buy now to use in a U.2 NAS? The NAS has the backplano internally ,correct?
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Probably a Samsung PM1733. PCIe 4.0, 1 DWPD @ 16TB or 3DWPD at 12TB and it's a TLC drive. The Intel P4510s I've been swearing by only go up to 8TB and the successor P5316 is QLC-based. They aren't cheap yet but I suspect they will be before too long.
 
LunarMist said:
SSDs prices seem to have stabilized and I expect will be lower in 2025.
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We might be looking at $20 to $25 per TB if prices normalize to their long-term trend. That puts 128TB at around $2,500 to $3,200 if we're talking commodity stuff. Enterprise would probably be at least twice that.

Among the things being looked at to lower price per TB are up to 1,000 layers, and at least 5 bits per cell. I've heard 8 bpc might even be possible but I don't see how. That requires distinguishing between 256 levels. My concern is how stable will it be at holding data long-term.
 
Remember that NAND cell endurance drops by a power of 10 with every generation. QLC drives have whole-drive write endurances in the four digits as it is. I realize that there aren't tons of people writing 16TB per day of anything but at PCIe 5 transfer rates, it's within the realm of possibility to absolutely annihilate some future six cell drive just by installing and reinstalling Call of Duty 2028 (install size: "Only 3.6TB!")* a few dozen times.



* the current version of Call of Duty is something like 250GB on Xbox. For an FPS shooter with not particularly detailed textures.
 
jtr1962 said:
We might be looking at $20 to $25 per TB if prices normalize to their long-term trend. That puts 128TB at around $2,500 to $3,200 if we're talking commodity stuff. Enterprise would probably be at least twice that.

Among the things being looked at to lower price per TB are up to 1,000 layers, and at least 5 bits per cell. I've heard 8 bpc might even be possible but I don't see how. That requires distinguishing between 256 levels. My concern is how stable will it be at holding data long-term.
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You keep talking about cheap SSDs, but I really need a link or some info on where one can actually buy them in 2024 or early 2025.

Mercutio said:
Probably a Samsung PM1733. PCIe 4.0, 1 DWPD @ 16TB or 3DWPD at 12TB and it's a TLC drive. The Intel P4510s I've been swearing by only go up to 8TB and the successor P5316 is QLC-based. They aren't cheap yet but I suspect they will be before too long.
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So they are about $1500-2200, depending on supplier.
 
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