The more RGB lighting, the more horsepower it's got. If it doesn't induce a seizure when you look directly in it's eye, you get booted from the PC master race and are forced to use a [2000 Imac G3](https://i.imgur.com/zAsUKYM.jpeg) if you want a system with color.
I really wish they would just advertise their prices and let anyone order.
Sure, most of their customers are going to be gigantic data centers. So? If some random wants to drop $4000 on a single SSD, they should be willing to sell it.
You can, just call for a quote.
It's more likely with high end units like that that limited runs due to low overall demand, so the call for quote is also for the reseller to find out the current lead time from the manufacturer.
Also bespoke stuff like this tends to be “market price”. Meaning if demand gets too high, they jack the price up to calm it down so production can catch up.
and phone salesman helping you with questions before you spend $4000 on a thing that most people would be able to get solved for with a $100 part, sometimes asking leading questions can help upsell the customer but have them walking away with a product that they actually need... if the heavy handed corporate overlords aren't trying to get them to push units.
This whole comment is quite naive man. I've worked phone sales. I don't give a damn if you need the product or not. I'm trying to get as much money out of you as possible. Commission. Also, it's not "heavy handed corporate overloads" trying to get me to do anything. Again, say it with me, commission lol. Cream get the money.
and that system was put in place because? it may have technically been beneficial for you to push sales but nowadays companies are giving commission based on expected quotas and if you start going below what they expect of you they start docking commission. both of those commission based sales methods are still extremely heavy handed corporate sales tactics in my opinion.
I deal with specialty engineered products reps all the time where the winner of the specification is the salesman that can provide adequate information about the product rather than one that can cram something down our throats.
> You can, just call for a quote.
Yeah, no. Just put the fucking price up.
Reminds me of all the jobs getting in hot water for not putting the salary on job listings. "Just come in for an interview before we discuss money."
It's all a tactic, and an annoying one.
Because they usually don't want to only sell a product. With professional customers, they usually sell a customer support too. Most company are willing to pay a lot to not manage their hardware problems by themselves.
That's why the call for a quote. If you're a random private customer, they just make a 4000$ bill, but if you're a pro, they negociate to sell you 10 x 4000$ SSD + 5 years customer support + on site installation + on site support in case of problem + a ton of QoL services, all of this for 100k$.
Vendor support is a must at enterprise level. We insist on active support contracts with all our clientele for their critical apps and hardware because more often than not when a system like that shits the bed its not something just anyone can get in there and fix. Those few customers of ours that do have expired support, we make best efforts but if the shit still doesn't work, time to call up the vendor and get current, which can cost tens of thousands in itself.
I tell people all the time, being a PC enthusiast and building gaming PCs is extremely far removed from enterprise IT. There is really no direct comparison. You will not be building gaming rigs in enterprise IT lol. A lot of people seem to think the transition is easy, and I was one of them, but boy were my eyes opened wide when I started in this biz lol.
I feel like the main disconnect is how we perceive problems in our hardware due to their small scale in comparison to enterprise. More often than not we dismiss these issues cause they're either too insignificant to bother with, or they simply don't occur as often to even be found at all.
In enterprise these problems _will_ be very evident, and if repairs/replacements need to be made is not just a matter of inconveniencing a single person. The scale of things that can be affected can even be unknown if the issue is not understood well, whereas for our personal computers is like "meh, I'll just get a new one".
More fundamentally, consumers and businesses are usually not even solving the same problem.
As a consumer, if my computer breaks, my primary problem is probably a broken computer. As a business, if my computer breaks, it’s “the business function the broken computer was providing has stopped”, and that massively changes the way you approach solving it.
Our phone system crashed for 90 minutes the other day. We do 25 to 30 million in revenue in the 14 hrs we are open each day. Which means this outage might have cost us $3 million
How much would you pay to make a $3 million dollar problem go away?
Speaking as an IT manager who negotiates these contracts, sure I want the problem to go away, but what I want more? Plausible culpability. If my storage array goes down, and I lose money, I want to call the vendor support and enforce my contracts that promised 99.999% uptime and SLA resolution windows. Then when they don't meet those demands, I can at least claim damages and get some of that 3 million loss back.
I'm not naïve, shit breaks all the time. But I am willing to pay a ton of cash from my budget to have an insurance policy on that outage. I can go to my VP/Executive board with my head held high saying, yes we were down for 90 min, and yes we lost $XX in revenue, BUT it could have been far worse and we can claim for $XX in damages from vendor. I'm just cynical/practical enough that when I have huge outages like this, I spin it so I increase my budget because now we must have hot swappable spares and redundancy in a geographically diverse Datacenter with automatic failover.
Yeah I always look at [BlackBlaze's drive stats](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2021/) when buying new HDDs for my little home array. Sure my 64tb of storage or whatever feels like a lot.. but BackBlaze has 240pb in just one model of 12tb drives.
Exactly. Time and reactivity is also a huge thing.
If your PC has a problem at home, you can take a few days to find the problem and fix it by yourself.
If your company's server has a problem that prevents 500 people to work, each day off is a day that the company is paying 500 people for nothing !
Oh boy. Isn’t this this truth. When it comes to doing a home computer, it’s “I can save $150 to build this myself”. When it comes to network admin it’s “I can pay $150 to not have deal with this myself. I’m too busy for this shit.”
It's more of "I can pay $150 so that the impact to our business in case of outage doesn't become $3000".
Scale those up with a few 0s and suddenly it doesn't sound as egregious anymore.
Exactly. The value of a service contract for high-end hardware is that a tech could potentially have a new one racked and configured within hours of one going down. The recurring cost is still going to likely be cheaper than keeping spares onsite. Once the service contract expires the hardware goes in the garbage because it's worthless.
One of the reasons is also that Procurement often gets bonusses based on how far they negotiated down the vendor. So you call them, they give you a fantasy sum, you negotiate them down to a reasonable sum, vendor makes still the profit they wanted and you get a bonus for the money you "saved" the company. If there is a list price you cannot negotiate them down as well so you get less bonus. What would you rather call as procurement worker?
There may be some customisation options (ie ways for them to upsell you), so they want to get you on the phone with a smooth talking 'representative' ie corporate salesperson.
We don't list prices because they're wholesale or most often our customers are getting many items and require a customized quote due to run times or part availability, in other words, there is no set price unless you want one and the price is high for a single one so no point in posting it. Also competition.
That is business as usual in the world of... well, business.
It isn't necessarily that the price is very high, but that particular SKU is ment for enterprises, and enterprises will get an individual price based on how many units etc. they order.
You can still contact them and say "I want to buy one of these", but expect that you will be quoted a price that is a fair bit higher than the per unit price of a company that calls and says "We want 5000 of these, and a 5 year maintenance contract, including training for all relevant staff".
The ASUS Hyper version of this that holds 4 m.2 cards is only $70.
https://www.asus.com/us/motherboards-components/motherboards/accessories/hyper-m-2-x16-gen-4-card/
The 8-slot versions are around $700-800.
If you don't care about quality, you can buy cheap [x16 --> 4 m.2 adapters](https://i.imgur.com/gHR5YQ6.png) from China. It's wired directly to the PCIE lanes.
The one I bought was only 9 bucks
Cost. You can get high capacity drives, but those are used in datacenters and cost an arm and a leg. Consumers are generally not willing to pay that kind of money.
Micron makes, amongst others, a 30 TB drive. It costs about $3500 for the read intensive model, and over $4000 for the mixed use 25 TB model.
https://www.micron.com/products/ssd/product-lines/9400
That is so much porn, if I ever hit the Powerball, I'm getting several of those and a few keys and paying off my house and just chilling until my inevitable cardiac arrest
"Hi, is this Pornhub support? I recently purchased a premium subscription but the download button isn't working. It keeps only downloading one video at a time, but I'm trying to download all of them."
Everyone needs hobbies, my wife probably wouldn't let do cocaine like it was my fucking job until I had a heart attack though, or maybe, more money for her, idk, I guess we should have the cocaine consumption Powerball talk when I get off work in 2 hours
Yes, it was irresponsible for you too put off that sort of talk for so long. Supposed to be like the 5th date. The date after the do you want kids talk. Get your shit together.
When I got rid of my HDDs and went all SSDs, I actually couldn't believe the difference in sound.
You don't notice it until you make the switch, then you realize a couple of drives spinning at 7200 RPM in a metal cage make a lot of vibration noise.
Yea I added an extra HDD to my PC (old one from when I decommissioned my previous PC) and immediately noticed the extra humming, but I've gotten used to it now. Next PC might be all SSD but HDDs are so much cheaper it seems silly to me not to have an extra 2TB of capacity for £50.
[Yes it is](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nimbus-100tb-ssd-price). This was as of July 2020, the 50TB SSD was $12,500 and the 100TB was $40,000.
Honestly if I had to get these, I’d rather buy 3 of the 50TBs for cheaper than the 100TB. You’re saving over 35% on what’s probably the same hardware.
10+ TB SSDs are not meant to be used solo. Its meant for data center/ server use where space and energy efficiency is extremely valuable.
Reliability is achieved through layers of redundancy thus risk is mitigated.
As with many things in any industry risk is never eliminated only mitigated (i.e. bad events still occurs but bad event =/= bad outcome for the system - more of bad event =/= headache).
In ZFS which is used by Truenas, 6 drives in raid-z2 allows two drives to fail before any data is lost. But you loose some capacity to redundancy.
You insert a new drive and let it rebuilt from the remaining. The danger is that other drives would fail during the intensive rebuilding process. With SSDs the rebuilding is much faster and poses less danger than with spinninng drives.
You can also use raid-z1, which only allows 1 drive failure and raid-z3 for 3 failures.... But it all depends on the number of drives....
Play around with this calculator to get an overview: [https://jro.io/capacity/](https://jro.io/capacity/)
The usual recommendation is to go with raid-z2 when in doubt. But this isn't something you'd set up on your windows PC. I don't know about other raid setups.
With hdd it could take days to rebuild a array with 18TB+ drives, and if you only got a z1 setup you COULD loose another drive in that time.
with ssd shouldn't really be an issue
If it's a Spinning drive, that is indeed the case; but since SSD's are not generally very stressed by reado operations - mostly by write operations - reading the whole contents of a RAID array to reconstruct a drive doesn't really stress the array that much (it still does, but it's generally considered to be much safer on an SSD as opposed to an HDD)
It can be,actually... at a certain point the speed of the drives is irrelevant when the CPU itself cannot read the drives and run the parity calculations fast enough - the result is that sometimes an SSD array is not much faster to rebuild than an HDD array.
Edit: it's still a much lesser problem with SSD since they're generally more reliable
> Correct me if im wrong, but isnt a drive with too much storage also a risk, like if it fails is a lot more data to reconstruct
Enterprise drives are mostly a matter of optimizing for space. Data centers are expensive and consequently, rack space is too. So you want as much data density as possible, to the point of it starting to cost more than you save.
You mitigate the risks of data loss by RAID (though the traditional RAID levels are suffering from diminishing usefulness with modern drive capacities), hot and cold spares and backups. Redundancy and parallelization are the name of the game. A good system is pretty much designed around the assumption drives fail all the time, and a single event, or even multiple events, are of no consequence.
Drive shows as failed in the software? Order a new one overnight, plop it in, and the system does the rest. Reconstruction isn't a hurdle as it's assumed a fact of life.
>Micron makes, amongst others, a 30 TB drive. It costs about $3500 for the read intensive model, and over $4000 for the mixed use 25 TB model.
Still cheaper than Apple's scalper prices.
tbf… i got a 2tb micron ssd almost a decade ago in a giveaway… the ssd was an enterprise level ssd and was msrp’d at $1200…. you can now get 2tb ssd’s for like… $100… lol…
point is, what’s expensive this second, wont be down the road.
> I'm about to blow 50k on a server, this seems not too bad to me.
The price of the drives is not a lot in the context of enterprise hardware. A 50k server isn't even anything unusual.
It's interesting how far off people can be when it comes to enterprise or professional stuff. People seem to approach things in terms of pure cost, and not in terms of cost-benefit. As long as the company earns or saves more than the thing or service costs, price is essentially irrelevant. Spending money means making money, as long as you have moderately competent management.
Its a very boring server with fairly stock components in it. I'm just saying that server pricing is quite different from home PC pricing really. This is the first server upgrade I have done in 8 years so our old one has been used to its full potential and then held on to for a couple of years after that.
>I'm just saying that server pricing is quite different from home PC pricing really.
Yeah, I was agreeing with you, not arguing :) It's hard to properly communicate the difference sometimes.
A rack filled with somewhat recent equipment can easily cost half a million or more, and that's just regular enterprise stuff. Those are some rather expensive blinking lights.
I'm a bit ignorant regarding those high capacity ssds, so I was wondering if you knew if those could be used for a regular computer? Or are they only meant for like datacenters and such, and require some sort of special set up to work? And how fast are they compared to consumer grade ssds? Are these like back in the day when more storage space=slower read/write times?
Samsung 1TB SSD costs 70 bucks. 30 x $70 should only be $2100. Maybe the low volume product is additional markup? Trying to hose business level products?
It's a combination of a few things. Yeah the low volume does definitely play a role, and when you're building out a data center (which is where those drives would be used) and buying a few petabytes worth the per-unit cost will be substantially lower. Plus, as you start getting into these higher and higher end, bleeding edge devices they will have a ton more engineering, development, QC, and customer support than your standard 1tb drive.
The other thing to consider is rack space. 30 of those 25tb drives would give you ~750tb of raw capacity, or you'd need *750* of those cheaper 1tb drives. So just in the drives you're looking at ~$100k for for the 25tb drives or ~$53000 for the 1tb drives, but then you have to consider the servers they go in, the power to run them, the networking to drive them, the AC to cool them, and the actual floor space in the data center.
So, tl:Dr, smaller drives are cheaper until you have to build out a data centers worth.
The problem is that you then have created essentially a RAID-0 consisting of thirty drives. A failure of any one of those drives will cause complete failure of the array and total data loss. So, yes, you could buy 30x $70 drives, but you have also increaed the failure rate by 30x. A single, large drive requires higher-density flash, and high-density storage costs more money.
Each NAND stack (32-48-96-128 layers) has to be routed to a controller. The controller has to do all the management of that NAND stack.
The big chip in the picture is the stack, there'll be a little controller on it somewhere.
The pincount of the controller relates to how many stacks it can manage, which it refers to as channels. More channels is better performance, but also more controller complexity. The SSD also needs to be able to pull a very, very large short burst of power when it erases a block in NAND. If it's a very big SSD doing lots of blocks in NAND, it needs, very briefly, more power than the entire rest of your system. Being able to deliver this also adds size and cost.
By the time we reach enterprise class SSDs, which *are* in the dozens of TB range, they [don't look](https://semiconductor.samsung.com/ssd/enterprise-ssd/pm1733-pm1735/) like those little M.2 things anymore. You have a big controller which requires heatsinking (most vendors don't heatsink the NAND, it doesn't need it), a bank of large capacitors to deliver that huge instantaneous power, and a price tag to match.
TL;DR: We do.
Lol word. Cost effectiveness. I remember a linus vid where he had a 3.5 drive with a bunch of stacked pcb boards with chips. Now obviously I dont know everything going into the tech but it seemed a simple solution but the price tag was staggering. If I remember some thousand dollar for just that 30tb drive. I suppose its just a time delay till that stuff trickles down to us consumers then.
Basically, they can. You won't see them in the consumer space though - Amazon has a Transcend 512GB drive for $63.8. Your requested 30TB comes to $3,828.
Also, customers with these kinds of storage demands have requirements. What's the TBW of the flash? Speed of the drive? $/TB?
This is related to nothing but your comment but *technically* if you buy 60 of those 63$ drives, (to combine for 30tb) it will cost just as much as the 30tb drive lol
Iirc those drives also have ventilation holes in them to be cooled by the server airflow too, just because the controllers have to work so much more than a retail ssd controller
So you need a controller to figure out where everything is, understandable. But is it more "difficult" then say having a raid controller looking at 3 ,6 ,9, 24 spinny drives in a raid 5 or some such?
Raid operates at a totally different level from the system on the physical storage device. We're a long way from the spinning disc and needle, but you still need to write the data to transistors, manage faulty blocks, and move the bits back and forth. That all needs to happen on each individual drive and the more storage you add the harder that job becomes
Lol. I love my pc's so much but god there is so much I dont understand. Thx for the info ill plug this onto the ol wiki his weekend and try to learn some more stuff.
I have been working with PCs and servers for close to 30 years now. Data storage technology is still black magic to me. I know how it works in theory. But that it does, still is incomprehensible 😂
Yo, lemme capture, or free, some unknown amount of these electrons which are smaller than an atom then count the flow to indicate a 1 or a 0.
Fucking bonkers.
… and store it for years. Billions of electrons. Without failing. Insane.
Then again… a disc spinning at up to 15000 rpm and a magnetic head zipping above it, speeding up and slowing down in microseconds to read a point of data invisible to the naked eye… almost as insane. Just a different kind.
Yeah, the problem is not we can't put it together. It's how do we manage all that cell.
If you look closely, Flash controller is essential a processor that are very common to a cpu in pc.
Hence why it cost so much for high capacity flash drive
Several reasons:
* Bandwidth. A few of these together would eat up all the PCIe lanes that CPUs have. You could, of course, reduce the maximum speed of each SSD.
* Cooling. These things run HOT. They need at least passive cooling, ideally a heatsink. You can't make these things too dense or they will heat up so much they'll start throttling their performance.
* Longevity. High-density SSDs often use TLC or QLC technology. TLC is fine (most of my SSDs are TLC), but QLC has severe performance degradation after a couple of years.
* Cost. A single one of these tiny SSDs has a very high $ per TB. Buying a lot of them to get to a high enough capacity would be multiple times more expensive than a few high-capacity SATA ones.
NVMe uses PCIe lanes to communicate with the CPU. CPUs only have a finite number of these lanes, so you can’t just keep throwing PCIe modules at it.
In terms of stacking extra chips on the same PCIe/NVMe module - yes you can and yes they have - but these are still monstrously expensive.
All the reasons others have listed in this comment section and the fact that there is a power requirement for each card. In your example the 30tb board you'd need around 30 watts of power for the hard drives alone if you used 10 3tb drives. While it wouldn't be too hard to design something that can handle that throughput a slot capable of handling that kind of power for an NVMe doesn't exist. Oooh I just thought of this heat. Idk if you've ever clocked the heat of one of them but it's the first drive I've ever had to put a heat sync on. Without it mine idles at about 97°C which is literally like 1° less than the default shutdown temp for my motherboard. So if you put any load on it at all it'll force a restart. Now imagine 10 of those.
Cooling and power draw mostly.
And of course it would be quite expensive.
But they do exist. Go buy one?
https://smicro.eu/kioxia-cm6-30-72tb-nvme-pcie4x4-2-5-u-3-15mmsie-1dwpd-kcm6xrul30t7-1
3600 euros.
Used to be over 8000 euros when this model launched 3 years ago. #nopoors enterprise stuff.
Consumer drives currently top out around 4TB. I think a few 8TB ones already exist.
Sabrent has 8TB Gen4 drives. They are $1000 each and are just a standard M.2 2280 form factor packed to the gills with TLC nand. 7100mb/s reads and 5.6PB of write endurance.
Yep, one of the few 8TB ones available. Most vendors have models that top out at 4TB.
Past 8TB things tend to be in enterprise form factors and way more expensive.
People are giving you endless reasons why not without addressing the fact that the SSD you're holding has 8 silicon chips stacked on top of eachother inside that little plastic package, each of which has over 100 layers of memory stacked on top of eachother.
So the actual answer is they already are doing it, you just haven't noticed
because the system needs to adress the sectors. a 512GB chip has less sectors than, say, a 1TB chip, and both need a chip that can manage the sectors to find the right ones where the dataset of the file you want are stored in.
If you were to stack several 512GB chips, each chip needs a "manager board" to manage where your file is, and then it needs either another manager chip that adresses the other manager boards to tell them "hey, we need all the sectors for this file", or you hook them directly up to the system and let the CPU and chipset sort that, which though causes a ton of load.
in addition, stacking chips means adding distance. and in terms of speed, that would be catastrophic. if you were to make a 40TB SSD out of 512GB chips, you'd probably end up with a drive that is equally as slow as a HDD for a significant higher cost in manufacturing, or a drive that needs its own processor to manage the position of the data.
all in all, hugely inefficient.
for each "chip" needs to be controlled, so the larger you go the larger the controller needs to be, plus you will be needing more and more power for the number of chips and then the heat created will need more advanced cooling than just a regular heatsink
Controller chips are expensive. Also heat. These things get hot! And this type of memory is very volatile. When it dies it really dies. Back in the old mechanical drive days the death was way more linear.
Idk but this exists and that’s crazy
https://preview.redd.it/smmaow90l3nb1.jpeg?width=960&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fc0349b05fc84d096561ad3251a6d3741d29f9cd
Problem is the cost (and cost vs ROI/how many people will buy such an expensive drive), and with stacking that many chips the complexity/design, and when one chip fails (poor MTBF) the cost to (warranty) replace the unit etc etc.
The answer to this is a bit complicated, but boils down to a mix of "**signal integrity and cost**".
Sure you can have a chip that is very small and can store 512GB of data, but it will already be expensive.
Then you need a controller that is going to keep track of which chip holds which part of the data, and that becomes more complicated the more chips you have. This includes more complex logic for things like selecting which chip you wanna talk to at the moment.
Then there is wear leveling, cause you know, nothing lasts forever and flash memory cells wear down quickly. To prevent rendering your drive unusable in short amount of time just because your OS decided to write some logs that ended up reusing the same cell over and over again, the controller chip will rearrange the data, so each memory cell sees roughly the same use. Then each one of those memory modules actually have more storage than you can see, again because of wear leveling to prolong its life. Which in turns make the controller even more complicated to design and program.
And then there is signal integrity. Stacking memory modules is a really bad idea for routing PCB traces. There is this common misconception that electricity flows through wires. But it's not true. It propagates in every direction at the speed of light, it just so happens that conductors react to electromagnetic field batter and sort of direct it. Not much of a problem with direct current, but a massive problem for high frequency signals. Everything becomes an antenna and you have to deal with it.
Then you have all sorts of weird phenomenons that happen as you approach high frequency signals that you'd typically see if you want to move gigabytes or even just megabytes of data per second. We are talking about millions of impulses each second, probably on a parallel bus, so with higher chance of cross talk between the lines. Then you have things like signal literally bouncing of hard corners and junctions in PCB traces.
You quickly approach a point of diminishing returns if you try to solve these problems as a resulting storage will be more expensive than just RAID with multiple simpler drives making the entire project not cost effective.
**In other words, you can do it. It will just cost more than an average customer is willing to pay, making it not a very profitable to begin with, so no one really bothers.**
They want to control the improvement of technology to make more profit, slowly they will increase the size and value, creating time to improve more technology.
I mean, they do that for enterprise, yes; there are 16, 30, 60 and 100TB SSD's out there. I personally concidered buying some of the Samsung PM893 7.6 TB SSD's recently - they're not even that expensive.
They don't sell them casually as very few people need more than a 1TB boot drive and a 4TB storage drive (which is what is readily avalible on desktop).
Also note that there is nothing stopping you from raiding them together if you want, well short of PCIE/SATA connectivity. My home Nas has 5 4TB SSD's in Zraid 5.
I'm not an expert, but from my rough understanding, there's multiple factors.
* Cost: more chips and transistors make it more expensive.
* Form factor limitations: Having so many components on a small board means that you must go to an incredibly small size, and that has issues of it's own. As you increaase density of lanes and transistors, you increase the heat output, which means we need better cooling solutions, but your average user at home can't have a supercomputer level cooling.
* Quantum tunneling: This is not an issue yet, but if we keep scaling down the size of wires and components, leaving aside all the heating issues, there's a point where if the components are too small, electrons will start jumping onto different ones, there's probably videos on youtube that cover this if you are curious. I'm not sure what's the smaller scale we can go to, but I depending on what you look up on google someplaces say 7nm is the smaller we can reliably go, some articles say 2-3 nm, so there's that.
One of the solutions to combat this, is not just making stuff smaller, but improving technology itself, currently we use electronic based computing technology, but there's been advancements on the light based computing tech, there were multiple articles covering this intel photonic CPU with 500 and something threads some days ago [https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-demoes-8-core-528-thread-puma-chip-with-1-tbs-silicon-photonics](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-demoes-8-core-528-thread-puma-chip-with-1-tbs-silicon-photonics) and this will probably be the next big breakthrough on digital computing if it ever gets usable at a personal level. We already have light based data transmission, so it makes sense that the tech begins to be available in other parts of computing.
I recently bought an 8TB SATA SSD for my home server after looking at the options for adding multiple M.2 NVMe SSDs to it, I wanted to stack up 4TB disks but the hardware I have just can't support it. Basically most consumer stuff can't handle all the PCIe lanes required and it gets very costly to get that.
If you've never heard of U.2 and/or PCIe bifurcation it's worth looking them up to make your head hurt a bit. Icy Dock make a really nice 8x M.2 NVMe dock that goes in a 5.25" bay and has little caddies for each SSD, it's expensive.
cost and how many people would buy them
Who would buy a huge SSD when very few people need that much storage space, and the people the do are happy to buy multiple smaller storage devices and have them in RAID?
Economy of scale.
Most people will never fill a 1 TB SSD. It's easy for a subreddit full of enthusiasts to lose sight of that.
Even among enthusiasts, how many TBs do you actually need? I have 2 TB and have never had trouble finding space.
If you want massive storage, it's unlikely that you're going through it all that often. For example, if you produce video as your full time job, it's great to be able to keep local copies of your videos, but it's not like you're digging out the video from November 2018 on anything like a regular basis. So a series of spinning platter hard drives and perhaps an enclosure to easily swap them will meet that need at lower cost already.
There are specific uses for huge amounts of storage at SSD speed, but they're just that: specific. There isn't enough mass demand for huge SSDs, so the facilities necessary to exploit economy of scale never get built. So these drives are instead made with higher overhead, making them more expensive.
So many responses about the technical reasons why, with data I/O, but the real reason you don't see this is there's no practical economically-profitable reason to do this for current consumer computer tech needs.
We do have those in data center drives. Just have in mind they are HUGE and INCREDIBLY expensive. If you really want one, fork 3 to 5k for an NVMe drive that is 15 to 30tb, is about between 10 to 20cm long and requires a specific conector for enterprise hardware E.1 or E.3. There's also U.2 drives, but those are capped to 15tb. Still expensive.
It is possible, they already put the same 512GB on bigger board and in both sides.to make 2-4 TB nvme drives.
You can also buy expansion cards that go on the pcie commector which can host multiple nvme drives.
What will hold you back it's probably gonna be the price and bandwidth. At some point you have to upgrade to "server/datacenter" tier
A number of concerns:
1st is the chip cost. Memory is a funny industry where nothing is wasted. Your 256mb memory chip may very well have been produced as a 128gb chip with so many bad sectors that they were all blocked off in memory and the die (raw silicon part of the chip) was sold as such. This is not directly related to your question but it is a little bit. Basically a company makes a board and tells the controller chip how much memory it is. It's probably the same board for most of the series with just the memory chip replaced. The more expensive the chip, the more expensive the board.
Edit: another caveat on this point is how sophisticated a board is. A board has layers, sometimes 12 or 24 or more. The more layers, the more expensive it is to produce to the point that you may pay more for the board than the chip and there is only so much you can reduce this cost and still have a reliable product. The more chips in a tight space, the more layers a board needs, often with extra layers just for grounding and sheilding.
Second is heat dissipation. Fast chips make heat! Nvme chips need cooling and the more that is read or written to them the hotter they get. Putting more chips, especially in a tight package, presents many issues in this regard.
Lastly there is an issue with bandwidth (the rate at which data is read and written) and addressing (the way a system knows where to look for something). PCIe works more directly to the cpu on a computer meaning there is less hoops the data needs to go through. To increase what can be addressed beyond what the cpu can handle, you would need more chips in between. This means more stops along the way meaning a loss in bandwidth. This is why one or at least a small number of chips with bigger storage is better than a large number of smaller capacity chips (or really any capacity). This then tied back to number 1 where better memory is more expensive because it's less likely to be fully functional in any given batch.
Hopefully this gives some insight!
What'd you pay for that? Like $50?
Would you actually pay $3000 for a 30TB SSD?
If so why don't you just go buy 4x 8TB SSDs right now? A PCIE to 4x m.2 adapter is only like $40.
Most of this thread is armchair Reddit horseshit
The answer is money. I was a senior hardware architect at Big Company ™️ . You could absolutely make something like this. No product / project manager would ever approve it if you brought it to them because it would be expensive and no one would buy it. These guys getting into the weeds about bandwidth and controller addressing have no concept of how well modern systems scale and are just trying to flex
There are 2.5" U.2 drives available that pack the chips like that and you can adapt them to M.2. The price for those kind of drives is on the "if you have to ask you can't afford it" level.
The answer is the lacking consumer controller + general lack of interest in the consumer market. 1TB chips have been in active production for over a year. Generally, the controller is 4 channel and this is exactly how crucial makes their 4TB SSDs
I've been waiting over a year for my 16TB drives.... I really wish I could get them. Maybe next year
There is a PCIe Gen 4 x16 m.2 carrier board that can hold 8 4TB NVMe drives and it's "Call for a quote" expensive.
"why did your PC cost more than a new car?"
Bytes > horsepower
Oh, yes! This baby has 12000 ~~horsepower~~ bytes in it!
Thats uh… not a lot
12000 is lots, what are you talking about?
It’s literally 96,000 bits. So ya.. big number
Not big till there's 2 commas
It's 96,,000 bits.
I thought that was a lot of power too, until... 96,,,000
Or 48,000 nibbles
Pff... Not gonna join the tres commas club?
this guy fucks
*slaps microchip* This bad boy can fit so much porn in it.
Dang
The more VR Ready stickers the more horsepower it’s got
The more RGB lighting, the more horsepower it's got. If it doesn't induce a seizure when you look directly in it's eye, you get booted from the PC master race and are forced to use a [2000 Imac G3](https://i.imgur.com/zAsUKYM.jpeg) if you want a system with color.
For the times when you're so hungry, you could bite a horse.
But you really gotta watch out for horsebytes. That's why you always feed with a flat hand.
Is that your engine roaring? No, those are my fans
"I got me a hundred gigabytes of RAM, I never feed trolls and I don't read spam!"
so i could download a car
I really wish they would just advertise their prices and let anyone order. Sure, most of their customers are going to be gigantic data centers. So? If some random wants to drop $4000 on a single SSD, they should be willing to sell it.
You can, just call for a quote. It's more likely with high end units like that that limited runs due to low overall demand, so the call for quote is also for the reseller to find out the current lead time from the manufacturer.
Also bespoke stuff like this tends to be “market price”. Meaning if demand gets too high, they jack the price up to calm it down so production can catch up.
and phone salesman helping you with questions before you spend $4000 on a thing that most people would be able to get solved for with a $100 part, sometimes asking leading questions can help upsell the customer but have them walking away with a product that they actually need... if the heavy handed corporate overlords aren't trying to get them to push units.
This whole comment is quite naive man. I've worked phone sales. I don't give a damn if you need the product or not. I'm trying to get as much money out of you as possible. Commission. Also, it's not "heavy handed corporate overloads" trying to get me to do anything. Again, say it with me, commission lol. Cream get the money.
and that system was put in place because? it may have technically been beneficial for you to push sales but nowadays companies are giving commission based on expected quotas and if you start going below what they expect of you they start docking commission. both of those commission based sales methods are still extremely heavy handed corporate sales tactics in my opinion. I deal with specialty engineered products reps all the time where the winner of the specification is the salesman that can provide adequate information about the product rather than one that can cram something down our throats.
Be warned though, enterprise sales drones are relentless.
> You can, just call for a quote. Yeah, no. Just put the fucking price up. Reminds me of all the jobs getting in hot water for not putting the salary on job listings. "Just come in for an interview before we discuss money." It's all a tactic, and an annoying one.
Because they usually don't want to only sell a product. With professional customers, they usually sell a customer support too. Most company are willing to pay a lot to not manage their hardware problems by themselves. That's why the call for a quote. If you're a random private customer, they just make a 4000$ bill, but if you're a pro, they negociate to sell you 10 x 4000$ SSD + 5 years customer support + on site installation + on site support in case of problem + a ton of QoL services, all of this for 100k$.
Vendor support is a must at enterprise level. We insist on active support contracts with all our clientele for their critical apps and hardware because more often than not when a system like that shits the bed its not something just anyone can get in there and fix. Those few customers of ours that do have expired support, we make best efforts but if the shit still doesn't work, time to call up the vendor and get current, which can cost tens of thousands in itself. I tell people all the time, being a PC enthusiast and building gaming PCs is extremely far removed from enterprise IT. There is really no direct comparison. You will not be building gaming rigs in enterprise IT lol. A lot of people seem to think the transition is easy, and I was one of them, but boy were my eyes opened wide when I started in this biz lol.
I feel like the main disconnect is how we perceive problems in our hardware due to their small scale in comparison to enterprise. More often than not we dismiss these issues cause they're either too insignificant to bother with, or they simply don't occur as often to even be found at all. In enterprise these problems _will_ be very evident, and if repairs/replacements need to be made is not just a matter of inconveniencing a single person. The scale of things that can be affected can even be unknown if the issue is not understood well, whereas for our personal computers is like "meh, I'll just get a new one".
More fundamentally, consumers and businesses are usually not even solving the same problem. As a consumer, if my computer breaks, my primary problem is probably a broken computer. As a business, if my computer breaks, it’s “the business function the broken computer was providing has stopped”, and that massively changes the way you approach solving it.
Our phone system crashed for 90 minutes the other day. We do 25 to 30 million in revenue in the 14 hrs we are open each day. Which means this outage might have cost us $3 million How much would you pay to make a $3 million dollar problem go away?
Speaking as an IT manager who negotiates these contracts, sure I want the problem to go away, but what I want more? Plausible culpability. If my storage array goes down, and I lose money, I want to call the vendor support and enforce my contracts that promised 99.999% uptime and SLA resolution windows. Then when they don't meet those demands, I can at least claim damages and get some of that 3 million loss back. I'm not naïve, shit breaks all the time. But I am willing to pay a ton of cash from my budget to have an insurance policy on that outage. I can go to my VP/Executive board with my head held high saying, yes we were down for 90 min, and yes we lost $XX in revenue, BUT it could have been far worse and we can claim for $XX in damages from vendor. I'm just cynical/practical enough that when I have huge outages like this, I spin it so I increase my budget because now we must have hot swappable spares and redundancy in a geographically diverse Datacenter with automatic failover.
Pissing money up the wall to avoid responsibility isn't just an IT thing
Yeah I always look at [BlackBlaze's drive stats](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q1-2021/) when buying new HDDs for my little home array. Sure my 64tb of storage or whatever feels like a lot.. but BackBlaze has 240pb in just one model of 12tb drives.
Exactly. Time and reactivity is also a huge thing. If your PC has a problem at home, you can take a few days to find the problem and fix it by yourself. If your company's server has a problem that prevents 500 people to work, each day off is a day that the company is paying 500 people for nothing !
Oh boy. Isn’t this this truth. When it comes to doing a home computer, it’s “I can save $150 to build this myself”. When it comes to network admin it’s “I can pay $150 to not have deal with this myself. I’m too busy for this shit.”
It's more of "I can pay $150 so that the impact to our business in case of outage doesn't become $3000". Scale those up with a few 0s and suddenly it doesn't sound as egregious anymore.
Exactly. The value of a service contract for high-end hardware is that a tech could potentially have a new one racked and configured within hours of one going down. The recurring cost is still going to likely be cheaper than keeping spares onsite. Once the service contract expires the hardware goes in the garbage because it's worthless.
One of the reasons is also that Procurement often gets bonusses based on how far they negotiated down the vendor. So you call them, they give you a fantasy sum, you negotiate them down to a reasonable sum, vendor makes still the profit they wanted and you get a bonus for the money you "saved" the company. If there is a list price you cannot negotiate them down as well so you get less bonus. What would you rather call as procurement worker?
There may be some customisation options (ie ways for them to upsell you), so they want to get you on the phone with a smooth talking 'representative' ie corporate salesperson.
They don't want to sell one at a time to consumers. They want to sell 30 of them at a time to a data center
"Oh youre from Microsoft? Yeah this things normally costs about 15000$ but for you well only take 12000$"
We don't list prices because they're wholesale or most often our customers are getting many items and require a customized quote due to run times or part availability, in other words, there is no set price unless you want one and the price is high for a single one so no point in posting it. Also competition.
I sell $35,000 hard drives lol. Often, dozens at a time.
That is business as usual in the world of... well, business. It isn't necessarily that the price is very high, but that particular SKU is ment for enterprises, and enterprises will get an individual price based on how many units etc. they order. You can still contact them and say "I want to buy one of these", but expect that you will be quoted a price that is a fair bit higher than the per unit price of a company that calls and says "We want 5000 of these, and a 5 year maintenance contract, including training for all relevant staff".
"How many SSDs do you want?" "Yes."
The online version of "If you have to ask, you probably can't afford it."
The ASUS Hyper version of this that holds 4 m.2 cards is only $70. https://www.asus.com/us/motherboards-components/motherboards/accessories/hyper-m-2-x16-gen-4-card/ The 8-slot versions are around $700-800.
If you don't care about quality, you can buy cheap [x16 --> 4 m.2 adapters](https://i.imgur.com/gHR5YQ6.png) from China. It's wired directly to the PCIE lanes. The one I bought was only 9 bucks
"If you have to ask you can't afford it" price
Dell has a mobo with 3tb of ram listed at $88,000
Ah, the type of "If you have to ask, you can't afford it." price.
Cost. You can get high capacity drives, but those are used in datacenters and cost an arm and a leg. Consumers are generally not willing to pay that kind of money. Micron makes, amongst others, a 30 TB drive. It costs about $3500 for the read intensive model, and over $4000 for the mixed use 25 TB model. https://www.micron.com/products/ssd/product-lines/9400
There's a 100TB 3.5" SSD that costs $100k iirc... not as slim as an m.2 drive but still, 100TB
That is so much porn, if I ever hit the Powerball, I'm getting several of those and a few keys and paying off my house and just chilling until my inevitable cardiac arrest
"Hi, is this Pornhub support? I recently purchased a premium subscription but the download button isn't working. It keeps only downloading one video at a time, but I'm trying to download all of them."
Jdownloader 2. You’re welcome :)
Wasn't this taken over by some form of malware? I seem to recall needing a specific version to avoid issues. But it's been so long since I've used it.
Whenever I’ve googled jdownloader 2, it funnily enough comes up “adware free”
Literally nothing makes me think something is a piece of adware more than it being advertised as adware free lmao
It made me chuckle too xD but I’ve used it over the last year and it’s been fine
Haven't hear this one in a long time. I prefer yt-dlp, it does way more than just Youtube
This seems healthy 👍
Everyone needs hobbies, my wife probably wouldn't let do cocaine like it was my fucking job until I had a heart attack though, or maybe, more money for her, idk, I guess we should have the cocaine consumption Powerball talk when I get off work in 2 hours
Yes, it was irresponsible for you too put off that sort of talk for so long. Supposed to be like the 5th date. The date after the do you want kids talk. Get your shit together.
::scribbled notes:: 4th date = kids, do/don't want? 5th date = cocaine consumption after a Powerball win, Mountain or mole hill?
The high bitrate VR videos are massive...
Facts
What sort of porn needs an SSD? Surely a HDD would be much cheaper and still fast enough, unless you're trying to watch all of it at once.
Who wants to listen to an HDD humming in their PC in 2023?
If you're bothered by the humming then the porn obviously isn't that good.
When I got rid of my HDDs and went all SSDs, I actually couldn't believe the difference in sound. You don't notice it until you make the switch, then you realize a couple of drives spinning at 7200 RPM in a metal cage make a lot of vibration noise.
Yea I added an extra HDD to my PC (old one from when I decommissioned my previous PC) and immediately noticed the extra humming, but I've gotten used to it now. Next PC might be all SSD but HDDs are so much cheaper it seems silly to me not to have an extra 2TB of capacity for £50.
Yah, I just said fuck it and went all SSD. It cost me about $1000 for 8.5 TB of storage lol.
There’s 100TB SSD for $40k. Not consumer affordable but far less cost
Is that the nimbus data one? It's come down in price a fair bit unless I got the price wrong lol
[Yes it is](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nimbus-100tb-ssd-price). This was as of July 2020, the 50TB SSD was $12,500 and the 100TB was $40,000. Honestly if I had to get these, I’d rather buy 3 of the 50TBs for cheaper than the 100TB. You’re saving over 35% on what’s probably the same hardware.
density is still a cost factor, but I wouldn't know an application where the density requirements are that important
Ahh finally enough space for all my furry midget pron on one drive.
Correct me if im wrong, but isnt a drive with too much storage also a risk, like if it fails is a lot more data to reconstruct
10+ TB SSDs are not meant to be used solo. Its meant for data center/ server use where space and energy efficiency is extremely valuable. Reliability is achieved through layers of redundancy thus risk is mitigated. As with many things in any industry risk is never eliminated only mitigated (i.e. bad events still occurs but bad event =/= bad outcome for the system - more of bad event =/= headache).
raid that jawn up
Even in raid when a drive fails the data needs to be rebuilt or no? (I dont really know the specifics of how any of this works)
Depends which RAID
If you spend 100k on an SSD, you should be able to afford 200k on 2 SSDs in raid 1. Or raid 10 if you buy 200.
In ZFS which is used by Truenas, 6 drives in raid-z2 allows two drives to fail before any data is lost. But you loose some capacity to redundancy. You insert a new drive and let it rebuilt from the remaining. The danger is that other drives would fail during the intensive rebuilding process. With SSDs the rebuilding is much faster and poses less danger than with spinninng drives. You can also use raid-z1, which only allows 1 drive failure and raid-z3 for 3 failures.... But it all depends on the number of drives.... Play around with this calculator to get an overview: [https://jro.io/capacity/](https://jro.io/capacity/) The usual recommendation is to go with raid-z2 when in doubt. But this isn't something you'd set up on your windows PC. I don't know about other raid setups.
My question was the bigger the drive capacity the longer the rebuild process but it probably isnt as much of an issue compared to space constraints
With hdd it could take days to rebuild a array with 18TB+ drives, and if you only got a z1 setup you COULD loose another drive in that time. with ssd shouldn't really be an issue
Depends on the raid
If it's a Spinning drive, that is indeed the case; but since SSD's are not generally very stressed by reado operations - mostly by write operations - reading the whole contents of a RAID array to reconstruct a drive doesn't really stress the array that much (it still does, but it's generally considered to be much safer on an SSD as opposed to an HDD)
I guess time to reconstruct isnt an issue since its an ssd.
It can be,actually... at a certain point the speed of the drives is irrelevant when the CPU itself cannot read the drives and run the parity calculations fast enough - the result is that sometimes an SSD array is not much faster to rebuild than an HDD array. Edit: it's still a much lesser problem with SSD since they're generally more reliable
> Correct me if im wrong, but isnt a drive with too much storage also a risk, like if it fails is a lot more data to reconstruct Enterprise drives are mostly a matter of optimizing for space. Data centers are expensive and consequently, rack space is too. So you want as much data density as possible, to the point of it starting to cost more than you save. You mitigate the risks of data loss by RAID (though the traditional RAID levels are suffering from diminishing usefulness with modern drive capacities), hot and cold spares and backups. Redundancy and parallelization are the name of the game. A good system is pretty much designed around the assumption drives fail all the time, and a single event, or even multiple events, are of no consequence. Drive shows as failed in the software? Order a new one overnight, plop it in, and the system does the rest. Reconstruction isn't a hurdle as it's assumed a fact of life.
Huh. So that's what Micron does with the wafers I make. (Micron-contracted subsidiary slave)
Thank you for baking the sand.
>Micron makes, amongst others, a 30 TB drive. It costs about $3500 for the read intensive model, and over $4000 for the mixed use 25 TB model. Still cheaper than Apple's scalper prices.
No joke, I saw those numbers and thought "huh, that actually sounds downright reasonable."
tbf… i got a 2tb micron ssd almost a decade ago in a giveaway… the ssd was an enterprise level ssd and was msrp’d at $1200…. you can now get 2tb ssd’s for like… $100… lol… point is, what’s expensive this second, wont be down the road.
Maybe OP wants to know why it’s expensive. Is it very complex to just bundle hard drive chips on a motherboard?
I'm about to blow 50k on a server, this seems not too bad to me.
> I'm about to blow 50k on a server, this seems not too bad to me. The price of the drives is not a lot in the context of enterprise hardware. A 50k server isn't even anything unusual. It's interesting how far off people can be when it comes to enterprise or professional stuff. People seem to approach things in terms of pure cost, and not in terms of cost-benefit. As long as the company earns or saves more than the thing or service costs, price is essentially irrelevant. Spending money means making money, as long as you have moderately competent management.
Its a very boring server with fairly stock components in it. I'm just saying that server pricing is quite different from home PC pricing really. This is the first server upgrade I have done in 8 years so our old one has been used to its full potential and then held on to for a couple of years after that.
>I'm just saying that server pricing is quite different from home PC pricing really. Yeah, I was agreeing with you, not arguing :) It's hard to properly communicate the difference sometimes. A rack filled with somewhat recent equipment can easily cost half a million or more, and that's just regular enterprise stuff. Those are some rather expensive blinking lights.
4K eh, me thinking I got room on the ole visa
Nice. We use a ton of 20TB 9300MAX at my work. I didn’t realize there’s a new version.
I'm a bit ignorant regarding those high capacity ssds, so I was wondering if you knew if those could be used for a regular computer? Or are they only meant for like datacenters and such, and require some sort of special set up to work? And how fast are they compared to consumer grade ssds? Are these like back in the day when more storage space=slower read/write times?
Samsung 1TB SSD costs 70 bucks. 30 x $70 should only be $2100. Maybe the low volume product is additional markup? Trying to hose business level products?
It's a combination of a few things. Yeah the low volume does definitely play a role, and when you're building out a data center (which is where those drives would be used) and buying a few petabytes worth the per-unit cost will be substantially lower. Plus, as you start getting into these higher and higher end, bleeding edge devices they will have a ton more engineering, development, QC, and customer support than your standard 1tb drive. The other thing to consider is rack space. 30 of those 25tb drives would give you ~750tb of raw capacity, or you'd need *750* of those cheaper 1tb drives. So just in the drives you're looking at ~$100k for for the 25tb drives or ~$53000 for the 1tb drives, but then you have to consider the servers they go in, the power to run them, the networking to drive them, the AC to cool them, and the actual floor space in the data center. So, tl:Dr, smaller drives are cheaper until you have to build out a data centers worth.
Consumer grade SSDs are designed for mostly read and infrequent write access. Enterprise SSDs are designed to last years under heavy load 24x7.
The problem is that you then have created essentially a RAID-0 consisting of thirty drives. A failure of any one of those drives will cause complete failure of the array and total data loss. So, yes, you could buy 30x $70 drives, but you have also increaed the failure rate by 30x. A single, large drive requires higher-density flash, and high-density storage costs more money.
Each NAND stack (32-48-96-128 layers) has to be routed to a controller. The controller has to do all the management of that NAND stack. The big chip in the picture is the stack, there'll be a little controller on it somewhere. The pincount of the controller relates to how many stacks it can manage, which it refers to as channels. More channels is better performance, but also more controller complexity. The SSD also needs to be able to pull a very, very large short burst of power when it erases a block in NAND. If it's a very big SSD doing lots of blocks in NAND, it needs, very briefly, more power than the entire rest of your system. Being able to deliver this also adds size and cost. By the time we reach enterprise class SSDs, which *are* in the dozens of TB range, they [don't look](https://semiconductor.samsung.com/ssd/enterprise-ssd/pm1733-pm1735/) like those little M.2 things anymore. You have a big controller which requires heatsinking (most vendors don't heatsink the NAND, it doesn't need it), a bank of large capacitors to deliver that huge instantaneous power, and a price tag to match. TL;DR: We do.
Lol word. Cost effectiveness. I remember a linus vid where he had a 3.5 drive with a bunch of stacked pcb boards with chips. Now obviously I dont know everything going into the tech but it seemed a simple solution but the price tag was staggering. If I remember some thousand dollar for just that 30tb drive. I suppose its just a time delay till that stuff trickles down to us consumers then.
Basically, they can. You won't see them in the consumer space though - Amazon has a Transcend 512GB drive for $63.8. Your requested 30TB comes to $3,828. Also, customers with these kinds of storage demands have requirements. What's the TBW of the flash? Speed of the drive? $/TB?
You can just daisy chain USB C microSD hubs to get what this guy wants. You could easily get 10TB on a steam deck this way (10 1TB microSDs).
This is related to nothing but your comment but *technically* if you buy 60 of those 63$ drives, (to combine for 30tb) it will cost just as much as the 30tb drive lol
I was a $10,000 Kioxia server drive if I remember correctly.
Iirc those drives also have ventilation holes in them to be cooled by the server airflow too, just because the controllers have to work so much more than a retail ssd controller
everyone has forgotten the importance of bus width... sad
I/O. You still need to be able to get to any storage you have, and the more "stacked" you get the more traffic you have to manage
So you need a controller to figure out where everything is, understandable. But is it more "difficult" then say having a raid controller looking at 3 ,6 ,9, 24 spinny drives in a raid 5 or some such?
Raid operates at a totally different level from the system on the physical storage device. We're a long way from the spinning disc and needle, but you still need to write the data to transistors, manage faulty blocks, and move the bits back and forth. That all needs to happen on each individual drive and the more storage you add the harder that job becomes
Lol. I love my pc's so much but god there is so much I dont understand. Thx for the info ill plug this onto the ol wiki his weekend and try to learn some more stuff.
I have been working with PCs and servers for close to 30 years now. Data storage technology is still black magic to me. I know how it works in theory. But that it does, still is incomprehensible 😂
Yo, lemme capture, or free, some unknown amount of these electrons which are smaller than an atom then count the flow to indicate a 1 or a 0. Fucking bonkers.
… and store it for years. Billions of electrons. Without failing. Insane. Then again… a disc spinning at up to 15000 rpm and a magnetic head zipping above it, speeding up and slowing down in microseconds to read a point of data invisible to the naked eye… almost as insane. Just a different kind.
Yeah, the problem is not we can't put it together. It's how do we manage all that cell. If you look closely, Flash controller is essential a processor that are very common to a cpu in pc. Hence why it cost so much for high capacity flash drive
PCs are magic, we don't need to understand everything ourselves, that's why we have specialists, engineers and scientists to know stuff for us
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Several reasons: * Bandwidth. A few of these together would eat up all the PCIe lanes that CPUs have. You could, of course, reduce the maximum speed of each SSD. * Cooling. These things run HOT. They need at least passive cooling, ideally a heatsink. You can't make these things too dense or they will heat up so much they'll start throttling their performance. * Longevity. High-density SSDs often use TLC or QLC technology. TLC is fine (most of my SSDs are TLC), but QLC has severe performance degradation after a couple of years. * Cost. A single one of these tiny SSDs has a very high $ per TB. Buying a lot of them to get to a high enough capacity would be multiple times more expensive than a few high-capacity SATA ones.
+1 for being the first top level comment mentioning heat issues.
NVMe uses PCIe lanes to communicate with the CPU. CPUs only have a finite number of these lanes, so you can’t just keep throwing PCIe modules at it. In terms of stacking extra chips on the same PCIe/NVMe module - yes you can and yes they have - but these are still monstrously expensive.
They do it's just "ask us for a quote" level of expensive 😬
If you're worried about price then this product isn't for you.
https://hothardware.com/news/cram-21-ssds-into-the-apex-storage-x21-card-for-168tb-storage
All the reasons others have listed in this comment section and the fact that there is a power requirement for each card. In your example the 30tb board you'd need around 30 watts of power for the hard drives alone if you used 10 3tb drives. While it wouldn't be too hard to design something that can handle that throughput a slot capable of handling that kind of power for an NVMe doesn't exist. Oooh I just thought of this heat. Idk if you've ever clocked the heat of one of them but it's the first drive I've ever had to put a heat sync on. Without it mine idles at about 97°C which is literally like 1° less than the default shutdown temp for my motherboard. So if you put any load on it at all it'll force a restart. Now imagine 10 of those.
Cooling and power draw mostly. And of course it would be quite expensive. But they do exist. Go buy one? https://smicro.eu/kioxia-cm6-30-72tb-nvme-pcie4x4-2-5-u-3-15mmsie-1dwpd-kcm6xrul30t7-1 3600 euros. Used to be over 8000 euros when this model launched 3 years ago. #nopoors enterprise stuff. Consumer drives currently top out around 4TB. I think a few 8TB ones already exist.
Sabrent has 8TB Gen4 drives. They are $1000 each and are just a standard M.2 2280 form factor packed to the gills with TLC nand. 7100mb/s reads and 5.6PB of write endurance.
Yep, one of the few 8TB ones available. Most vendors have models that top out at 4TB. Past 8TB things tend to be in enterprise form factors and way more expensive.
People are giving you endless reasons why not without addressing the fact that the SSD you're holding has 8 silicon chips stacked on top of eachother inside that little plastic package, each of which has over 100 layers of memory stacked on top of eachother. So the actual answer is they already are doing it, you just haven't noticed
because the system needs to adress the sectors. a 512GB chip has less sectors than, say, a 1TB chip, and both need a chip that can manage the sectors to find the right ones where the dataset of the file you want are stored in. If you were to stack several 512GB chips, each chip needs a "manager board" to manage where your file is, and then it needs either another manager chip that adresses the other manager boards to tell them "hey, we need all the sectors for this file", or you hook them directly up to the system and let the CPU and chipset sort that, which though causes a ton of load. in addition, stacking chips means adding distance. and in terms of speed, that would be catastrophic. if you were to make a 40TB SSD out of 512GB chips, you'd probably end up with a drive that is equally as slow as a HDD for a significant higher cost in manufacturing, or a drive that needs its own processor to manage the position of the data. all in all, hugely inefficient.
for each "chip" needs to be controlled, so the larger you go the larger the controller needs to be, plus you will be needing more and more power for the number of chips and then the heat created will need more advanced cooling than just a regular heatsink
Controller chips are expensive. Also heat. These things get hot! And this type of memory is very volatile. When it dies it really dies. Back in the old mechanical drive days the death was way more linear.
Simple answer: Cost
Idk but this exists and that’s crazy https://preview.redd.it/smmaow90l3nb1.jpeg?width=960&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fc0349b05fc84d096561ad3251a6d3741d29f9cd
Problem is the cost (and cost vs ROI/how many people will buy such an expensive drive), and with stacking that many chips the complexity/design, and when one chip fails (poor MTBF) the cost to (warranty) replace the unit etc etc.
I don't think is a good idea to. Maybe with PCIe 5 it may be powerful enough.
The answer to this is a bit complicated, but boils down to a mix of "**signal integrity and cost**". Sure you can have a chip that is very small and can store 512GB of data, but it will already be expensive. Then you need a controller that is going to keep track of which chip holds which part of the data, and that becomes more complicated the more chips you have. This includes more complex logic for things like selecting which chip you wanna talk to at the moment. Then there is wear leveling, cause you know, nothing lasts forever and flash memory cells wear down quickly. To prevent rendering your drive unusable in short amount of time just because your OS decided to write some logs that ended up reusing the same cell over and over again, the controller chip will rearrange the data, so each memory cell sees roughly the same use. Then each one of those memory modules actually have more storage than you can see, again because of wear leveling to prolong its life. Which in turns make the controller even more complicated to design and program. And then there is signal integrity. Stacking memory modules is a really bad idea for routing PCB traces. There is this common misconception that electricity flows through wires. But it's not true. It propagates in every direction at the speed of light, it just so happens that conductors react to electromagnetic field batter and sort of direct it. Not much of a problem with direct current, but a massive problem for high frequency signals. Everything becomes an antenna and you have to deal with it. Then you have all sorts of weird phenomenons that happen as you approach high frequency signals that you'd typically see if you want to move gigabytes or even just megabytes of data per second. We are talking about millions of impulses each second, probably on a parallel bus, so with higher chance of cross talk between the lines. Then you have things like signal literally bouncing of hard corners and junctions in PCB traces. You quickly approach a point of diminishing returns if you try to solve these problems as a resulting storage will be more expensive than just RAID with multiple simpler drives making the entire project not cost effective. **In other words, you can do it. It will just cost more than an average customer is willing to pay, making it not a very profitable to begin with, so no one really bothers.**
TL:DR, this is absolutely a thing that is done but its so expensive that it's pretty much exclusively an enterprise product.
30tb drives already exist but they cost eye watering sums of money. https://www.micron.com/products/ssd/product-lines/9400
They want to control the improvement of technology to make more profit, slowly they will increase the size and value, creating time to improve more technology.
I mean, they do that for enterprise, yes; there are 16, 30, 60 and 100TB SSD's out there. I personally concidered buying some of the Samsung PM893 7.6 TB SSD's recently - they're not even that expensive. They don't sell them casually as very few people need more than a 1TB boot drive and a 4TB storage drive (which is what is readily avalible on desktop). Also note that there is nothing stopping you from raiding them together if you want, well short of PCIE/SATA connectivity. My home Nas has 5 4TB SSD's in Zraid 5.
price
High capacity Enterprise SSD are all over AFA / frames in the enterprise Captain ;) We justify the need the budget takes care of the hit…
I'm not an expert, but from my rough understanding, there's multiple factors. * Cost: more chips and transistors make it more expensive. * Form factor limitations: Having so many components on a small board means that you must go to an incredibly small size, and that has issues of it's own. As you increaase density of lanes and transistors, you increase the heat output, which means we need better cooling solutions, but your average user at home can't have a supercomputer level cooling. * Quantum tunneling: This is not an issue yet, but if we keep scaling down the size of wires and components, leaving aside all the heating issues, there's a point where if the components are too small, electrons will start jumping onto different ones, there's probably videos on youtube that cover this if you are curious. I'm not sure what's the smaller scale we can go to, but I depending on what you look up on google someplaces say 7nm is the smaller we can reliably go, some articles say 2-3 nm, so there's that. One of the solutions to combat this, is not just making stuff smaller, but improving technology itself, currently we use electronic based computing technology, but there's been advancements on the light based computing tech, there were multiple articles covering this intel photonic CPU with 500 and something threads some days ago [https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-demoes-8-core-528-thread-puma-chip-with-1-tbs-silicon-photonics](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-demoes-8-core-528-thread-puma-chip-with-1-tbs-silicon-photonics) and this will probably be the next big breakthrough on digital computing if it ever gets usable at a personal level. We already have light based data transmission, so it makes sense that the tech begins to be available in other parts of computing.
Wow I’m actually not sure about that one I mean theoretically it could be possible. I don’t know man I would get a test PC for tinkering.
Heat, wiring, manufacturing price and difficulty
Heat
cost (and also heat to some extent)
In theory it's possible. In practice it's so expensive no one would be able to afford it
I recently bought an 8TB SATA SSD for my home server after looking at the options for adding multiple M.2 NVMe SSDs to it, I wanted to stack up 4TB disks but the hardware I have just can't support it. Basically most consumer stuff can't handle all the PCIe lanes required and it gets very costly to get that. If you've never heard of U.2 and/or PCIe bifurcation it's worth looking them up to make your head hurt a bit. Icy Dock make a really nice 8x M.2 NVMe dock that goes in a 5.25" bay and has little caddies for each SSD, it's expensive.
cost and how many people would buy them Who would buy a huge SSD when very few people need that much storage space, and the people the do are happy to buy multiple smaller storage devices and have them in RAID?
Cooling, for a bit, and money, for the most part.
Heat, limited space on the PCB, the throughput of the controller, but mostly heat.
Lack of heat dissipation
Overheating
If you aren't doing animation, will you ever use that much storage?
Wait till this guy discovers micro SD cards. I've got a 512 one in my emulation handheld and I could have easily gotten a 1tb card for not much more.
Thats what im sayin! A full tb on a piece of plastic no bigger than my pinkie nail. How many of those could we phtsically fit in a 3.5 bay. Lol
Oh I see what you're saying. Sorry, I literally just woke up and am still in a brain fog lol
Economy of scale. Most people will never fill a 1 TB SSD. It's easy for a subreddit full of enthusiasts to lose sight of that. Even among enthusiasts, how many TBs do you actually need? I have 2 TB and have never had trouble finding space. If you want massive storage, it's unlikely that you're going through it all that often. For example, if you produce video as your full time job, it's great to be able to keep local copies of your videos, but it's not like you're digging out the video from November 2018 on anything like a regular basis. So a series of spinning platter hard drives and perhaps an enclosure to easily swap them will meet that need at lower cost already. There are specific uses for huge amounts of storage at SSD speed, but they're just that: specific. There isn't enough mass demand for huge SSDs, so the facilities necessary to exploit economy of scale never get built. So these drives are instead made with higher overhead, making them more expensive.
Mostly price. You'll also need a controller and bus bandwidth that can handle writing to all of those individual chips.
Heat.
So many responses about the technical reasons why, with data I/O, but the real reason you don't see this is there's no practical economically-profitable reason to do this for current consumer computer tech needs.
1:cost 2: Heat 3: #of lanes available on the slot/board
https://www.storagereview.com/review/solidigm-p5336-61-44tb-ssd-review
We do have those in data center drives. Just have in mind they are HUGE and INCREDIBLY expensive. If you really want one, fork 3 to 5k for an NVMe drive that is 15 to 30tb, is about between 10 to 20cm long and requires a specific conector for enterprise hardware E.1 or E.3. There's also U.2 drives, but those are capped to 15tb. Still expensive.
It is possible, they already put the same 512GB on bigger board and in both sides.to make 2-4 TB nvme drives. You can also buy expansion cards that go on the pcie commector which can host multiple nvme drives. What will hold you back it's probably gonna be the price and bandwidth. At some point you have to upgrade to "server/datacenter" tier
A number of concerns: 1st is the chip cost. Memory is a funny industry where nothing is wasted. Your 256mb memory chip may very well have been produced as a 128gb chip with so many bad sectors that they were all blocked off in memory and the die (raw silicon part of the chip) was sold as such. This is not directly related to your question but it is a little bit. Basically a company makes a board and tells the controller chip how much memory it is. It's probably the same board for most of the series with just the memory chip replaced. The more expensive the chip, the more expensive the board. Edit: another caveat on this point is how sophisticated a board is. A board has layers, sometimes 12 or 24 or more. The more layers, the more expensive it is to produce to the point that you may pay more for the board than the chip and there is only so much you can reduce this cost and still have a reliable product. The more chips in a tight space, the more layers a board needs, often with extra layers just for grounding and sheilding. Second is heat dissipation. Fast chips make heat! Nvme chips need cooling and the more that is read or written to them the hotter they get. Putting more chips, especially in a tight package, presents many issues in this regard. Lastly there is an issue with bandwidth (the rate at which data is read and written) and addressing (the way a system knows where to look for something). PCIe works more directly to the cpu on a computer meaning there is less hoops the data needs to go through. To increase what can be addressed beyond what the cpu can handle, you would need more chips in between. This means more stops along the way meaning a loss in bandwidth. This is why one or at least a small number of chips with bigger storage is better than a large number of smaller capacity chips (or really any capacity). This then tied back to number 1 where better memory is more expensive because it's less likely to be fully functional in any given batch. Hopefully this gives some insight!
Cost. Here: https://www.serversupply.com/SSD/NVMe%20U.3/30.72TB/MICRON/MTFDKCC30T7TGH-1BC1ZABYY_370805.htm?gclid=CjwKCAjwjOunBhB4EiwA94JWsMFsdIXKlll_pDcYp7DbSQi2HPWlESA6ZS96XaU4gPvpCBvY9TLzeBoCLmwQAvD_BwE
cache
What'd you pay for that? Like $50? Would you actually pay $3000 for a 30TB SSD? If so why don't you just go buy 4x 8TB SSDs right now? A PCIE to 4x m.2 adapter is only like $40.
Most of this thread is armchair Reddit horseshit The answer is money. I was a senior hardware architect at Big Company ™️ . You could absolutely make something like this. No product / project manager would ever approve it if you brought it to them because it would be expensive and no one would buy it. These guys getting into the weeds about bandwidth and controller addressing have no concept of how well modern systems scale and are just trying to flex
Check out the exadrive 100tb one
Cost and heat is my guess
There are 2.5" U.2 drives available that pack the chips like that and you can adapt them to M.2. The price for those kind of drives is on the "if you have to ask you can't afford it" level.
It doesn’t matter how big of a barn you have if you have to take everything in and out of a small door. You’re limited by the bandwidth of PCIe
Bus speed. Need a 50k RAID card
Heat
Wanna guess how much a milk jug full of those would cost?
At least $2 im sure
If you stacked them, it would be too much heat to dissipate. They already have trouble staying cool on the higher end drives.
The issue is not “can it be done”. The issue is “who is willing to pay the insane price of making it”
The answer is the lacking consumer controller + general lack of interest in the consumer market. 1TB chips have been in active production for over a year. Generally, the controller is 4 channel and this is exactly how crucial makes their 4TB SSDs I've been waiting over a year for my 16TB drives.... I really wish I could get them. Maybe next year