Every piece of storage news I've seen for the past year or two reinforces my opinion that there is a great deal of price-fixing happening in the consumer storage market. The price trend of 2TB HDDs, for example, just does not make sense.
When I see that a company can now create SSDs with ~16x more capacity than the best consumer option, I feel like something fishy is going on that is artificially slowing the pace of larger capacity drives making it into the hands of consumers at a reasonable price.
In the HDD market there are actually just two companies: WD and Seagate. There are other brands (Toshiba, HGST) but these are not completely independent (HGST is owned by WD, Toshiba still exists mostly because WD feeds it with technology whenever they are threatened by anti-monopoly rulings, so they can say competition still exists).
In the SSD market there are lots of brands, but only a few flash chip makers - so it's the same lack of competition but better hidden to the consumer.
One thing about HDDs is that the marginal cost to the manufacturer is basically constant regardless of size. It costs them just over $100 per drive to make a drive. The cost of making 6 or 10TB drives is all in the R&D. Large cloud providers buy drives in such large volumes that they get access to pricing that normal people don't which is why they can provide things like Youtube, S3 and Glacier without going broke.
I feel that as well. We are told it will be a while until we see anything beyond single digit TB and suddenly Samsung drops a massive bomb with 16TB? I doubt that an average consumer would use 16TB but who knows. Also I have some qualms about storing on SSD knowing the data won't last forever
Ignoring that it's a wholly new flash/storage chip just being introduced to the market, scaling up flash storage is not a great mystery or difficulty -- add more chips. The reason consumer drives are at the sizes they are is a matter of consumer tolerance for pricing levels, and we saw all of the noise when 1TB flash drives were announced, people annoyed that it isn't for less than $100.
I'm reading the Innovator's Dilemma right now, and I just finished the chapter about the storage industry. The author draws the conclusion that solid-state drives may eventually move upmarket from cash registers and embedded applications to PCs and such.
Having seen the move from 5.25" HDDs to 3.5" HDDs, then the move from desktops to laptops, and now seeing SSDs becoming extremely common in laptops, tablets, and phones, I have to believe that the author predicted the future when he wrote the book.
Since PC sales have dropped, people are not buying as many HDDs, and buying more SSDs, usually indirectly. Cloud infrastructure has likely gobbled up the existing HDD supply.
But even there, SSDs are preferred for many applications, such as databases, since they're faster overall, storage limitations be damned.
And now we're seeing the first SSD that has a capacity greater than HDDs, in a similar sized package. And no current HDD company has an SSD offering worth mentioning.
It's disruption happening right before our eyes. History seems to repeat itself all too often!
You do realize that the example of the hard disk industry in The Innovator's Dilemma is actually one of the weakest in the book:
"In fact, Seagate Technology was not felled by disruption. Between 1989 and 1990, its sales doubled, reaching $2.4 billion, “more than all of its U.S. competitors combined,” according to an industry report. In 1997, the year Christensen published “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” Seagate was the largest company in the disk-drive industry, reporting revenues of nine billion dollars."
and:
"Between 1982 and 1984, Micropolis made the disruptive leap from eight-inch to 5.25-inch drives through what Christensen credits as the “Herculean managerial effort” of its C.E.O., Stuart Mahon. (“Mahon remembers the experience as the most exhausting of his life,” Christensen writes.) But, shortly thereafter, Micropolis, unable to compete with companies like Seagate, failed."
Note that he published his book long after this stuff had been shown to be hopelessly wrong, without making any corrections.
Many of his examples are similarly terrible. And those are the ones he cherry-picks to back his thesis.
I found The Innovator's Dilemma to be infuriating. It's a classic 20/20 hindsight -- just vague enough to apply to everything but excuse itself from any conspicuous counter-examples (Apple, say). Like most management fads, I guess.
(Prediction: wait until electric, self-driving car tech becomes practical. Ford and GM will crush the "nimble" disruptors like bugs. Well, unless it's Apple. Then all bets are off.)
Now, the hard disk makers may well be going under, but let's set aside Clay Christensen's over-rated terminology.
Samsung is hardly a small startup "disrupting" big, slow stalwarts. Samsung dwarfs the hard disk makers -- it's more like Google "disrupting" libraries, or Walmart "disrupting" local businesses.
BTW in Christensen's terms, this new disk is a "sustaining" innovation -- it's a better, faster, more complicated, harder-to-manufacture iteration of an existing, successful product.
Holy that is a lot of storage in a very small amount of space. Besides the fact that I want one right now I am starting to wonder how much heat this will generate.
A lot of 1 unit rack servers can fit about 8 2.5" drives. 128TB of storage in 1U is pretty crazy storage density.
Everytime they reveal a larger capacity drive I just wonder what the backup strategy is going to be. Longer tapes?
For flash devices, power consumption / thermal dissipation is usually a small constant for the control logic, plus a very small amount per read, plus a small amount per (page) write.
If you are limited to the write rate allowed by the SSD interface, then that will serve to limit the heat dissipation as well.
Tape?? You can get 6TB spinning HD for 300 bucks. Call it 12 grand for 1:1 redundancy on spinning disks @128TB. Spinning disk sequential throughput is more than big enough to do this overnight every day, and probably enough to backup almost live.
You're paying for $5 billion in lithography steppers and other fab equipment for one factory (you'll LOL at the cost of 1 deep-UV immersion litho stepper). That's amortized over 5 years. There's also masks, and process research costs, in addition to the basic materials costs.
Did you know that a silicon wafer is a perfect crystal, structured like a diamond? Silicon is right underneath Carbon in the periodic table, which means it shares the same outer electron shell configuration. Making that ain't cheap.
And if one atom is in the wrong place, you have to throw away the chip.
That kind of core expense doesn't exist in a hard drive factory. The disks in a hard drive don't have to be perfect crystals, for example. It's a LOT more expensive to produce chips.
Multiply all the distribution and sales costs, and you'll understand why it's so expensive.
HDDs cost more because they consist of technologies understood and implemented in factories for long. Manufacturing of SSDs is different, and it'll take some time for manufacturing companies to get up to speed, at least to overtake the scaled assembly line operations of HDD manufacturing.
My bet is by the end of next year, SDDs will be cheaper than their equally sized HDDs. HDDs are certainly on their way out.
It's not always intuitive! Another incredible one- the silicon industry absolutely bends over backwards to keep using silicon and UV, instead of GaAs, E-UV, and other exotic processes. As much as silicon & UV can be a colossal billion-dollar pain in the butt, it's still easier & cheaper than E-UV.
Or automotive engines. We have all sorts of technology tacked on around the basic ICE gasoline engine to make them better- the combustion chamber is just a tiny piece of the machine, which is tended by countless devices managing temperature, airflow, fuel flow, air velocity, etc. Tremendously complex compared to electric motors- but in the end, they are still more popular than electric motors because of the fundamental problem of batteries.
A version of Moore's Law seems to apply to storage, which is very much a good thing. The first IBM Winchester I used cost a couple year's salary and stored 30MB on 14" platters. The next I used was an 8" ~150MB and only cost a couple months salary. Forward 30 years and I can buy a 500GB drive the size of a stick of gum for a couple hours salary. 30 more years? Can't wait to see. I assume I will eat the stick of gum and by doing so know everything in the Library of Congress.
Moore's law is passing the baton from GHz to the storage stack. Whereas you once had a simple RAM + HD setup, you now have a teamworking hierarchy of storage technologies: Cache / 3d stacked mem / DRAM / X-point / SSD / HD. Each one of these is behaving just like GHz did: doubling in speed/capacity every 18 months. Given that this is where the performance bottleneck has been, we're looking good on exponential performance upside for a long time to come if we extrapolate the recent trend. Excellent.
Won't be long till the network is the bottleneck again. 10Gb is still relatively expensive for the end user, and 40 and 100Gb are out of reach for most budgets.
Moore's Law has always been concerned about transistor size. Solid State Drives are nothing but a big pile of transistors, so it's no surprise we're seeing incredible capacity growth.
The really amazing thing is one of their other announcements [0]:
Samsung has designed the PM1725 to cater towards next-generation enterprise storage market. This new half-height, half-length card-type NVMe SSD offers high-performance data transmission in 3.2TB or 6.4TB storage capacities. The new NVMe card is quoted with random read speed of up to 1,000,000 IOPS and random writes up to 120,000 IOPS. In addition, sequential reads can reach up to an impressive 5,500MB/s with sequential writes up to 1,800MB/s. The 6.4TB PM1725 also features five DWPDs for five years, which is a total writing of 32TBs per day during that timeframe.
That does kick it up a notch versus Intel's current top of the line. The P3700 is max 2.0TB, 450,000 read iops, 175,000 write iops, and 2,800 / 2,000 MB/s.
It's also $3.25/gb for 800GB vs the Samsung PM1725's $2.15/gb for 800GB.
Hopefully there is a P3710 waiting in the wings that is competitive with Samsung's new offerings. I have had infinitely better luck in terms of reliability and performance consistency with Intel than any other SSD brand, and I think I'm not alone on that front.
Interesting given the reliability news Facebook posted on their SSDs. With a 5x10^11 UBER you could not even read all the sectors on a 16TB disk reliably. Something I'll be looking at when I get my hands on one.
You linked to an article about Intel's 3D XPoint memory, which isn't NAND flash or any other kind of flash. They are also doing 3D NAND flash, and that's what will be competing against Samsung's 3D NAND flash.
I'm slightly surprised by the numbers given for IOps. The example they give is 48 drives giving 2MM IOps:
2,000,000 / 48 = 41,666.66… IOps
45k IOps for 16TB limits its use cases a bit. I don't know enough about storage to make an educated guess, but anyone know what the constraint there might be? Aren't there controllers that can do 1MM IOPS on single EFDs? 45k is still a ton of operations, but I expected more somehow.
45k iops is not terrible, but it's not competitive with current Intel enterprise SSDs (S3500 is 70k+, S3710 is 85k). I suspect that Samsung had to make huge sacrifices to the controller and DRAM portions of the drive to fit that many NAND chips into the 2.5" form factor. They're basically trying to create a new class of flash storage, which is space-optimized rather than performance-optimized.
I'm sure there's a market there, but I don't know how big it is. This is denser than current hard drives, but total cost is probably heavily in favor of hard drives for most use cases.
I find it particularly confusing that Samsung (seems) to have gone for a SAS SSD versus NVMe. NVMe would allow them to do a PCIe card form factor, which would surely be easier from a physical space perspective. And it's not like anyone has a PCIe flash product at 16TB either -- Fusion-io tops out at 6.4TB.
NVMe also might allow them to improve the iops. Intel's P3500 NVMe is 430k iops at 2TB. Night and day compared to this Samsung drive. So in one 2U chassis you could have any of:
24x2TB Intel P3500
= 48TB
= 10,320,000 iops (read 4k)
24x1.6TB Intel S3500
= 38TB
= 1,572,000
24x16TB Samsung PM1633a
= 384TB
= 1,000,000 iops
(meanwhile HDD would have far lower iops, but also probably a lot cheaper)
While the Samsung one is alluring from a space perspective, I can't really see replacing either the 'fast SSD' tier or the 'slow HDD' tier with it in my deployments.
if they really wanted to make waves they would unveil the world's fastest AND the world's largest hard-drive, two in one, with an onboard battery and hybrid 64, 128, or 256 GB of RAM (not SSD) in 2x, 4x, or 8x 32gig dimms exposed as a physical Drive, costing +/- $800, $1600, and $3200 respectively, in addition to the 16 TB second physical drive, all integrated in one package so you can't disconnect the battery and nuke your lightning-fast drive without being extremely aware that you're doing so.
The hard drives would have ironclad firmware that keeps the RAM refrehsed until its battery goes down to 15% (or whatever the conservative 10 minutes of power is), at which point it takes the ten minutes to dump the contents of that RAM to SSD, and reverts to having that drive also be SSD until the power is reconnected long enough to charge battery back up to 80%. Then it reads it back into RAM and continues as a Lightning Fast 64 GB + Very fast 16 TB drive.
You would store your operating system on the lightning-fast drive.
The absolute nightmare failure state isn't even that bad, as even though the RAM drive should be as ironclad as SSD, in case it ever should lose power unexpectedly through someone opening the device and disconnecting the battery or something, it can still periodically be backed up, so that if you pick up the short end of six sigma, you can just revert to reading the drive from SSD rather than RAM and lose, say, at most 1 day of work.
thoughts? I bet a lot of people would be happy to pay an extra $800 to have their boot media operate at DIMM speed, as long as the non-leaky abstraction is that it is a physical hard drive, and the engineering holds up to this standard.
There is a lot of software out there that is very conservative about when it considers data to be fully written - it would be quite a hack for Samsung to hack that abstraction by doing six or seven sigma availability on a ramdrive with battery and onboard ssd to dump to.
Am I right to assume that NAND flash has higher storage density than magnetic disks? I've been trying to find some definitive data about this but failed so far. I'd really appreciate if someone can point me the right direction to search.
In 2012 they list the density of magnetic disks as 750 Gb/in^2 and nand flash as 550 Gb/in^2. I'm not sure how the numbers have changed with 2d nand, but 3d nand probably pushes the density way over magnetic.
Yes, flash density is much higher. Partly that's because putting circular platters in a rectangular case wastes a lot of space and partly because you can stack eight flash dies into a package around 1 mm thick.
[+] [-] jaawn|10 years ago|reply
When I see that a company can now create SSDs with ~16x more capacity than the best consumer option, I feel like something fishy is going on that is artificially slowing the pace of larger capacity drives making it into the hands of consumers at a reasonable price.
[+] [-] miahi|10 years ago|reply
In the SSD market there are lots of brands, but only a few flash chip makers - so it's the same lack of competition but better hidden to the consumer.
[+] [-] wmf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] discodave|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StillBored|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] digi_owl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curiousjorge|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inversionOf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HorizonXP|10 years ago|reply
Having seen the move from 5.25" HDDs to 3.5" HDDs, then the move from desktops to laptops, and now seeing SSDs becoming extremely common in laptops, tablets, and phones, I have to believe that the author predicted the future when he wrote the book.
Since PC sales have dropped, people are not buying as many HDDs, and buying more SSDs, usually indirectly. Cloud infrastructure has likely gobbled up the existing HDD supply.
But even there, SSDs are preferred for many applications, such as databases, since they're faster overall, storage limitations be damned.
And now we're seeing the first SSD that has a capacity greater than HDDs, in a similar sized package. And no current HDD company has an SSD offering worth mentioning.
It's disruption happening right before our eyes. History seems to repeat itself all too often!
[+] [-] Tloewald|10 years ago|reply
"In fact, Seagate Technology was not felled by disruption. Between 1989 and 1990, its sales doubled, reaching $2.4 billion, “more than all of its U.S. competitors combined,” according to an industry report. In 1997, the year Christensen published “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” Seagate was the largest company in the disk-drive industry, reporting revenues of nine billion dollars."
and:
"Between 1982 and 1984, Micropolis made the disruptive leap from eight-inch to 5.25-inch drives through what Christensen credits as the “Herculean managerial effort” of its C.E.O., Stuart Mahon. (“Mahon remembers the experience as the most exhausting of his life,” Christensen writes.) But, shortly thereafter, Micropolis, unable to compete with companies like Seagate, failed."
Note that he published his book long after this stuff had been shown to be hopelessly wrong, without making any corrections.
Many of his examples are similarly terrible. And those are the ones he cherry-picks to back his thesis.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-...
I found The Innovator's Dilemma to be infuriating. It's a classic 20/20 hindsight -- just vague enough to apply to everything but excuse itself from any conspicuous counter-examples (Apple, say). Like most management fads, I guess.
(Prediction: wait until electric, self-driving car tech becomes practical. Ford and GM will crush the "nimble" disruptors like bugs. Well, unless it's Apple. Then all bets are off.)
Now, the hard disk makers may well be going under, but let's set aside Clay Christensen's over-rated terminology.
Samsung is hardly a small startup "disrupting" big, slow stalwarts. Samsung dwarfs the hard disk makers -- it's more like Google "disrupting" libraries, or Walmart "disrupting" local businesses.
BTW in Christensen's terms, this new disk is a "sustaining" innovation -- it's a better, faster, more complicated, harder-to-manufacture iteration of an existing, successful product.
[+] [-] __float|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jtchang|10 years ago|reply
A lot of 1 unit rack servers can fit about 8 2.5" drives. 128TB of storage in 1U is pretty crazy storage density.
Everytime they reveal a larger capacity drive I just wonder what the backup strategy is going to be. Longer tapes?
[+] [-] pyre|10 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations
looks like LTO-10 is planned to be 48TB per cartridge.
[+] [-] gdickie|10 years ago|reply
If you are limited to the write rate allowed by the SSD interface, then that will serve to limit the heat dissipation as well.
[+] [-] greedo|10 years ago|reply
EDIT: I should have specified `backup to an SSD storage array.` Disk is just embedded in my brain.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] vegabook|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IanDrake|10 years ago|reply
When I look at all the moving parts in an HDD, I'm shocked they can still be produced for less.
[+] [-] mozumder|10 years ago|reply
Did you know that a silicon wafer is a perfect crystal, structured like a diamond? Silicon is right underneath Carbon in the periodic table, which means it shares the same outer electron shell configuration. Making that ain't cheap.
And if one atom is in the wrong place, you have to throw away the chip.
That kind of core expense doesn't exist in a hard drive factory. The disks in a hard drive don't have to be perfect crystals, for example. It's a LOT more expensive to produce chips.
Multiply all the distribution and sales costs, and you'll understand why it's so expensive.
[+] [-] Joeri|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] com2kid|10 years ago|reply
Humans are pretty damn good at making small precise mechanical movements.
[+] [-] pen2l|10 years ago|reply
My bet is by the end of next year, SDDs will be cheaper than their equally sized HDDs. HDDs are certainly on their way out.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|10 years ago|reply
Or automotive engines. We have all sorts of technology tacked on around the basic ICE gasoline engine to make them better- the combustion chamber is just a tiny piece of the machine, which is tended by countless devices managing temperature, airflow, fuel flow, air velocity, etc. Tremendously complex compared to electric motors- but in the end, they are still more popular than electric motors because of the fundamental problem of batteries.
[+] [-] intrasight|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jawngee|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vegabook|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pixl97|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dublinben|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] MaysonL|10 years ago|reply
Samsung has designed the PM1725 to cater towards next-generation enterprise storage market. This new half-height, half-length card-type NVMe SSD offers high-performance data transmission in 3.2TB or 6.4TB storage capacities. The new NVMe card is quoted with random read speed of up to 1,000,000 IOPS and random writes up to 120,000 IOPS. In addition, sequential reads can reach up to an impressive 5,500MB/s with sequential writes up to 1,800MB/s. The 6.4TB PM1725 also features five DWPDs for five years, which is a total writing of 32TBs per day during that timeframe.
[0] http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_announces_tcooptimized_...
[+] [-] skuhn|10 years ago|reply
It's also $3.25/gb for 800GB vs the Samsung PM1725's $2.15/gb for 800GB.
Hopefully there is a P3710 waiting in the wings that is competitive with Samsung's new offerings. I have had infinitely better luck in terms of reliability and performance consistency with Intel than any other SSD brand, and I think I'm not alone on that front.
[+] [-] rasz_pl|10 years ago|reply
~10K cycles sounds good
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markhahn|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tired_man|10 years ago|reply
A compressed LTO6 is 6.25 TB, right? Let's just go with 3 of them.
So, I figured out how many carts we need. You calculate the fractional station wagon part. My math was never _that_ good ;-)
[+] [-] akx|10 years ago|reply
https://gist.github.com/akx/61302f35a9a58bd9371d
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Gladdyu|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtallis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexEatsKittens|10 years ago|reply
2,000,000 / 48 = 41,666.66… IOps
45k IOps for 16TB limits its use cases a bit. I don't know enough about storage to make an educated guess, but anyone know what the constraint there might be? Aren't there controllers that can do 1MM IOPS on single EFDs? 45k is still a ton of operations, but I expected more somehow.
[+] [-] skuhn|10 years ago|reply
I'm sure there's a market there, but I don't know how big it is. This is denser than current hard drives, but total cost is probably heavily in favor of hard drives for most use cases.
I find it particularly confusing that Samsung (seems) to have gone for a SAS SSD versus NVMe. NVMe would allow them to do a PCIe card form factor, which would surely be easier from a physical space perspective. And it's not like anyone has a PCIe flash product at 16TB either -- Fusion-io tops out at 6.4TB.
NVMe also might allow them to improve the iops. Intel's P3500 NVMe is 430k iops at 2TB. Night and day compared to this Samsung drive. So in one 2U chassis you could have any of:
While the Samsung one is alluring from a space perspective, I can't really see replacing either the 'fast SSD' tier or the 'slow HDD' tier with it in my deployments.[+] [-] logicallee|10 years ago|reply
The hard drives would have ironclad firmware that keeps the RAM refrehsed until its battery goes down to 15% (or whatever the conservative 10 minutes of power is), at which point it takes the ten minutes to dump the contents of that RAM to SSD, and reverts to having that drive also be SSD until the power is reconnected long enough to charge battery back up to 80%. Then it reads it back into RAM and continues as a Lightning Fast 64 GB + Very fast 16 TB drive.
You would store your operating system on the lightning-fast drive.
The absolute nightmare failure state isn't even that bad, as even though the RAM drive should be as ironclad as SSD, in case it ever should lose power unexpectedly through someone opening the device and disconnecting the battery or something, it can still periodically be backed up, so that if you pick up the short end of six sigma, you can just revert to reading the drive from SSD rather than RAM and lose, say, at most 1 day of work.
thoughts? I bet a lot of people would be happy to pay an extra $800 to have their boot media operate at DIMM speed, as long as the non-leaky abstraction is that it is a physical hard drive, and the engineering holds up to this standard.
There is a lot of software out there that is very conservative about when it considers data to be fully written - it would be quite a hack for Samsung to hack that abstraction by doing six or seven sigma availability on a ramdrive with battery and onboard ssd to dump to.
[+] [-] riobard|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jyxent|10 years ago|reply
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6...
In 2012 they list the density of magnetic disks as 750 Gb/in^2 and nand flash as 550 Gb/in^2. I'm not sure how the numbers have changed with 2d nand, but 3d nand probably pushes the density way over magnetic.
[+] [-] wmf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ck2|10 years ago|reply