Live data from Hacker News

Samsung ships the world's highest capacity SSD, with 15TB of storage

computerworld.com

51–60 of 147 posts

Re: Samsung ships the world's highest capacity SSD, with 15TB of storage

#51
post #50
post #25

Why SAS and not NVMe? You can buy all NVMe enclosures/servers now. Is this solely aimed at replacing drives in existing enclosures? Not much good there as most of them will be SAS6. They'll still work, but not nearly as fast as SAS12 nor NVMe.

You're asking for 2 major tech steppings in a single product. We don't even have many mass market NVMe drives yet, and that aside, they're undoubtedly pushing the limits of their existing controller tech just to handle the capacity. Has NVMe seen much enterprise adoption yet? No surprise they chose an interface to match their intended customers' existing product lines

> Has NVMe seen much enterprise adoption yet?

Have you tried to buy one in the past year? If you're not in the Fortune 100, fat effing chance! Here's how it goes, Samsung announces NVMe product, companies beat down their door screaming "take my money!" and Samsung conveniently "cancels" the product for sale. They made it. They just sold their entire production run to a handful of customers. Maybe, just maybe you can get a couple hundred units if you're willing to wait 3-4 months and someone returns some or changes an order after delivery (and you get the returns).

Even second tier (non Intel, non Samsung) suppliers are sold out. About the only thing you can buy now is HGST because no one wanted their stuff in the first place, and they jacked up their prices in response to other vendors' product shortages.

Yes, NVMe is on fire right now. Everyone wants it. I wouldn't put new tech like this into a 3-4 year old system because of a sunk cost fallacy. NVMe is not also exactly "new". They're already on version 1.2 (or 1.3) of the spec. Intel has gone through 2 major NVMe product revisions (with the third out in 3 months).

Also, Samsung isn't exactly breaking 3D NAND ground here. Novachips did it last year, and in a NVMe interface, too.

Re: Samsung ships the world's highest capacity SSD, with 15TB of storage

#52
post #2

Impressive. First question that pops into mind is how long the rebuild time would take if one of these failed in a RAID. I can imagine it'll take a while.

If you use a fully distributed storage system, like Ceph (or 3Par?), then rebuild times during a drive failure would be significantly lower. Also, any self-respecting storage system (RAID or not) will lower rebuild priority over normal IO.

To give a specific example, let's say you have a 10-node Ceph cluster with 10 of these SSDs in each node filled up to 75% capacity. During a rebuild you throttle down to 50 MBps per SSD. After a single drive failure, the remaining 99 SSDs will work together to redistribute the data in about 40 minutes:

  $ python3 -c "print(round((15.36 * 1024 * 1024 *.75) / (50.0 * 99) / 60.0, 2))"
40.67

The 50 MBps per drive may seem like a low number, but that actually means each node has to move data at roughly 5 Gbps over the cluster network.

* Edited to fix the python line where the multiplication characters converted to italics formatting.

Re: Samsung ships the world's highest capacity SSD, with 15TB of storage

#53
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you have to include the connectors and buses to access the SSD as well. And it will still be in favor of microsd, which can be read by a tiny connector + tiny controller in a smartphone.

I think parent was asking if you can fit 75 microSD cards (75 * 200 GB = 15 TB) and the required connections in the form factor of this SSD.

Yep, that's exactly what I was asking. Remember also that both solutions have to use the SAS connector to interface with the main board. It's a little disingenuous to say that Samsung could have glued a bunch of SD cards together because it's not really comparing apples to apples.

Re: Samsung ships the world's highest capacity SSD, with 15TB of storage

#54
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any SAS SSD's going for much less than $1,000/TB. Some of them are twice that! And I'm sure the density will let it command a premium by targeting users who really need more storage in tight spaces. My guess is $50,000.

On the other hand, I still remember when hard drives (the spinning platter ones) reached the $1/GB mark ~10 years ago. Now high-end SSDs are there. A billion bits of storage costing $1 is pretty amazing, I think.

Our brain thinks linear, technology grows exponentially.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns

Re: Samsung ships the world's highest capacity SSD, with 15TB of storage

#55
post #50
post #25

Why SAS and not NVMe? You can buy all NVMe enclosures/servers now. Is this solely aimed at replacing drives in existing enclosures? Not much good there as most of them will be SAS6. They'll still work, but not nearly as fast as SAS12 nor NVMe.

You're asking for 2 major tech steppings in a single product. We don't even have many mass market NVMe drives yet, and that aside, they're undoubtedly pushing the limits of their existing controller tech just to handle the capacity. Has NVMe seen much enterprise adoption yet? No surprise they chose an interface to match their intended customers' existing product lines

We put a couple of Intel 750s in our primary DB server and so many of our issues just went away instantly. Reading at 2GB/s is amazing. On a 10gb network, our network backups now happen at 1+GB/s. Of course we optimize our DB queries as much as possible but sometimes, you just hit a brick wall and can't speed things up because of how the data is structured. Instead of spending 100 developer/dbadmin hours on reorganizing our tables for some query that runs once a week, we put $2500 of drives and solved more problems than I imagined.

The easiest problems are the ones that go away if you throw money at them and NVMe drastically expands the set of such problems. Most small-mid-sized companies have DBs in the 10Gb-1TB range. If you have a single table that's 100GB in size, you can parse through every single row in just under a minute! This means you can actually use an easy to implement O(n) algorithm instead of trying to make O(1) or O(log n) fit your problem. NVMe SSDs are not that advantageous for companies that are built to scale horizontally on AWS. They are amazing when you have a monolithic DB that you can't partition/shard/cluster easily.

Re: Samsung ships the world's highest capacity SSD, with 15TB of storage

#56
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any SAS SSD's going for much less than $1,000/TB. Some of them are twice that! And I'm sure the density will let it command a premium by targeting users who really need more storage in tight spaces. My guess is $50,000.

On the other hand, I still remember when hard drives (the spinning platter ones) reached the $1/GB mark ~10 years ago. Now high-end SSDs are there. A billion bits of storage costing $1 is pretty amazing, I think.

Hell, I remember reading PC Mag and being SHOCKED about a 4GB HD that cost a few hundred bucks. (Also shocked that I subscribed to PC Mag.)

Re: Samsung ships the world's highest capacity SSD, with 15TB of storage

#58
post #55
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking for 2 major tech steppings in a single product. We don't even have many mass market NVMe drives yet, and that aside, they're undoubtedly pushing the limits of their existing controller tech just to handle the capacity. Has NVMe seen much enterprise adoption yet? No surprise they chose an interface to match their intended customers' existing product lines

We put a couple of Intel 750s in our primary DB server and so many of our issues just went away instantly. Reading at 2GB/s is amazing. On a 10gb network, our network backups now happen at 1+GB/s. Of course we optimize our DB queries as much as possible but sometimes, you just hit a brick wall and can't speed things up because of how the data is structured. Instead of spending 100 developer/dbadmin hours on reorganiz…

> If you have a single table that's 100GB in size, you can parse through every single row in just under a minute!

You're forgetting seek latency. It's orders of magnitude better with SSD, but it's still not necessarily zero. Depending on how the data is laid out and queried you can pay the seek cost per row, which multiplied by the number of rows (100GB+) isn't trivial.

Re: Samsung ships the world's highest capacity SSD, with 15TB of storage

#59
post #58
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We put a couple of Intel 750s in our primary DB server and so many of our issues just went away instantly. Reading at 2GB/s is amazing. On a 10gb network, our network backups now happen at 1+GB/s. Of course we optimize our DB queries as much as possible but sometimes, you just hit a brick wall and can't speed things up because of how the data is structured. Instead of spending 100 developer/dbadmin hours on reorganiz…

> If you have a single table that's 100GB in size, you can parse through every single row in just under a minute! You're forgetting seek latency. It's orders of magnitude better with SSD, but it's still not necessarily zero. Depending on how the data is laid out and queried you can pay the seek cost per row, which multiplied by the number of rows (100GB+) isn't trivial.

It's a pretty bad database that can't queue up enough reads to keep the drive constantly active during a full-table scan.

Re: Samsung ships the world's highest capacity SSD, with 15TB of storage

#60
post #55
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking for 2 major tech steppings in a single product. We don't even have many mass market NVMe drives yet, and that aside, they're undoubtedly pushing the limits of their existing controller tech just to handle the capacity. Has NVMe seen much enterprise adoption yet? No surprise they chose an interface to match their intended customers' existing product lines

We put a couple of Intel 750s in our primary DB server and so many of our issues just went away instantly. Reading at 2GB/s is amazing. On a 10gb network, our network backups now happen at 1+GB/s. Of course we optimize our DB queries as much as possible but sometimes, you just hit a brick wall and can't speed things up because of how the data is structured. Instead of spending 100 developer/dbadmin hours on reorganiz…

Just wanted to say that this kind of real-world experience is why I read Hacker News.
Post reply on HN