111–120 of 130 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
QLC with a decent SLC cache seems to work just fine as well, for most consumer purposes - see drives like the sabrent Rocket-Q
You need 6 times more QLC chips to get an equivalent write performance to TLC on average. Of course, for NAS RAID arrays that were already saturated by TLC man times over, it makes little difference.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need 6 times more QLC chips to get an equivalent write performance to TLC on average. Of course, for NAS RAID arrays that were already saturated by TLC man times over, it makes little difference.
But if you have a large (hundred GB, for example) SLC/TLC cache and DRAM, then for most consumer use you're never going to see a difference.
Explaining: there are 100% TLC drives high in the benchmarks, as long as you look at 1tb+ category.
You only need 3 times more chips with TLC than MLC, which was still easily doable, and there were no equivalent sized MLC chips anyways.
Read speeds weren't a problem with any flash technology, but QLC will give you harddrive level read speeds at sizes below 1tb.
QLC will only take off in SSD's sized 5TB+ if per-chip speed will not improve dramatically, like at least twofold.
QLC + huge cache is not good deal cost wise in comparison to pure TLC.
Can't say I particularly care frankly. I don't see myself buying another spinning plate of rust
If you can of course. But just got 16 disk for my nas. You just cannot escape this. Want 100T?
That's my point. I said I don't see myself needing HDDs again. Unfortunately hn read that as me saying nobody ever needs HDDs again :/
I've got about 3TB of SSD space and gigabit internet. That leaves me with very little need for massive NAS space, but others might.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But if you have a large (hundred GB, for example) SLC/TLC cache and DRAM, then for most consumer use you're never going to see a difference.
Still, does it make a net improvement over TLC? Explaining: there are 100% TLC drives high in the benchmarks, as long as you look at 1tb+ category. You only need 3 times more chips with TLC than MLC, which was still easily doable, and there were no equivalent sized MLC chips anyways. Read speeds weren't a problem with any flash technology, but QLC will give you harddrive level read speeds at sizes below 1tb. QLC will…
Speed-wise no, but it (almost) keeps up with the lower end of TLC NVMe drives.
> QLC + huge cache is not good deal cost wise in comparison to pure TLC.
Cost wise? Yes it seems to, Sabrent's "Rocket Q" is about the cheapest 2TB on the market, and performs pretty well, Reads more or less competitively with the non-QLC drives from the same vendor and writes at around 2/3 the speed.
Intel's 660p range performs a little less well, but typically still multiple times as fast as SATA drives, and is generally cheaper too.
Are the disk vendors publishing performance metrics that are being violated by the use of SMR technology? Or is this just one of those cases of performance generally not being as good as it used to be, and customers becoming reliant on past behavior despite the lack of an explicit performance promise from the vendors?
> Are the disk vendors publishing performance metrics that are being violated by the use of SMR technology? Not really, no. SMR drives overlays data on top of each other, like "shingles" on a typical American roof. As such, whenever an SMR drive writes data, it must read the data "underneath" the current spot, rewrite the "underneath" data, and then lay the new data on top of it. SMR drives are great for archives (wr…
Isn't that the wrong way around? Archives are write many, read maybe. I do regular backups that I hope I never have to read.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's competition. Every cost cutting tech gets adoption except for boost the main muggle specs like capacity. On the SSD side we have DRAMless and TLC. The annoying thing is that unless the government forces disclosure, the honest manufacturers are the ones hurt, having to start advertising "no SMR!" to differentiate, like the organic/health food products in the grocery store that have to list all the poisons they do…
This, plus the previous post about the WD Red drives, makes it all three manufacturers - there are no honest options left. It's like saying "honest telecoms". Also, "boost the main muggle"? I usually think I know my Potter references, but this one escapes me.
Adding to this confusing debacle is how HDDs are now being marketed like running shoes: one type for running, one for squash, one for tennis, one for basketball...
There are only maybe... 3 or 4 elements of HDD designs worth talking about. * CMR/PMR drives -- Classic hard drive you've been buying for the last 30 years. Not much to say about it. * SMR Drives -- "Shingled" has very poor write performance, but adds 20% more capacity at lower costs. For "write once, read many" workloads, like archival or backups. This is because "Shingled" drives write data on top of the old data,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are the disk vendors publishing performance metrics that are being violated by the use of SMR technology? Not really, no. SMR drives overlays data on top of each other, like "shingles" on a typical American roof. As such, whenever an SMR drive writes data, it must read the data "underneath" the current spot, rewrite the "underneath" data, and then lay the new data on top of it. SMR drives are great for archives (wr…
> SMR drives are great for archives (write once, read many). Isn't that the wrong way around? Archives are write many, read maybe. I do regular backups that I hope I never have to read.
SMR performs generally fine except in the physical rewrite case. A 6TB disk is unlikely to see a lot of physical rewrites except in this pathological case of a RAID rebuild that people are complaining about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's competition. Every cost cutting tech gets adoption except for boost the main muggle specs like capacity. On the SSD side we have DRAMless and TLC. The annoying thing is that unless the government forces disclosure, the honest manufacturers are the ones hurt, having to start advertising "no SMR!" to differentiate, like the organic/health food products in the grocery store that have to list all the poisons they do…
Yes, the NAND flash "decline" (for lack of better words) is sad to see, and it's as you said --- the only marketing spec people seem to care about with storage is capacity. TLC and QLC are misnomers, a TLC cell holds 3 bits but has eight levels and QLC likewise 4 bits with 16 levels. You get a multiplicative increase in capacity for an exponential decrease in reliability. The manufacturers have been very obfuscatory…
To go a bit further, I'm amazed you don't see a drive manufacturer offering an enterprise-client "firmware builder" tool, or at least as a build-to-order service if you're a big enough client. I could see customers that wanted to respec their 1TB drives as, say, 750GB to ensure an abundance of over-capacity for reallocation later, or the YOLO "I'm gonna run the cheapest drives in RAID0" crowd slashing overprovisioning and getting 1050Gb out of the same unit. If you dialed down the capacity low enough, the drive could presumably stay in "use SLC mode only" mode for its entire duration.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the NAND flash "decline" (for lack of better words) is sad to see, and it's as you said --- the only marketing spec people seem to care about with storage is capacity. TLC and QLC are misnomers, a TLC cell holds 3 bits but has eight levels and QLC likewise 4 bits with 16 levels. You get a multiplicative increase in capacity for an exponential decrease in reliability. The manufacturers have been very obfuscatory…
This feels like it could be managed in firmware. It's been well established that many modern SSDs will use a large volume of the NAND in a SLC style mode for performance reasons, and only switch to MLC/TLC/QLC mode as the available space to do so runs down. I would be curious what effect that has on reliability-- if an individual QLC flash cell goes bad, is it still typically usable if you're using psuedo-SLC coding?…
I'm amazed you don't see a drive manufacturer offering an enterprise-client "firmware builder" tool, or at least as a build-to-order service if you're a big enough client.
If they do, you probably wouldn't hear about it --- and I suspect they do, given that there are things like this: https://superuser.com/questions/593303/hitachi-hard-drive-wi...