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WD announces enterprise 128TB SSD

tomshardware.com

51–60 of 82 posts

Re: WD announces enterprise 128TB SSD

#51
There is a huge price:cost disconnect in the SSD and HDD market, and always has been.

The floor price for 2TB SSD is basically stuck on USD100.00 for reputable brands. Less reputable brands are significantly cheaper but the good ones are self-policing around the floor price.

People like Tom's Hardware say "oh its the NAND shortage" but thats bullshit. It's the last vestige of not-really-illegal collusive pricing behaviour by a bunch of highly profitable manufacturers.

Demand (price) is driving this. Cost has nothing to do with it. "it's the market" is true, because if somebody dropped the floor to USD80 or USD70 I am willing to bet they'd make a killing for a very short while until the others come on board but while they can make book on $100 they're not going lower.

the other SSD sources are very dodgy. There's a lot of risk in going for the super cheap brands right now, you only have to read the reviews to see they come up far more often in post-purchase failure and inevitably problems with replacement. Not to say the majors never fail, but nobody much complains about their RMA on the failure.

Pricing of 2.5" HDD are now predominantly driven by SMR or not SMR as far as I can see it. Shucking is no longer much use to anyone. I expect some of the shuckable drives to migrate slowly to SSD and not bother saying so except indirectly "shockproof" or somesuch. It would actually be better for them not to admit they used SSD, than have to break the de-facto price barriers here.

If you want 4TB or higher, you are paying a premium, its more than 2x the cost of 2TB. The unit price of a 1TB does seem a bit more malleable and the sub TB units are now cheap as .. chips. You burn PCI lines or USB ports to glue these into RAID structures. Nice if you have the slots. Highly reliable with all those discrete media units but you need loads of them to get back to the 5-10TB scale effective filestore size. DO NOT USE USB MEDIA IN RAID IF YOU CAN AFFORD NOT TO

(I don't think M.2 or SATA 2.5" FF has much to do with this)

Re: WD announces enterprise 128TB SSD

#52
post #9

I really want a denser SSD to store my photo collection. My current small form factor PC has two NVME PCIe slots and no room for SATA drives. I have two 4 TB SSDs in there right now and it seems that consumer SSDs basically cap out at 4 TB. I would really love to get about 16 TB in my computer.

I'd love to find a M2-only NAS in a very low profile form factor. I live in a small apartment and prefer small electronics that can hide in a cabinet, but it seems like all of the NAS enclosures that I've ever seen recommended are fucking huge.

It's not a NAS, but you could hook it up to a low-power device and share it. I've got one connected to my primary machine and love it. Super fast storage.

Side note: One of the m2 chips that I got from Amazon was an obvious fake that I might not have caught if I hadn't ordered four together and one obviously didn't match.

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/express-4m2

Re: WD announces enterprise 128TB SSD

#53
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good quality has a baseline level of speed which is pretty fast. There's not much you can cut at that point. But cheap SSDs got down to 2x the price of hard drives last year. Even after prices stabilized, they're at 3x. Flash catching up relatively soon seems likely. Flash matching the current price of hard drives seems even more likely.

I think that is too optimistic. The cost / capacity of NAND, even by Western Digital roadmap wouldn't have come down to current HDD price by 2027 / 2028. And that is assuming HDD price dont fall.

I agree. The price difference between SSD storage and HDD per TB is still a multiple (seems to be currently about 5x). That is better than the 10x it was a few years ago; but I don't expect them to be equivalent any time soon.

Re: WD announces enterprise 128TB SSD

#54
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good quality has a baseline level of speed which is pretty fast. There's not much you can cut at that point. But cheap SSDs got down to 2x the price of hard drives last year. Even after prices stabilized, they're at 3x. Flash catching up relatively soon seems likely. Flash matching the current price of hard drives seems even more likely.

I think that is too optimistic. The cost / capacity of NAND, even by Western Digital roadmap wouldn't have come down to current HDD price by 2027 / 2028. And that is assuming HDD price dont fall.

I think it's more that we have different amounts of time in mind for "relatively soon". I'd be happy with that roadmap.

Where can I find info on that roadmap, by the way? I've found a few things but they're very vague about price at best.

Re: WD announces enterprise 128TB SSD

#55
post #43

No price announced?

You can get a 30TB nvme at about $3k. So that’s probably four times that? I would guess around $15k.

This is for enterprise gear, the drives might cost something like that but whatever storage array these go in will be at least 6 figures on its own with a 3 year support contract.

Re: WD announces enterprise 128TB SSD

#56
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is too optimistic. The cost / capacity of NAND, even by Western Digital roadmap wouldn't have come down to current HDD price by 2027 / 2028. And that is assuming HDD price dont fall.

I agree. The price difference between SSD storage and HDD per TB is still a multiple (seems to be currently about 5x). That is better than the 10x it was a few years ago; but I don't expect them to be equivalent any time soon.

What numbers are you looking at for 5x?

Making sure I'm looking at new hard drives, I see prices around $15/TB at the cheap end. There are a few name-brand SSDs at $45/TB, many more at $50/TB. They're not high end but even the low end is fast these days.

Re: WD announces enterprise 128TB SSD

#57
post #9

I really want a denser SSD to store my photo collection. My current small form factor PC has two NVME PCIe slots and no room for SATA drives. I have two 4 TB SSDs in there right now and it seems that consumer SSDs basically cap out at 4 TB. I would really love to get about 16 TB in my computer.

You can get 15TB U.2 NVMe drives and use a PCIe U.2. adapter! Whether it fits in a SFF is going to depend on the specific chassis, but anything larger and it's fine.

You can also use an external PCIe Thunderbolt enclosure for macOS.

Re: WD announces enterprise 128TB SSD

#58
post #9

I really want a denser SSD to store my photo collection. My current small form factor PC has two NVME PCIe slots and no room for SATA drives. I have two 4 TB SSDs in there right now and it seems that consumer SSDs basically cap out at 4 TB. I would really love to get about 16 TB in my computer.

Kinda like saying you wish your Lamborghini had a big truck box.

Re: WD announces enterprise 128TB SSD

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to find a M2-only NAS in a very low profile form factor. I live in a small apartment and prefer small electronics that can hide in a cabinet, but it seems like all of the NAS enclosures that I've ever seen recommended are fucking huge.

I have the Flashstor 12 Pro. As the name suggests it's 12 m.2 nvme bays and it's pretty darn small considering. Pros: - It does what it says on the tin and I have 12 nvme drives in a ZFS pool - It has 10G ethernet built in. - It's pretty small, especially compared to most HDD focused NAS systems. - It's just an x86 PC and you can blast the factory OS away to install your OS of choice without issue. Cons: - Each drive…

I believe there is also a gen-2 just around the corner.
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