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245TB Micron 6600 ION Data Center SSD Now Shipping

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Re: 245TB Micron 6600 ION Data Center SSD Now Shipping

#31

Post by rbanffy »

dlenski wrote: post #13
el_snark wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven't released details but I was able to find a Solidigm D5-P5336 122.88TB drive for around 40,000 USD, as a guideline. So ... more than that.

Okay, so that 122TB drive costs about $330/TB. I haven't bought a hard drive or an SSD in at least a decade (I get stuff for free, basically) but…that seems a bit high, right? Seems like well-rated consumer-level SSDs cost around $250 for 1TB right now. What accounts for the premium price/TB of these extremely high capacity enterprise-targeted drives?

> What accounts for the premium price/TB of these extremely high capacity enterprise-targeted drives?

Spare capacity, mostly. That’s why they have higher endurance. If you want to double the endurance of a given drive, tell the controller to allocate twice as many spare blocks and report less capacity than you would otherwise.

In this case, you are also paying a premium for the PCIe attachment instead of SAS, and a lot for price elasticity. You see, with drives like these you slash space and energy consumption in relation to HDDs by a large number, and that allows you to pay a premium for the device, because, at the end of its lifetime, it’ll have more than covered the cost difference in saved space and energy.

Re: 245TB Micron 6600 ION Data Center SSD Now Shipping

#32

Post by trvz »

MadnessASAP wrote: post #6
nine_k wrote: post #3

The u.2 form factor is slightly larger than a 2.5" drive. I can imagine the entire space in it taken by Flash chips. I can't imagine what cooling scheme do they employ for the chips in the middle.

Apparently TDP is 30 watts¹, according to the product brief. I would imagine it's a single PCB with flash chips on both sides then thermally bonded to the aluminum chassis. That should keep all chips at approximately the same temperature. On its own it could be easily air cooled, but with 24 in a 2U chassis you'll be having some decently hefty forced air over the drives. 1. For comparison, an HDD usually comes in aro…

It's not just a single PCB, but a sandwich of several.

Re: 245TB Micron 6600 ION Data Center SSD Now Shipping

#33

Post by ricardobeat »

el_snark wrote: post #7
cammikebrown wrote: post #4

How much is it?

They haven't released details but I was able to find a Solidigm D5-P5336 122.88TB drive for around 40,000 USD, as a guideline. So ... more than that.

Apparently $80k, not that terrible in comparison

Re: 245TB Micron 6600 ION Data Center SSD Now Shipping

#34

Post by crote »

nine_k wrote: post #3

The u.2 form factor is slightly larger than a 2.5" drive. I can imagine the entire space in it taken by Flash chips. I can't imagine what cooling scheme do they employ for the chips in the middle.

Over the past few years the main improvement in SSD capacity has been due to them stacking an ever-increasing number of NAND layers in a single chip, with state-of-the-art SSDs already having over 300 layers.

No need to worry about cooling when each layer in the sandwich is only a fraction of a micrometer thick!

Re: 245TB Micron 6600 ION Data Center SSD Now Shipping

#36

Post by petra »

omeysalvi wrote: post #12

Can someone who knows explain what is the benefit of having all that data in one ssd instead of splitting it up into hundreds of individual drives? Does the single ssd benefit is more performance or does it really tuen out to be cheaper than hundreds of individual drives?

Higher density, less power. Those are the bottlenecks in current and new data centers that are built out.

So it's not exactly about cost savings, but having the option to do more, faster.

Also, you could also get much higher bandwidth density out of this vs HDD, and this is great for AI training

Re: 245TB Micron 6600 ION Data Center SSD Now Shipping

#37

Post by crote »

userbinator wrote: post #16

QLC NAND The datasheet shows 3GB/s sequential write, which for 245.76TB means writing the whole drive takes around 22h45m. Odd that the endurance is specified as "1.0 SDWPD", which is almost meaningless since the drive takes roughly that long to write at full speed. At scale, 1.9 times more energy is required for an HDD deployment ...but those HDDs are going to hold data for far more than twice as long. It's especial…

Perhaps their usual buyers just care less about retention?

Those drives aren't going to be used for cold storage, and it is basically a guarantee that there will be checksums and some form of redundancy. Who cares whether the data is retained for 10 or for 15 years after writing when you can do a low-priority background scrub of the entire drive once a month, and when there are already mechanisms in place to account for full-drive failure?

Re: 245TB Micron 6600 ION Data Center SSD Now Shipping

#38

Post by walrus01 »

nine_k wrote: post #3

The u.2 form factor is slightly larger than a 2.5" drive. I can imagine the entire space in it taken by Flash chips. I can't imagine what cooling scheme do they employ for the chips in the middle.

the u.2 form factor indeed evolved from chassis designs that were originally 2.5" drives. It's now kind of becoming obsolete with new designs using things like E1S, E1L (exactly the correct height to be slotted into a 1U server, it's like a slightly wider M.2, but meant to be insertable and removable), and E3S and E3L.

Note that the 245TB is an E3L, the half size version of it come in smaller size.

https://americas.kioxia.com/en-ca/business/ssd/solution/edsf...

https://www.exxactcorp.com/blog/storage/edsff-e1s-e1l-e3s-e3...

https://www.simms.co.uk/tech-talk/e1s-e1l-the-new-server-for...

Re: 245TB Micron 6600 ION Data Center SSD Now Shipping

#39

Post by delamon »

crote wrote: post #37
userbinator wrote: post #16

QLC NAND The datasheet shows 3GB/s sequential write, which for 245.76TB means writing the whole drive takes around 22h45m. Odd that the endurance is specified as "1.0 SDWPD", which is almost meaningless since the drive takes roughly that long to write at full speed. At scale, 1.9 times more energy is required for an HDD deployment ...but those HDDs are going to hold data for far more than twice as long. It's especial…

Perhaps their usual buyers just care less about retention? Those drives aren't going to be used for cold storage, and it is basically a guarantee that there will be checksums and some form of redundancy. Who cares whether the data is retained for 10 or for 15 years after writing when you can do a low-priority background scrub of the entire drive once a month, and when there are already mechanisms in place to account…

QLC retention reported to be around 1 year in unpowered state. I would assume, that drive does background refresh, though. No idea what effect it has on total drive lifetime. It is still mean that if you use it for cold storage it has to be powered.
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