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?
It’s about density in a datacenter. With this you have 1PB in 4 drives, fitting in a 1u rack, which is just incredible. Also these drives don’t use regular SATA or SAS, they use PCIe.
You’re actually right, it’s just that datacenters like density and will gladly split your data onto hundreds of these little amazing magical bits of technology rather than hundreds of less magical ones in the same physical volume.
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 around ~10 watts
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 especially infuriating to see such secrecy and vagueness around the real endurance/retention characteristics for SSDs as expensive as these.
On the other hand, 60TB of SLC for the same price would probably be a great deal.
1. For comparison, an HDD usually comes in around ~10 watts
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 especially infuriating to see such secrecy and vagueness around the real endurance/retention characteristics for SSDs as expensive as these.
On the other hand, 60TB of SLC for the same price would probably be a great deal.
You don't have permission to access
"http://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-detai..." on this server.
High security on this press release.
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?
The word "enterprise".