“The world has a new record holder for the largest SSD, and it comes in at 100TB,” Micah Singleton reports for The Verge.
“The Nimbus Data ExaDrive DC100 is a new, massive drive that is currently being tested with select customers and will be available to purchase this summer,” Singleton reports. “The company says the DC100 will utilize 3D NAND flash memory, which can provide enough capacity to store 20,000 HD movies, or 20 million songs, (if people still downloaded music), and is capable of read and write speeds of 500MB/s.”
Singleton reports, “As usual with these massive drives, they aren’t targeted at consumers, but they do give a glimpse into a near future…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As for the price: If you have to ask…
First Question – How Much (as you said)?
Second Question – how long is it expected to last?
The problem with the super massive drives in the data center is the rebuild time for arrays.
Say you’re doing a typical 11 for 8 array which gives you 800 TB of storage using 11 100 TB drives. Then one of the 11 goes bad. You can hot swap the bad drive and rebuild the data on that drive to reconstitute the array. BUT, the rebuild time for 100 TB of data at the theoretical limit of 500 MB/s is over 55 hours. In a real world situation it’s more likely well over 100 hours (or more than four days) for an array in full operation for standard use tasks.
Drives fail. Even SSDs fail. It’s reality.
Either the read/write speed of these drives (and the interfaces that support them) need to significantly increase (bringing real world rebuild times down to under 24 hours for even these massive drives) or these huge drives (and larger variants) won’t be practical in the data center.
I see the SSD future that eventually leads to simpler or nonexistent RAID need for many. This WOULD significantly reduce the need for a conventional huge workstation box for graphics and video media work. And eventually SSD integrity will, with advanced technology, come up with even greater reliability and much longer life. (Well until we get technology that writes zero’s and one’s on the molecular level.) Then there’s quantum computing.
Great, all the good stuff is coming just as my life is closer to shuffling off to Buffalo than newly arrived from Kook-a-monga!