Monday, July 24th 2023
Solidigm Introduces D5-P5336 - the World's Highest Capacity PCIe SSD
Solidigm over the weekend announced the Solidigm D5-P5336 line of enterprise SSDs. The company earns bragging rights for having the highest capacity among production SSDs, with these coming in capacities of up to 61.44 TB—an incredible amount of storage that HDDs have yet to catch up to. These drives are targeted at the data-center, where they not just replace HDDs due to their sheer density, but also provide the advantage of responsive flash storage. The drives aren't gunning to top SSD performance charts, the design goal is simply capacity and reliability. The D5-P5336 series feature enterprise-grade QLC NAND flash memory that's been extensively tested for reliability and write endurance.
The Solidigm D5-P5336 series comes in three data-center relevant form-factors—15 mm-thick U.2, 7.5 mm-thick E3.S, and the E1.L (ruler) form-factor. Capacities start at 7.68 TB for the U.2 and E3.S models, and 15.36 TB for the E1.L. The maximum capacity on offer is 61.44 TB for the U.2 and E1.L form-factors, and 30.72 TB for the E3.S. Among the capacity variants are 15.36 TB, 30.72 TB, and 61.44 TB. The drives use a proprietary controller that takes advantage of the PCI-Express 4.0 x4 host interface, and NVMe 1.4c protocol. The star attraction, however, is the 192-layer 3D QLC NAND flash memory made in-house by Solidigm.
All variants offer sequential read speeds of up to 7 GB/s. Since these are high-density QLC drives, the sequential write speeds are low, but rated at up to 3.3 GB/s. Solidigm claims this is within 20% of a theoretical TLC-based drive at comparable densities. 4K random access speeds at QD-256 is rated at 1.005 million IOPS, and 16K writes at QD-256 at 43,000 IOPS. The company didn't put out variant-specific endurance numbers, yet; but the 61.44 TB variant can take 0.58 DWPD, while the base 7.68 TB variant 0.42 DWPDs. The 61.44 TB variant should typically offer 213,000 TBW, and the 30.72 TB variant 105,000 TBW.
"Modern workloads like AI and capabilities like 5G are rapidly reshaping the storage landscape," said Greg Matson, VP of Strategic Planning and Marketing at Solidigm. "Businesses need storage in more places that is inexpensive, able to store massive data sets efficiently and access the data at speed. The D5-P5336 delivers on all three -- value, density and performance. With QLC, the economics are compelling -- imagine storing 6X more data than HDDs and 2X more data than TLC SSDs, all in the same space at TLC speed."
Built to handle massive amounts of data from the core to the edge, the read performance of the Solidigm D5-P5336 exceeds some of the latest cost-optimized triple-level cell (TLC) SSDs on the market today. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), content delivery networks, scale-out network attached storage (NAS), and object storage are all read-intensive workloads that continue to drive enormous volumes of data, regardless of where they reside.
Massive scalability and improved TCO across a range of configurations
With its high capacity enabling smaller storage footprints, Solidigm's D5-P5336 enables a lower total cost of ownership and more sustainable infrastructure than all-TLC arrays, SAS HDD arrays, or hybrid arrays. Consider the following, based on a 100PB object storage solution deployment:
"For years there has been debate about endurance and reliability of SSDs, QLC in particular, but Solidigm might have ended that debate with the D5-P5336," noted Avery Pham, VP Operations, VAST Data. "Any number of applications will see notable benefits from these drives from AI and machine learning to object storage."
"Today, it is clear that the primary constraint for edge workloads is the limitation of bandwidth rather than latency," said Doug Emby, VP of Sales and Business Development at Cheetah RAID Storage. "Solidigm's D5-P5336 QLC SSDs offer an impressive combination of capacity, performance, and reliability as a solution to overcome this challenge. The seamless integration of these Solidigm QLC SSDs with Cheetah's high-performance servers makes them highly suitable for the efficient deployment of edge solutions."
The D5-P5336 is shipping now in E1.L form factor with up to 30.72 TB, with subsequent availability extending to 61.44 TB in both U.2 and E1.L later this year. In the first half of 2024, Solidigm will be shipping E3.S form factor with up to 30.72 TB.
To learn more about the D5-P5336 visit this page. Additionally, the D5-P5336 will be on display at the Solidigm booth (#107) at Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. August 8-10.
Sources:
Solidigm News, D5-P5336 Product Page
The Solidigm D5-P5336 series comes in three data-center relevant form-factors—15 mm-thick U.2, 7.5 mm-thick E3.S, and the E1.L (ruler) form-factor. Capacities start at 7.68 TB for the U.2 and E3.S models, and 15.36 TB for the E1.L. The maximum capacity on offer is 61.44 TB for the U.2 and E1.L form-factors, and 30.72 TB for the E3.S. Among the capacity variants are 15.36 TB, 30.72 TB, and 61.44 TB. The drives use a proprietary controller that takes advantage of the PCI-Express 4.0 x4 host interface, and NVMe 1.4c protocol. The star attraction, however, is the 192-layer 3D QLC NAND flash memory made in-house by Solidigm.
Solidigm Press Release
Solidigm is proud to announce another industry-first quad-level cell (QLC) solid-state storage drive (SSD) for the data center—the Solidigm D5-P5336. Offered in capacities from 7.68 TB to 61.44 TB, the Solidigm D5-P5336 makes it possible to store up to 6X more data in the same space compared to an all hard disk drive (HDD) array."Modern workloads like AI and capabilities like 5G are rapidly reshaping the storage landscape," said Greg Matson, VP of Strategic Planning and Marketing at Solidigm. "Businesses need storage in more places that is inexpensive, able to store massive data sets efficiently and access the data at speed. The D5-P5336 delivers on all three -- value, density and performance. With QLC, the economics are compelling -- imagine storing 6X more data than HDDs and 2X more data than TLC SSDs, all in the same space at TLC speed."
Built to handle massive amounts of data from the core to the edge, the read performance of the Solidigm D5-P5336 exceeds some of the latest cost-optimized triple-level cell (TLC) SSDs on the market today. Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), content delivery networks, scale-out network attached storage (NAS), and object storage are all read-intensive workloads that continue to drive enormous volumes of data, regardless of where they reside.
Massive scalability and improved TCO across a range of configurations
With its high capacity enabling smaller storage footprints, Solidigm's D5-P5336 enables a lower total cost of ownership and more sustainable infrastructure than all-TLC arrays, SAS HDD arrays, or hybrid arrays. Consider the following, based on a 100PB object storage solution deployment:
"For years there has been debate about endurance and reliability of SSDs, QLC in particular, but Solidigm might have ended that debate with the D5-P5336," noted Avery Pham, VP Operations, VAST Data. "Any number of applications will see notable benefits from these drives from AI and machine learning to object storage."
"Today, it is clear that the primary constraint for edge workloads is the limitation of bandwidth rather than latency," said Doug Emby, VP of Sales and Business Development at Cheetah RAID Storage. "Solidigm's D5-P5336 QLC SSDs offer an impressive combination of capacity, performance, and reliability as a solution to overcome this challenge. The seamless integration of these Solidigm QLC SSDs with Cheetah's high-performance servers makes them highly suitable for the efficient deployment of edge solutions."
The D5-P5336 is shipping now in E1.L form factor with up to 30.72 TB, with subsequent availability extending to 61.44 TB in both U.2 and E1.L later this year. In the first half of 2024, Solidigm will be shipping E3.S form factor with up to 30.72 TB.
To learn more about the D5-P5336 visit this page. Additionally, the D5-P5336 will be on display at the Solidigm booth (#107) at Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. August 8-10.
Solidigm Slide Deck
20 Comments on Solidigm Introduces D5-P5336 - the World's Highest Capacity PCIe SSD
Other charts show endurance figures of 790 p/e cycles for the 7.68TB model, up to 1090 p/e cycles for the 61.44 TB model:
So no, they haven't magically solved the QLC endurance issue, it's still around a third of TLC's endurance. Is half a drive write per day a lot of writing on a 61.44TB drive? Absolutely yes, but it's still QLC, and still a long way from ideal when these things are likely to cost around $4000 each.
I can see their use case for content hosting where the data is almost static yet hundreds of thousands of users could be pulling data off it simultaneously - but AFAIK most of the large content hosts go down the route of slow, cheap, spinning rust with enormous amounts of redundancy. Perhaps that thinking is being overwhelmed by increasing datacenter energy and size constraints. I don't know for sure, I'm not a Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Facebook employee...
But the charts dont say as much, they are misleading, that's for sure.This, and IOPS too. A single SSD has the IOPS of a large van filled with hard disks, and when serving thousands of users, this is crucial.
Once you go beyond 8TB drives at the moment, I'm not entirely sure what's happening under the hood. Intel/Solidigm/WD drive reviews I've read test performance but not the internal layout. I don't know if the 30.7TB/61.4TB U2 form factor drives are internal RAID/JBOD arrays behind a RAID controller, or whether they use dedicated SSD controllers that have 16 or 32 channels.
So, until we get higher-density NAND dies, we're stuck at 16 multiples (8-channel, double-stacked) of the current 512GiB dies for 2280, consumer-friendly 2280 M.2 SSDs.
You can often find the number of CE (chip enable) signals in controller data sheets. The E18 has 32, which means that 32 chips (dies) can be connected to it. But maybe some kind of multiplexing exists in addition to CEs because 32 x 512 Gbit isn't enough for a 4 GB drive.
Same net result by the sound of it though?
If it's bits not bytes, but they stack up to 8, then there's still this cost/complexity threshold at 512GiB per package.
Thread
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/rumour-that-mx500-now-has-qlc-variants.302350/
Just about every SSD manufacturer has been guilty of that so far, and it's not that the TLC has low endurance, it's that the model "currently using TLC" still needs to meet its rated and sold specification when they later downgrade the flash so that they don't get hit with class-actions.
But if endurance is specified, and sufficiently high, I would be confident I'm not going to get a QLC-filled drive. As an example, the Crucial P5 Plus (1 TB) has an endurance of 600 TB, and the Kingston KC3000 and Fury Renegade have more. Consumer-level QLC isn't there yet.
So have no high endurance rated drives been switched then?
Drives such as the Kingston NV2 have pretty low endurance, it indeed has TLC and QLC variants in the TPU database. I don't know about other confirmed examples that magically became QLC during their lifetime. The SX8200 Pro, the grandfather of bait-and-switch, had countless variants but all were TLC.
Ideally someone can take a punt and buy a 4tb from amazon or something. :)
www.networkworld.com/article/3247746/impact-of-intel-and-micron-ending-their-nand-partnership-is-negligible.html
and Solidigm is Intel NAND Division sold to SK Hynix
www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-sells-ssd-business-dalian-facility-sk-hynix.html#gs.31ozln
www.anandtech.com/show/17134/intel-sells-ssd-business-to-sk-hynix-as-new-subsidiary-solidigm
Let me see if I can pick up some used Enterprise drives on eBay.