Samsung Shows Off its Biggest and Fastest SSDs at FMS 2015

[btarunr]

At the 2015 Flash Memory Summit, Samsung announced the fruition of its swanky new 48-layer 3D V-NAND chips, the PM1633a. Built in the 2.5-inch form-factor, and featuring a SAS 12 Gb/s interface, this drive offers an unformatted capacity nearing 16 TB (15,360 GB to be precise). The drive relies on ten 48-layer stacks of 256 Gb 3-bit NAND flash dies, making up 15,360 GB of unformatted capacity. Samsung showed off a system with 48 of these drives, making up 720 TB of total storage.

Besides the largest SSD, Samsung also showed off the fastest. The PM1725 SSD, designed for servers with high-traffic databases, where throughput is the king, is built in the 2.5-inch form factor (up to 3.2 TB) and HHHL form-factor (up to 6.4 TB). It features a PCI-Express 3.0 host bus, and talks to the OS over the modern NVMe protocol. The two offer random access throughput of up to 1,000,000 IOPS.



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[AsRock]

OOh so want one haha, but yes the price will be crazy.

 

[Legacy-ZA]

Fantastic! So erm, $100 right?

 

[Basard]

Remember when all your games AND DOS fit on two 720k floppies?

 

[AsRock]

Remember when all your games AND DOS fit on two 720k floppies?

I still remember the sound of them haha.

Then there was your 3 1/2 drives

 

[rooivalk]

I still remember the sound of them haha.

Then there was your 3 1/2 drives

Whoa, my family had PC with two of 5 1/4 drives and don't remember they're emitting ungodly sound.
Maybe because I was 3 years old back then

 

[Basard]

The old tandy 1000 we had had 384k ram, no hd, a 5.25we never used and a 720k 3.5"... moonbugs was where it was at!

 

[Fx]

Boom. There it is. 2016 is the year of SSDs. Bye bye HDDs; it was a good run...

 

[AsRock]

Boom. There it is. 2016 is the year of SSDs. Bye bye HDDs; it was a good run...

Not at all data retrieval probably be cheaper from a HDD than a SSD to start with and second the price of these are probably some 2+k

 

[Fx]

Not at all data retrieval probably be cheaper from a HDD than a SSD to start with and second the price of these are probably some 2+k

You lost sight of the picture to focus on a pixel. The point is that the size of SSDs have now surpassed HDDs, and in time, prices will lower to something manageable to consumers; this trend has never failed. Concerning endurance, which has always been the achilles heel of SSDs, algorithms and overprovisioning has vastly addressed that.

No one compares the speed between HDDs and SSDs. Perhaps only a small fraction of people consider data retrieval methods. This is because the reliability of the drives and how you configure them determines risk. Both RAID 10 and small arrays of RAID 6 provide excellent resiliency and give superb performance as well.

HDDs are simply being outclassed in 2016 and onward.

 

[AsRock]

It still going be some time, probably 2+ years at the least. A 4TB drive set you back about $140 were as just 2TB SSD is going be much more than that.

You can get a 500GB for $170 but still that's a lot less space for more money.


It's getting there though, 2TB SSD's at HDD prices that's going take time.

 

[Fx]

It's getting there though, 2TB SSD's at HDD prices that's going take time.

Yes, it will still take some time, but I am excited primarily about HDDs finally being overcome in capacity. This is a BIG hurdle finally cleared. Now it is just a matter of time, and I think that time will drive the prices down faster than we can estimate. There are other entities coming out with 8 and 10TB SSDs so its game on between all of them to be competitive, thus bringing down prices. Samsung, with its V-NAND, is leaps and bounds ahead of everybody and they have an excellent history of offering value in SSDs in both price and performance.

I am absolutely excited over this news. They just put all other SSD vendors on notice.

 

[atticus14]

however I would think HDD prices will adjust or capacity will move up greatly. We have gotten back to pre-flood prices long ago, but price:capacity has been stagnate. I think in a competitive world 2GB @ 50 would be more common these days, instead, we still sit at 1TB @ 50 as kind of our entry level point.

 

[Uplink10]

Boom. There it is. 2016 is the year of SSDs. Bye bye HDDs; it was a good run...

HDDs are simply being outclassed in 2016 and onward.

SSDs are superior to the HDDs in almost every way but the price is still the main factor and until the prices come down HDDs will prevail.

I buy a new laptop and I put in a new $55 1TB HDD, if I want SSD I have to pay $330. Do you see the price per GB difference? It is very big and if I buy a laptop for $300 (because only cheap laptops have the lowest price per performance and "what you get") I pay more for the SSD than the laptop itself. This is outrageous!

Or if I buy a desktop PC and I put in two 3TB HDDs in RAID 1 and it would still be only $200 compared to the unknown high price for the SSD configuration.

 

[Aquinus]

If SSDs get down to 0.10 USD per GB (~100 USD per 1TB,) there will be very little reason to get spinning disks. A good 1TB drive is still going to cost 75-80 USD, like a WD black. I have 4 of them in RAID-5 and it performs very well however, it's no SSD. The only reason I have them is because of the capacity and price. Once SSDs overcome the price hurdle, HDDs will go the way of the dinosaur.

 

[Uplink10]

SSDs get down to 0.10 USD per GB (~100 USD per 1TB,) there will be very little reason to get spinning disks.

This is still too much. For cold storage and NAS storage that means that SSDs are still three times the price per GB compared to HDDs. That is not acceptable because for 15 TBs of storage you would pay $1500 instead of $500 if you would choose the 3 TB HDDs.
The price has to come down to the same level as the price of HDDs are now. And HDDs can retain data after 5 years of inactivity, can SSDs also?

 

[Aquinus]

And HDDs can retain data after 5 years of inactivity, can SSDs also?

I would imagine just as long. Unlike DRAM, NAND and XOR flash doesn't require the charge to get refreshed. As I understand it, flash works by trapping electrons and requiring a strong enough magnetic field to "push" electrons out when changing its state. I don't know what this means for inactive longevity but, even in normal operation, it's not re-writing data to ensure endurance, it just sits there, so I have no firm idea but would suspect that it would persist.

Point taken on mass storage but, remember. Producing anything in bulk is cheaper, that's not only limited to HDDs but, point taken nonetheless.

 

[Prima.Vera]

10TB but you're still using ancient outdated interfaces like SATA and even SAS, which cannot give you more than 1.4GB/s anyways...

I look forward for cheap drives that can pass the ancient DDR-200 RAMs on speed )

 

[buggalugs]

Holy smokes so many IOPS.......

 

[gingerboy92]

10TB but you're still using ancient outdated interfaces like SATA and even SAS, which cannot give you more than 1.4GB/s anyways...

I look forward for cheap drives that can pass the ancient DDR-200 RAMs on speed )

I look forward for drives that will replace the RAM for good. Why have another place to put your data temporarily when your hard drive is very close in speed.

 

[Disparia]

I look forward for drives that will replace the RAM for good. Why have another place to put your data temporarily when your hard drive is very close in speed.

Yup, new CPUs and faster drives will probably squeeze out the need for external RAM eventually. Here's an Intel Knights Landing (Xeon Phi) with 16GB:

This tech could trickle down and really make the CPU divisions significant, for example i3 = 4GB, i5 = 8GB, and i7 = 16GB.

 

[Uplink10]

This tech could trickle down and really make the CPU divisions significant, for example i3 = 4GB, i5 = 8GB, and i7 = 16GB.

I hope this does not happen. I can't have an i3 CPU and 16 GB of RAM, WTF?

 

[Aquinus]

Yup, new CPUs and faster drives will probably squeeze out the need for external RAM eventually. Here's an Intel Knights Landing (Xeon Phi) with 16GB:

This tech could trickle down and really make the CPU divisions significant, for example i3 = 4GB, i5 = 8GB, and i7 = 16GB.

That is damn sexy looking, if I do say so myself. I would rather like to see that be like another level of cache as opposed to system memory. The only case where I would say that it shouldn't would be mobile devices. They could further minimize laptop motherboards with such a CPU.

 

[Uplink10]

That is damn sexy looking, if I do say so myself. I would rather like to see that be like another level of cache as opposed to system memory. The only case where I would say that it shouldn't would be mobile devices. They could further minimize laptop motherboards with such a CPU.

The best thing it would be would be that it could be a system memory but there would still be not-on-CPU memory as additional memory and on-the-CPU memory would be used first and it would have the start of the memory address.

But you cannot include only that memory on laptops and miniPCs because it would become non-upgradeable and that would mean I could not have i3 with 16 GBs of memory on laptop. It would be a disaster and it would limit the use of a device.

 

[Aquinus]

The best thing it would be would be that it could be a system memory but there would still be not-on-CPU memory as additional memory and on-the-CPU memory would be used first and it would have the start of the memory address.

But you cannot include only that memory on laptops and miniPCs because it would become non-upgradeable and that would mean I could not have i3 with 16 GBs of memory on laptop. It would be a disaster and it would limit the use of a device.

That's why I tried to be careful of my statement. I completely agree which is why I said it should almost be treated as a level of cache. In reality a small enough application will end up completely residing in L2 cache. I would see something like this working no differently by simply using another level of memory should it be available. It's just something that's between you're run of the mill SRAM cache and system memory so you kind of want a little bit of both in terms of functionality to be present at that level, if that makes any sense.

If you consider memory in general, it tends to be virtualized and pages handled by the either the OS and hardware depending on the level. From a logical level, I would want it to be in the same domain as RAM but in the case of using more than what's on the CPU I would want it to act like a cache if there is external memory. I guess that's what I mean by kind of like system memory but kind of like cache.