Tag: SSDs

Samsung Announces 8tb Consumer SSD

Samsung has announced a consumer-grade 8tb SSD drive.

One of the issues with these is that these are QLC drives which generally have much lower lifespans when being rewritten. This drive appears to be no different,

And before you ask: it should last a long time before losing its write ability despite the quad-level cell flash memory. The 8TB model is rated for an endurance rating of up to 2,880 terabytes written. You’d have to completely rewrite the drive 360 times before running into trouble, to put it another way. That 360-times endurance applies to lower-capacity models as well.

With all due respect to Engadget, who wrote the above, that’s not a lot of rewrites for a drive that’s likely to come in at $1,000.

Hopefully in a few years, the cost of these will come down to the point where it makes sense to throw large large numbers of them in a NAS for a low power, high speed (compared to spinning rust) data storage.

Samsung Promises Fail-In-Place/’Never Die’ SSDs

Samsung is planning to create SSDs equipped with what it calls “fail-in-place technology” that will protect the drives from traditional failure methods.

Samsung’s FIP technology marks a new milestone in the 60-year history of storage by ensuring that SSDs maintain normal operation even when errors occur at the chip level, enabling a never-dying SSD for the first time in the industry. In the past, failure in just one out of several hundred NAND chips meant having to replace an entire SSD, causing system downtime and additional drive replacement cost. SSDs integrated with Samsung’s FIP software can detect a faulty chip, scan for any damage in data, then relocate the data into working chips. For instance, if a fault is identified in any of the 512 NAND chips inside a 30.72TB SSD, the FIP software would automatically activate error-handling algorithms at the chip level while maintaining the drive’s high, stable performance.

This technology will initially be available primarily on SSDs intended for data centers, but hopefully it will eventually find its way into consumer-level drives.

Consumer SSD Prices and Sizes

It’s interesting to see how quickly the per/gigabyte price for SSDs continues to fall as companies begin introducing bigger and cheaper models.

Back in February 2018, I bought a couple 2TB SSDs for some new laptops for about $500/each. Today, ten months later, those SSDs can be had on Amazon for $290, a 42 percent price drop in less than a year.

Meanwhile, Samsung recently announced consumer level QLC SSDs in 1TB/2TB/4TB capacities that will initially retail for $149.99, $299.99, and $599.99 respectively.

Aside from the relatively low prices, one of the interesting things about the QLC drives is their write endurance,

The 860 QVO, from the box, is given a write endurace rating equivalent to 0.3 Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD), which even for the 1TB means 300GB a day, every day, which goes above and beyond most consumer workloads. 

Better drives, larger capacities and cheaper storage prices. What’s not to love?

4TB SSD Hard Drives & SSD Costs

Ran across this September 2016 article about Samsung’s plans to drive SSD prices down to magnetic hard drive levels by 2020. As the article notes, magnetic hard drives today cost about 4 cents per gigabyte, whereas SSDs cost 20 to 50 cents per gigabyte storage.

For example, I can go on Amazon and buy a 4tb magnetic hard drive for about $110 (3 cents per gigabyte). Samsung makes a 4TB SSD, but it currently costs $1540 (39 cents per gigabyte).

On the other hand, SSDs have a lot of advantages over magnetic hard drives, though not enough to warrant paying 13 times as much (at least for my intended usage). If SSD prices do fall to current HD prices by 2020, that would be a major game changer.

Intel/Micron to Release a 10tb SSD?

Intel SSDBack in early 2015, Intel and Micron suggested that work they were doing could result in a 10tb 2.5 inch SSD. Now that Micron is apparently beginning to manufacture its new 3D flash chips, that 10tb SSD might not be too far off.

Want to make the switch to SSDs but feel they don’t offer enough storage space? Then you might want to hold off making any purchases for a while because Intel, in partnership with Micron, is reportedly getting ready to unveil SSDs with 10TB of storage capacity.

Right now the largest SSD that Intel offers has 4TB of storage.

The increase in capacity is made possible by Micron’s 3D NAND flash, which it is now able to produce in volume. Samsung and Toshiba already make use of 3D NAND flash technology in their SSDs, but neither have hit the 10TB mark.

If you can’t wait for that, Fixstars sells a 13TB SSD, though it will set you back around $13,000.