By the time the capacities I want are affordable, I won't have enough PCIe bandwidth to utilize it all. I'll have to buy a dual Xeon platform just to use two drives.
Anything over 500 MB/s is largely useless in consumer and even most prosumer scenarios. I assume you are not an enterprise user, since you white about "having to buy xeon"...
Any word on warranty? Just the other day I saw a box of HP branded SAS seagate hdds - enterprise product at enterprise price.... with pathetic 12 months warranty... WTG...
If you want speed? If a 15 second boot time isn't fast enough? Lamboghinis is not a consumer car either. But people still buy it. At this moment this is top shelf ssd's. I doubt most people will be able to afford it. But if i could i would buy one just to have it. Even with a PCI-e SSD i still get loading screens and it still takes 8 seconds to boot my pc. What if i could boot in 1 second? Who wouldn't want that.
If you think its about "booting time" you are completely clueless.
First of all, most professionals rarely shut down their system, my system has not booted for like a month, I could not care less about booting time. I have zero booting time, because I don't boot, it is that easy. Besides, most of the boot time is actually due to the bios, bootloaders and such, and faster storage will do nothing for those times.
Secondly, as tests have shown, booting from from a 2 GB/s PCIe NVME is barely any faster than booting from a 500 MB/s SSD, even though the NVME is 400% faster, booting time is only 2% faster. Make the storage even faster and the benefits are diminished even further, because at this point storage is no longer a bottleneck, even if you have a gazillion GB/s it won't make a difference.
HDDs were largely the slowest component in the system and the system is only as fast as its slowest component, however, even a regular SATA SSD is enough to alleviate it, and even if new NVME drives are 4-5 times faster in synthetic tests that isolate only the storage component, there is barely any difference in actual real world software. Not consumer software, not even prosumer software, in fact prosumer software is usually far more bottlenecked by CPU performance, so regardless of how fast your storage is, you will have to wait on the CPU to process the data.
Such fast SSDs are not meant for consumers and they will never be, you may buy one if you have money to waste, but it will do you no good and it will be money stupidly spent. Those are products for database servers, they are far better at random iops, and even though the immense bandwidth for sequential access doesn't really have a use in that scenario, it is actually beneficial when you add new or replace existing storage, where the fast sequential performance will allow to populate that volume in a very short time so it can enter service faster.
Booting in 1 - 2 seconds is just plain impossible, even with a hypothetical optical computer. Only a computer that never shut down but actually hibernated (rather deeply), could do that. But currently you need a full reboot for various updates, particularly kernel updates in Linux (and many more, if you use Windows). The speeds required for ~1 second reboots would be immense, and the latency ridiculously low. I suppose you could do it if you could fit the BIOS, the bootloader and the entire OS in some kind of non volatile memory that was as fast as L1 cache. Do you really see that happening?
The problem is, there are a lot of waiting for device power-up and wait for response. The classic BIOS was like rollcall at school: you have to wait until everyone is in the room, seated and listening and you call out a name one at a time (you can't call out all names at once nor listen for everyone to respond in parallel).
Large vendors want you to buy service contracts on their equipment. What better way to do that than with a 12 month warranty, while getting a 3-5 year warranty from their ODM.
Fastest internet in my area (claims it) is 330MB/s 2 years ago it was under 200, it's not unreasonable to consider that 500MB/s will become a bottleneck for downloading in the near future. Anyway I want my computer to boot faster than I can blink.
TBH the 60 TB is more impressive, who doesn't want a massive home media server they can fit in a shoebox?
Seems like you are confusing bits for bytes... Those 330 mbits would be 41 mbytes.
330 mbytes are doable... only if you are on 5+ gigabit network and have a host which can supply that bandwidth to you. Certainly an achievable peak if you are on a fast fiber optic network and have a neighbor who is also on it and seeds torrents from an SSD drive, but totally unsustainable at a large scale.
I noticed that too, I was expecting ~500MBs read/write when I read that part. Even if this isn't the fastest out there, it's well past most SSDs on the market.
It would be great if SSD prices would fall much closer to that of their mechanical siblings... and if large capacities would be available at sane prices. Still, 60TB even for a tech demonstration, is insane.
That's not good enough. If you look at SSD prices, they went sharply down from 2010 to 2013 or so. In the last few years, they have come down at a much slower pace. You should frankly be able to buy a good 1TB SSD for $100, and even that should not be seen as anything revolutionary. Cost parity should be the norm within the next few years, as SSDs are the primary focus of consumers these days. But it won't likely be, at least if progress will continue to be as slow as it is now. (Talking about the consumer space prices).
A few years ago a half-terabyte SSD seemed INSANE for a home user to own. Two weeks ago I bought a 500GB Samsung 750 EVO for +-USD110 and considered it a good buy.
We're now at the point where most people can replace their hard drives for an affordable amount of money without having to downsize the data they are storing on it. Sadly most PC makers are still shipping old fashioned hard drives as standard.
That SAS demo has two 12 Gbit channels so I wonder if it could bond those two channels for even more bandwidth. With 60 TB of flash, there should be enough parallel channels to exceed the bandwidth of a single 12 Gbit link so the rest would be up to the SSD controller.
Because 1500MB/s is only possible over a 12Gb/s link with 100% efficiency (any protocol overhead would make the reported number impossible); I half suspect they already are. It's either that or marketing is padding the numbers.
OTOH if the main reason for a dualport setup is so the device can be wired to two different SAS controllers for redundancy multiplexing the IO to use both in normal operations would be an interesting software challenge for their driver team. (Assuming it's not already a done deal; I'm not up on the details of high end enterprise storage.)
Its definitely already a thing and you don't even need high end to do it. Allows for multiserver access to a single storage array or for redundant sas controllers hooked up to a single das, backplane, or whatever.
Dur forgot to mention the dual port part and no edit. Its a single physical port not like there are two independent sets of jacks...well kinda I mean there are I guess but not like two usb ports vs one usb port.
If that 60TB Seagate SSD comes in at less than $40,000 each, I'd be surprised. I wonder what the raw NAND size is for the overprovisioning? It would be amusing if the amount of overprovisioning NAND is higher than what we can get as a full consumer drive (4TB overprovision probably?)
Sorry to say,and its unfortunate,but most of you guys are really lacking knowledge,so please don't comment.PCI-E SSDs are a big marketing trick,they do not make a difference in almost any scenario and its a complete waste of money if you buy one.If they release an SSD with 3-4x higher 4k random read speeds,that is going to make a Slight improvement in every storage intensive task,but until then,stick with the typical sata 3 ssds.
Sorry to say that it seems you are completely lacking knowledge.There are many usages for PCI-E SSDs in the Enterprise and business world, where extra speed and more capacity are needed. However, I do agree that for consumers PCIE SSD's are of no benefit. You can't simply generalize that these SSD's are completely worthless and provide no benefit to the entire market.
Sorry but SATA is trash. I can't tell you how many times I've moved around files of hundreds of megabytes or even muti-GB files and had to put up with the incredible frustration of having to wait for the system to finish doing what I've told it to do. Having to rely on all these slow HDDs with all these moving parts any of which could malfunction thereby transforming themselves into a massive pain in the ass to recover and/or replace data that already took a massive amount of time to produce and accumulate. Having to deal with RAID arrays with all of their own complications and hidden costs, ridiculously long rebuild times, added heat, power and noise tradeoffs and inherent limitations. It's the 21st century. There is absolutely no excuse. In the business world, time is money. In the non-business world time wasted is time out of your life you'll never get back. If you're an enterprise desk monkey at least you're on someone's clock waiting for your process to finish, whatever it may be. SSDs, and PCI-E SSDs, are a massive step up on almost every level. You sound just like people who used to say that 64k is all the memory a computer will ever need or those who poo-pooed SSDs providing any real benefit for consumers over HDDs. Many people will never NEED PCI-E speeds just like many people will never NEED 50 or 100gb/s download speeds but at the same time there's also no excuse for not bringing higher capacities and higher speeds to market. The technology is there.
Lower power, faster transfer speeds, higher capacities, increased reliability, less noise, cooler operating equipment, simpler storage. To you maybe these things don't mean anything but to this consumer you're the one who doesn't know what he's talking about.
We'll see what happens next year when the industry stops dragging its ass so much and starts releasing SSDs with higher capacities. I for one have no interest in or patience for migrating/managing gigabytes and even terabytes of data at SATA speeds and I'll bet I'm not the only one. We'll see.
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38 Comments
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nathanddrews - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
By the time the capacities I want are affordable, I won't have enough PCIe bandwidth to utilize it all. I'll have to buy a dual Xeon platform just to use two drives.(slight exaggeration)
ddriver - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Anything over 500 MB/s is largely useless in consumer and even most prosumer scenarios. I assume you are not an enterprise user, since you white about "having to buy xeon"...Any word on warranty? Just the other day I saw a box of HP branded SAS seagate hdds - enterprise product at enterprise price.... with pathetic 12 months warranty... WTG...
WinterCharm - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
No it's not. PCIE SSD's make a big difference.ddriver - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Care to provide empirical proof of that statement?mdw9604 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Have you seen 4K p0rn? Those bits don't carry themselves to my screenwyewye - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Baf example. Even the highest UHD Bluray movies have a bandwidth than can easily be handled by a dumb mecanical HDD.Blamcore - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Maybe u just don't have enough 4k screens surrounding you, simultaneously playing different genres of p0rn to feel the impact of slow drives...mdw9604 - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
LOL. Inovation in PCIe SSD as was /w Beta will be p0rn. Streaming VR in 16K will require 16 bus lanes :)Smókes - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
If you want speed? If a 15 second boot time isn't fast enough? Lamboghinis is not a consumer car either. But people still buy it. At this moment this is top shelf ssd's. I doubt most people will be able to afford it. But if i could i would buy one just to have it. Even with a PCI-e SSD i still get loading screens and it still takes 8 seconds to boot my pc. What if i could boot in 1 second? Who wouldn't want that.ddriver - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
If you think its about "booting time" you are completely clueless.First of all, most professionals rarely shut down their system, my system has not booted for like a month, I could not care less about booting time. I have zero booting time, because I don't boot, it is that easy. Besides, most of the boot time is actually due to the bios, bootloaders and such, and faster storage will do nothing for those times.
Secondly, as tests have shown, booting from from a 2 GB/s PCIe NVME is barely any faster than booting from a 500 MB/s SSD, even though the NVME is 400% faster, booting time is only 2% faster. Make the storage even faster and the benefits are diminished even further, because at this point storage is no longer a bottleneck, even if you have a gazillion GB/s it won't make a difference.
HDDs were largely the slowest component in the system and the system is only as fast as its slowest component, however, even a regular SATA SSD is enough to alleviate it, and even if new NVME drives are 4-5 times faster in synthetic tests that isolate only the storage component, there is barely any difference in actual real world software. Not consumer software, not even prosumer software, in fact prosumer software is usually far more bottlenecked by CPU performance, so regardless of how fast your storage is, you will have to wait on the CPU to process the data.
Such fast SSDs are not meant for consumers and they will never be, you may buy one if you have money to waste, but it will do you no good and it will be money stupidly spent. Those are products for database servers, they are far better at random iops, and even though the immense bandwidth for sequential access doesn't really have a use in that scenario, it is actually beneficial when you add new or replace existing storage, where the fast sequential performance will allow to populate that volume in a very short time so it can enter service faster.
Santoval - Sunday, July 16, 2017 - link
Booting in 1 - 2 seconds is just plain impossible, even with a hypothetical optical computer. Only a computer that never shut down but actually hibernated (rather deeply), could do that. But currently you need a full reboot for various updates, particularly kernel updates in Linux (and many more, if you use Windows). The speeds required for ~1 second reboots would be immense, and the latency ridiculously low. I suppose you could do it if you could fit the BIOS, the bootloader and the entire OS in some kind of non volatile memory that was as fast as L1 cache. Do you really see that happening?tygrus - Tuesday, July 18, 2017 - link
The problem is, there are a lot of waiting for device power-up and wait for response. The classic BIOS was like rollcall at school: you have to wait until everyone is in the room, seated and listening and you call out a name one at a time (you can't call out all names at once nor listen for everyone to respond in parallel).jhh - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Large vendors want you to buy service contracts on their equipment. What better way to do that than with a 12 month warranty, while getting a 3-5 year warranty from their ODM.Jacxel - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Fastest internet in my area (claims it) is 330MB/s 2 years ago it was under 200, it's not unreasonable to consider that 500MB/s will become a bottleneck for downloading in the near future. Anyway I want my computer to boot faster than I can blink.TBH the 60 TB is more impressive, who doesn't want a massive home media server they can fit in a shoebox?
ddriver - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Seems like you are confusing bits for bytes... Those 330 mbits would be 41 mbytes.330 mbytes are doable... only if you are on 5+ gigabit network and have a host which can supply that bandwidth to you. Certainly an achievable peak if you are on a fast fiber optic network and have a neighbor who is also on it and seeds torrents from an SSD drive, but totally unsustainable at a large scale.
rpg1966 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
I love that we're at a stage where sequential read/write specs of 1GBs+, and "just" 150K read IOPS are now considered "mundane" :-)WackyWRZ - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
In the target sector for these drives (enterprise) - these speeds have been mundane for a while now.rpg1966 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Just proves the point even more.blackice85 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
I noticed that too, I was expecting ~500MBs read/write when I read that part. Even if this isn't the fastest out there, it's well past most SSDs on the market.nagi603 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
It would be great if SSD prices would fall much closer to that of their mechanical siblings... and if large capacities would be available at sane prices. Still, 60TB even for a tech demonstration, is insane.ImSpartacus - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
A tb for $200 is pretty nice. That's, what, four times the cost of an equivalent drive?I think that's not bad at all for a basic boot drive.
Mondozai - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
> four times the cost of an equivalent driveThat's not good enough. If you look at SSD prices, they went sharply down from 2010 to 2013 or so. In the last few years, they have come down at a much slower pace. You should frankly be able to buy a good 1TB SSD for $100, and even that should not be seen as anything revolutionary. Cost parity should be the norm within the next few years, as SSDs are the primary focus of consumers these days. But it won't likely be, at least if progress will continue to be as slow as it is now. (Talking about the consumer space prices).
Gigaplex - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
We're getting there. Give it time.AndrewJacksonZA - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
This, what Gigaplex said.A few years ago a half-terabyte SSD seemed INSANE for a home user to own. Two weeks ago I bought a 500GB Samsung 750 EVO for +-USD110 and considered it a good buy.
Glaurung - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
We're now at the point where most people can replace their hard drives for an affordable amount of money without having to downsize the data they are storing on it. Sadly most PC makers are still shipping old fashioned hard drives as standard.Kevin G - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
That SAS demo has two 12 Gbit channels so I wonder if it could bond those two channels for even more bandwidth. With 60 TB of flash, there should be enough parallel channels to exceed the bandwidth of a single 12 Gbit link so the rest would be up to the SSD controller.DanNeely - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Because 1500MB/s is only possible over a 12Gb/s link with 100% efficiency (any protocol overhead would make the reported number impossible); I half suspect they already are. It's either that or marketing is padding the numbers.OTOH if the main reason for a dualport setup is so the device can be wired to two different SAS controllers for redundancy multiplexing the IO to use both in normal operations would be an interesting software challenge for their driver team. (Assuming it's not already a done deal; I'm not up on the details of high end enterprise storage.)
Kraszmyl - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Its definitely already a thing and you don't even need high end to do it. Allows for multiserver access to a single storage array or for redundant sas controllers hooked up to a single das, backplane, or whatever.https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee6197...
Kraszmyl - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Dur forgot to mention the dual port part and no edit. Its a single physical port not like there are two independent sets of jacks...well kinda I mean there are I guess but not like two usb ports vs one usb port.http://www.scsita.org/serial-storage-wire/2007/07/...
bill.rookard - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
If that 60TB Seagate SSD comes in at less than $40,000 each, I'd be surprised. I wonder what the raw NAND size is for the overprovisioning? It would be amusing if the amount of overprovisioning NAND is higher than what we can get as a full consumer drive (4TB overprovision probably?)danwat1234 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
No pics of the 60TB SSD? why?..zodiacfml - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
If Samsung's 15TB drive costs $10K, then what is this, $40K?Icehawk - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
I would expect it to run more than 4x the cost of the 15tb drive based on typical pricing schemasrUmX - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Agreed. A single large 60TB drive over 4x15TB? There's a huge premium for that.fanofanand - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
This is an incredible product, based on my experience with Seagate it should brick itself precisely 10 days after warranty expiration.Pirun - Wednesday, August 17, 2016 - link
Sorry to say,and its unfortunate,but most of you guys are really lacking knowledge,so please don't comment.PCI-E SSDs are a big marketing trick,they do not make a difference in almost any scenario and its a complete waste of money if you buy one.If they release an SSD with 3-4x higher 4k random read speeds,that is going to make a Slight improvement in every storage intensive task,but until then,stick with the typical sata 3 ssds.negusp - Sunday, August 21, 2016 - link
Sorry to say that it seems you are completely lacking knowledge.There are many usages for PCI-E SSDs in the Enterprise and business world, where extra speed and more capacity are needed. However, I do agree that for consumers PCIE SSD's are of no benefit. You can't simply generalize that these SSD's are completely worthless and provide no benefit to the entire market.Magichands8 - Saturday, July 15, 2017 - link
Sorry but SATA is trash. I can't tell you how many times I've moved around files of hundreds of megabytes or even muti-GB files and had to put up with the incredible frustration of having to wait for the system to finish doing what I've told it to do. Having to rely on all these slow HDDs with all these moving parts any of which could malfunction thereby transforming themselves into a massive pain in the ass to recover and/or replace data that already took a massive amount of time to produce and accumulate. Having to deal with RAID arrays with all of their own complications and hidden costs, ridiculously long rebuild times, added heat, power and noise tradeoffs and inherent limitations. It's the 21st century. There is absolutely no excuse. In the business world, time is money. In the non-business world time wasted is time out of your life you'll never get back. If you're an enterprise desk monkey at least you're on someone's clock waiting for your process to finish, whatever it may be. SSDs, and PCI-E SSDs, are a massive step up on almost every level. You sound just like people who used to say that 64k is all the memory a computer will ever need or those who poo-pooed SSDs providing any real benefit for consumers over HDDs. Many people will never NEED PCI-E speeds just like many people will never NEED 50 or 100gb/s download speeds but at the same time there's also no excuse for not bringing higher capacities and higher speeds to market. The technology is there.Lower power, faster transfer speeds, higher capacities, increased reliability, less noise, cooler operating equipment, simpler storage. To you maybe these things don't mean anything but to this consumer you're the one who doesn't know what he's talking about.
We'll see what happens next year when the industry stops dragging its ass so much and starts releasing SSDs with higher capacities. I for one have no interest in or patience for migrating/managing gigabytes and even terabytes of data at SATA speeds and I'll bet I'm not the only one. We'll see.