Probably at some point as prices per TB continue to come down. I don’t know anyone buying a laptop with a HDD these days. Can’t imagine being likely to buy one for a desktop ever again either. Still got a couple of old ones active (one is 11 years old) but I do plan to replace them with SSDs at some point.
But you don’t need 32TB storage per drive in your laptop.
Then how will I fit my porn folder on it?
I don’t know that sounds like a reasonable size for the new GTA.
I doubt it. SSDs are subject to quantuum tunneling. This means if you don’t power up an SSD once in 2-5 years, your data is gone. HDDs have no such qualms. So long as they still spin, there’s your data and when they no longer do, you still have the heads inside.
So you have a use case that SSDs will never replace, cold data storage. I use them for my cold offsite back ups.
Sorry dude, but bit rot is a very real thing on HDDs. They’re magnetic media, which degrades over time. If you leave a disk cold for 2-5 years, there’s a very good chance you’ll get some bad sectors. SSDs aren’t immune from bit rot, but that’s not through quantum tunneling - not any more than your CPU is affected by it at least.
You’re wrong. HDD need about as much frequently powering up as SSD, because the magnetization gets weaker.
Haven’t they said that about magnetic tape as well?
Some 30 years ago?
Isn’t magnetic tape still around? Isn’t even IBM one of the major vendors?
Anyone who has said that doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Magnetic tape is unparalleled for long-term/archival storage.
This is completely different. For active storage, solid-state has been much better than spinning rust for a long time, it’s just been drastically more expensive. What’s being argued here is that it’s not performant and while it might be more expensive initially, it’s less expensive to run and maintain.
Tape will survive, SSDs will survive. Spinning rust will die
That’s all circumstantial.
Right up until an EMP wipes out all our data. I still maintain that we should be storing all our data on vinyl, doing it physically is the only guarantee.
Microsoft has project Silica where they store data in glass. Being electromagnetic field-proof is one of the stated goals.
That’s a WORM medium though, so really purely for storage. Which is still extremely useful of course.
I’ll shed no tears, even as a NAS owner, once we get equivalent capacity SSD without ruining the bank :P
Considering the high prices for high density SSD chips…
Why are there no 3.5" SSDs with low density chips?Not enough of a market
The industry answer is if you want that much volume of storage, get like 6 edsff or m.2 drives.
3.5 inch is a useful format for platters, but not particularly needed to hold nand chips. Meanwhile instead of having to gate all those chips behind a singular connector, you can have 6 connectors to drive performance. Again, less important for a platter based strategy which is unlikely to saturate even a single 12 gb link in most realistic access patterns, but ssds can keep up with 128gb with utterly random io.
Tiny drives means more flexibility. That storage product can go into nas, servers, desktops, the thinnest laptops and embedded applications, maybe wirh tweaked packaging and cooling solutions. A product designed for hosting that many ssd boards behind a single connector is not going to be trivial to modify for any other use case, bottleneck performance by having a single interface, and pretty guaranteed to cost more to manufacturer than selling the components as 6 drives.
No shit. All they have to do is finally grow the balls to build SSD’s in the same form factor as the 3.5" drives everyone in enterprise is already using, and stuff those to the gills with flash chips.
“But that will cannibalize our artificially price inflated/capacity restricted M.2 sales if consumers get their hands on them!!!”
Yep, it sure will. I’ll take ten, please.
…But instead it appears they’re going to try to make proprietary form factor bullshit, in order to ensure vendor lock in. Because of course they are.
Hate to break it to you, but the 3.5" form factor would absolutely not be cheaper than an equivalent bunch of E1.S or M.2 drives. The price is not inflated due to the form factor, it’s driven primarily by the cost of the NAND chips, and you’d just need more of them to take advantage of bigger area. To take advantage of the thickness of the form factor, it would need to be a multi-board solution. Also, there’d be a thermal problem, since thermal characteristics of a 3.5" application are not designed with the thermal load of that much SSD.
Add to that that 3.5" are currently maybe 24gb SAS connectors at best, which means that such a hypothetical product would be severely crippled by the interconnect. Throughput wise, talking about over 30 fold slower in theory than an equivalent volume of E1.S drives. Which is bad enough, but SAS has a single relatively shallow queue while an NVME target has thousands of deep queues befitting NAND randam access behavior. So a product has to redesign to vaguely handle that sort of product, and if you do that, you might as well do EDSFF. No one would buy something more expensive than the equivalent capacity in E1.S drives that performs only as well as the SAS connector allows,
The EDSFF defined 4 general form factors, the E1.S which is roughly M.2 sized, and then E1.L, which is over a foot long and would be the absolute most data per cubic volume. And E3.S and E3.L, which wants to be more 2.5"-like. As far as I’ve seen, the market only really wants E1.S despite the bigger form factors, so I tihnk the market has shown that 3.5" wouldn’t have takers.
there are plenty of enterprise u.2 and m.2 22110 on ebay
Hdds were a fad, I’m waiting for the return of tape drives. 500TB on a $20 cartridge and I can live with the 2 minute seek time.
Tape drives are still definitely a thing.
If you exclude the introductory price of the drive and needing specialized software to read/write to it it’s very affordable €/TB
Meanwhile Western Digital moves away from SSD production and back to HDDs for massive storage of AI and data lakes and such: https://www.techspot.com/news/107039-western-digital-exits-ssd-market-shifts-focus-hard.html
Yea but isn’t that more because SanDisk is going to fully focus on that? Or what am I missing?
That SanDisk is it’s own company now.
But I don’t k ow if they are still a subsidiary or completely spun of WD.
So can someone make 3.5" SSDs then???
They can be made any size. Most SATA SSD are just a plastic housing around a board with some chips on it. The right question is when will we have a storage technology with the durability and reliability of spinning magnetized hard drive platters. The nand flash chips used in most SSD and m.2 are much more reliable than they were initially. But for long-term retention Etc. Are still off quite a good bit from traditional hard drives. Hard drives can sit for about 10 years generally before bit rot becomes a major concern. Nand flash is only a year or two iirc.
Longer if it has some kind of small power. I think I read that somewhere.
Given that there are already 32TB 2.5” SSDs, what does a 3.5” buy you that you couldn’t get with an adapter?
A better price as low density chips are cheaper.
And you can fit in more of those in a bigger space = Cheaper.The lowest density chips are still going to be way smaller than even a E1.S board. The only thing you might be able to be cheaper as you’d maybe need fewer SSD controllers, but a 3.5" would have to be, at best, a stack of SSD boards, probably 3, plugged into some interposer board. Allowing for the interposer, maybe you could come up with maybe 120 square centimeter boards, and E1.L drives are about 120 square centimeters anyway. So if you are obsessed with most NAND chips per unit volume, then E1.L form factor is alreay going to be in theory as capable as a hypothetical 3.5" SSD. If you don’t like the overly long E1.L, then in theory E3.L would be more reasonably short with 85% of the board surface area. Of course, all that said I’ve almost never seen anyone go for anything except E1.S, which is more like M.2 sized.
So 3.5" would be more expensive, slower (unless you did a new design), and thermally challenged.
A big heat sink like they used to put on WD Raptor drives.
Native slotting into server drive cages. No concerns about alignment with the front or back.
The market for customers that want to buy new disks but do not want to buy new storage/servers with EDSFF is not a particularly attractive market to target.
What kind of server? Dell’s caddies have adapters, and I’m pretty sure some have screw holes on the bottom so you don’t need an adapter.
They should be cheaper since theres a bunch more space to work with. You don’t have to make the storage chips as small.
Build quality
Relevant video about the problems with high capacity ssds.
Why? We can cram 61TB into a slightly overgrown 2.5” and like half a PB per rack unit.
Because we don’t have to pack it in too much. It’d be higher capacities for cheaper for consumers
Also cooling
It’s not the packaging that costs money or limits us, it’s the chips themselves. If we crammed a 3.5” form factor full of flash storage, it would be far outside the budgets of mortals.
You could make the chips bigger, which should be cheaper to produce.
Nope. Larger chips, lower yields in the fab, more expensive. This is why we have chiplets in our CPUs nowadays. Production cost of chips is superlinear to size.
Then lower the storage density. Making things as small as possible almost always ends up being more expensive.
Not economical. Storage is already done on far larger fab nodes than CPUs and other components. This is a case where higher density actually can be cheaper. ”Mature” nodes are most likely cheaper than the ”ancient” process nodes simply due to age and efficiency. (See also the disaster in the auto industry during covid. Car makers stopped ordering parts made on ancient process nodes, so the nodes were shut down permanently due to cost. After covid, fun times for automakers that had to modernise.)
Go compare prices, new NVMe M.2 will most likely be cheaper than SATA 2.5” per TB. The extra plastic shell, extra shipping volume and SATA-controller is that difference. 3.5” would make it even worse. In the datacenter, we are moving towards ”rulers” with 61TB available now, probably 120TB soon. Now, these are expensive, but the cost per TB is actually not that horrible when compared to consumer drives.
Skill issue
I want them like my 8" floppies!
Just replace then all with flash, along with bluray (or other optical storage) for archival.
Spinning rust is a funny way of describing HDDs, but I immediately get it
My datacenter is 80% nvme at this point. Just naturally. It’s crazy.
Nvme is terrible value for storage density. There is no reason to use it except when you need the speed and low latency.
Just like magnetic tape! Oh wait…
