In my hand is 16 terabytes of mechanical
storage. And the crazy part is that's not even cutting edge. WD just announced
18 and 20 terbte hard drives. Both of
which get absolutely wrecked. Buy this.
This is the 100 terabyte aptly named Exa
Drive from Nimbus Data. I have been
waiting literally months to get my hands
on the highest capacity SSD on the
planet. Welcome to a very exciting
installment of Holy.
It's worth $40,000.
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How bad is my hair right now? It's fine. The first thing you'll notice about the
exive DC series is the size. It uses the
same 3 and 1/2 in form factor as a typical desktop mechanical hard drive.
By comparison, anything from uh a
desktop SSD like this one all the way up to a highcapacity enterprisegrade SSD
like this 7.68 TB one from Micron uses
the 2 and 1/2 in form factor which back in the days when mechanical drives ruled
the roost was only really used for laptops. It does this for a couple of
reasons. Number one is that the Exad drive is really considered by the
manufacturer to be more of a competitor for hard drives than it is for, you
know, high performance SSDs like this PCI Express one over here from Liquid.
Reason number two is this is just great.
Look at this. They just need all that space. This has
to be one of the most densely packed
products that I have ever seen. It's
nothing but floor to ceiling wallto-wall
nan flash inside the entire enclosure. It's actually even heavy. I mean, most
SSDs like they kind of don't really weigh anything. And if they do, it's
just because they're using like a a big thick chassis so that it feels quality
or whatever. This is not that far off the weight of an actual hard drive. But
I guess that's just what it takes to get 100 terab of storage into a 3 and 1/2 in
drive. To put that capacity in the appropriate context for y'all, okay?
Like what's a what's a PC game that takes up an unfathomable amount of
storage? Call of Duty War Zone. You could have 500 copies of War Zone on
this drive. I mean, not quite, cuz it's going to be closer to like, you know, 90
terabytes by the time you actually formatted an account for overhead.
Obviously, I was being facitious just there. If you actually had 100 terab of
game data, it would be way more economical to store it on a hard drive
with a modestly sized solid state cache sitting in front of it. thing is a
single user could never need low latency
access to such an enormous and random
distribution of data that they would need the entire library to be stored on
solid state. Guys, you can only play one
game at once, right? Well, except that
time we played two games at once, but still even two. No justification for
this. So, okay, let's play around with
it, shall we? I've actually got autodisk benchmark running right now and you can
see these numbers are
not that impressive.
Yep. At 512 bytes, we're looking at 9
megabytes a second writes and 13.81
megabytes a second reads. And in fact, getting all the way up to 1 2 and 4
megabyte transfers, we are still sitting in the 300 to 450
mgabytes a second range. So,
wow. Considering that this is an SSD,
that is not super fast. But but but but
it's really big. So in the data center,
the advantages of an approach like this are very real. The biggest one is
unrivaled storage density. A Storinator XL like we used in our most recent
Pabyte project holds 60 of these standard 3 and 1/2 in drives. Now with
the 16 TBTE drives that we're using today, one of those units gives us about
1 pabyte of RAW space in a 4U chassis.
That's about 75 pabytes of accessible
space after accounting for RAID redundancy and other ZFS overhead. By
comparison, one of those chassis full of these puppies gives us six pabytes of
raw capacity and over 5 pabytes of
usable capacity as long as we've got a
cool $2.4 million for the drives alone.
But don't let that price fool you into thinking that there's no market for
these things. Increasing your storage density by 5 to 6x has some very real
advantages. Starting with the fact that you will need fewer servers to plug them
into. Now, in the context of $2.5
million worth of drives, the 10 grand or
so that you might save per server box might not sound like a big advantage.
But this is the but wait there's more moment. Fewer servers also means less
expensive data center rack space and less rack space means less cooling. Each
of these sucks back about 8 watts while idle and 16 watts while active. That's
16 watts. That's the reason we actually had this fan on here while we were
running benchmarks. Possibly the biggest possible savings is that depending on
what kind of software you're running, enterprise licensing, which can be
thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year, is often handled on a
per server or per CPU socket basis.
Meaning that if you can consolidate your server count from five down to one over
a span of 5 years or more, those recurring costs could end up eating a
lot of the savings that you would get by going with hard drives. Not to mention
that the performance of an all SSD setup
versus all hard drives is going to be in another league, even if that's not that
impressive for a modern SSD. Now, as I
mentioned before, a lot of that ground could be made up with a higher speed SSD
tier sitting in front of your spinning rust. But if you're working with, I
don't know, let's say, uh, a gigantic scientific data set where you have no
way of predicting what's going to be accessed next, an all SSD setup will
have a latency advantage, which can even help improve CPU utilization efficiency
because the system will spend less time waiting around for a slow storage
subsystem. It can even help with reliability. One of the scariest parts
of any server maintenance project is rebuilding a failed or degraded drive in
a RAID array. And this is especially true with mechanical drives. These
things have reached the point where their capacities are so high and the
speeds that you can access them at are so low that the wear and tear on them
during a rebuild increases the odds of a subsequent failure during the rebuild to
the point where it is not trivial. Well,
an exad drive like any SSD has no moving
parts. It has higher random performance and it's got higher sustained speeds
reducing the time for these risky operations.
So, that all sounds great, but there are
definitely some gotchas. And I mean, aside from the price, Nimbus Data here,
I've actually got their data sheet right here. Nimbus Data boasts a fiveyear
warranty with unlimited drive rights per
day. Wow. How on earth are they doing that? Unlimited, my friends. Are they
using some kind of special flash that
that doesn't wear out? Is it magic SSDs?
No. No, it's not. So, uh, whatever. This
right here is a SATA interface, meaning that it's limited to 6 Gbit per second.
By contrast, this right here is a liquid
honey badger capable of over 50 times
that speed. And like that's not necessarily a bad thing here. I mean,
the honey badger is a very different product. It takes up a PCI Express 16x
Gen 4 slot and can't reach nearly the capacity that an Exo drive can. All it
means is that practically speaking, they can offer an unlimited write warranty on
this thing because you cannot write data to it fast enough over that interface to
wear out the 100 terabytes of NAND in 5
years. It actually takes over 2 days of
continuous sequential data writing to it in order to fill it up. Now, if you guys
are anything like me, this is the part of this video you were waiting for. Not
all this theoretical monkey business and all that nonsense. Lionus, when are you
going to open the thing up and show us how it ticks
right now? Now, it's not strictly speaking part of our loan agreement for
this drive to open it up. But the way that I see it, they had to know who they
were dealing with. Okay, so Oh, wow. Not all the screws are
the same. Better keep track of where those go. And there's just something
about unlimited power.
And besides, isn't it just delightfully naughty to void the warranty on a
$40,000 product like that? Ready?
Oh, interesting. Very interesting. See
how that's kind of glossy on there like that? I thought that that might just be
because there was some leftover residue from like a thermal pad or something.
But there isn't. See, look. There's
nothing on the underside of the enclosure. So, what this probably is, this is a
strategy I've seen before, is
um a method of wiping off the markings
from these chips and then they've actually glued the outside of it to make
it more difficult to reverse engineer the product.
Very clever, Nimbus data. Very clever
indeed. These look like standard SATA connectors here. And then some kind of
power interface that I'm unfortunately not familiar with on each of these
daughter boards. Requires quite a bit of
stress on these posts here to pop these additional daughter boards up. So, okay,
we'll take off the second one. Each of these is 25
terab. Isn't that crazy?
Okay. I don't like the strain that this is putting on this thing here. Is there
a way to pop those posts out or something? Don't think of it in terms of
how much money it's worth. Think of it in terms of the people need to see it.
Just need to just pop.
Come on. Come on. There we go. Okay. So,
even though they're using what looks like um the same connector as like a U.2
two NVMe drive here. You can actually
see right on their PCB custom pin out do
not insert SFF8639 cable
backplane. This is what splits out to
this. So here's all the SATA interfaces for the individual 25 TBTE uh kind of
slices. Now, this one I'm pretty sure it would
be fairly rude of me to show because compared to the slices, this seems to be
where the actual brains is. But I'm going to look at it. Yep, we're looking
at an Altera FPGA.
Looks like some memory. There is some
very custom logic being done here. That's a That's not a cheap processor. I
figured out how they assemble it, Brandon. These posts, they unscrew.
There's absolutely no reason whatsoever to uh put all that strain on them. Wh
Hey, there it goes. Uh I don't remember what order they were in, so um hopefully
that doesn't matter. But yeah, you just put the sicey slices on there. 10 out of
10 slicy. I mean, imagine it. Okay, adding 25
terabytes of storage to your computer is that easy. You just do it four times and
bam, 100 terabytes. And then I can just screw this in into the bottom there. No
problem. I'm sweating right now from taking this
thing apart. See, I play it off like I'm like, "Yeah,
yeah, you know, whatever." It's like, "Yeah, whatever." It's like SSD or whatever. But like,
I do not want to break this. I'm pretty sure we're on the hook for it if I do.
All right, moment of truth, then. Hey, there's a bunch of activity LEDs. I
didn't actually notice those before. Oh, you know what? I bet if I uh I bet if I
put them together in the wrong order, they probably need to at least be reformatted.
I don't know what kind of logic that FPGA is programmed with, though. Like, I
don't Maybe it's smart enough to just put it back together. It definitely
don't see the capacity. D is not accessible. Let's just give it a quick
reboot. I think this was right. Oh, look at
that. We got a disc checking prompt. It's showing up in disk management. It's
got the full capacity. What if we just delete the volume? H. Okay. Unallocated.
New simple volume. Hey. Hey. Hold on.
This all this all looks pretty normal. Let's do a quick format here. Oh, Jake
did warn me. It takes a spicy minute to format. The system cannot find the file
specified. Uh, that's not a great sign. Well, I guess they're going to have to
sort out which order the things go on in. Bye.
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We're going to have that linked below. Are you roll? You're rolling. Yes.
Autodisk benchmark. Hold on. Dive start.
Oh, thank goodness it's working. Okay. I had the two top ones swapped. I I just
totally brain farted and I put the I put the wrong ones in that wrong order. It's
working. Everything's good. Uh, right. We can shoot the thumbnail now.