Holding a 60TB SSD
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
870 words · ~4 min read
0:00
huge shout out to AMD for sponsoring this video from CES 2017 learn more
0:05
about their ryzen processors at the link in the video description so we rolled
0:10
into the Seagate Booth where they were showing off all kinds of stuff including
0:14
their 12 big from l c which supports up to 120 terab of storage over Thunderbolt
0:19
3 with noct to a fans cooling it man those guys have good taste then we kind
0:24
of went come on you guys show us the really cool stuff so we rolled into the
0:29
big room where they're demoing all kinds of stuff and I went straight for this
0:33
this my friends is the as yet unnamed to
0:37
my knowledge 60 terte SSD it's in a 3
0:43
and 1/2 in form factor and exists sort
0:46
of as mostly a technology showcase to
0:49
show how Seagate has been investing in the R&D to address this many flash d
0:56
using some Bridge chip technology that they borrowed from
1:00
sass pretty freaking cool so naturally
1:03
of course the first thing I wanted to do was open it up and have a look inside
1:08
where I found that it's actually a dummy
1:12
unit I have told Seagate that I intend to be the first media Outlet to preview
1:17
this thing once I can get my hands on a working one but uh
1:20
unfortunately this is not this is not that day so you might ask yourself
1:25
what's the anticipated use case of a 60 terb SSD and I actually got some pretty
1:31
interesting answers cuz it's still by the look of things not going to be PCI
1:35
Express based and so they clearly don't
1:38
expect it to be really any faster than what you might get from existing SATA or
1:43
SAS technology and the answer is well look because there's no flash controller
1:49
on the market that has enough data paths
1:52
to address each of those nandy individually or even you know a handful
1:57
of them at a time this drive is going to deal with more latency and less speed
2:01
than one of their high performance drives like say for example this Nitro
2:06
10 Gigabyte per second drive that
2:09
reaches a capacity of 8 terabytes at the
2:13
moment that one's going to be a real product pretty soon no the use case here
2:18
is going to be somewhere in between massive massive arrays of data and
2:23
high-speed PCI Express based SSD caches
2:27
what this will allow a company like Ade
2:30
uh Facebook for example to do is store
2:33
Grandma's pictures that haven't been accessed for over a year on Facebook on
2:38
a storage medium that is fast enough for
2:41
people to be hitting them you know randomly pulling up a few photos at a
2:46
time and high capacity enough that it's
2:49
actually feasible to keep things like Grandma's photos on it so you don't have
2:54
to sit around and wait for a page to load while a hard drive spins up but
2:57
Facebook doesn't have to be spending you know or5 per gig on the storage that they're
3:03
using to store it I heard pricing
3:06
numbers thrown around of like $50,000 a
3:10
drive but uh what I'll say is this if you're the kind of customer who wants
3:14
one of these you're the kind of customer who's not just ordering one so if you
3:18
bulk at that price point then uh you're probably not the intended market and
3:23
pricing could be highly variable depending on what kind of nand flash
3:27
they're putting in the drive which would basically be down to the individual
3:30
customer so at this point in the video a fair question might be lonus do we
3:34
really need a 60 terb SSD and the answer is while I think they are planning to
3:39
productize this this year maybe not
3:42
necessarily immediately but the need is definitely coming so seate projects that
3:48
in 2019 one zetabyte of data will be
3:54
shipped in that calendar year with 1.3
3:57
zettabytes the following year I mean to put that number perspective if we take
4:01
it back down to gigabytes that's more gigabytes than there are grains of sand
4:05
on the entire Earth and this issue of
4:09
more content creation and needing more and more storage is actually going to
4:14
get worse so in that same year in the
4:18
2019 2020 time frame they're expecting
4:22
600 zettabytes of data to be created to
4:25
go with that 1.3 zaby of storage that
4:28
will be shipped so the answer
4:32
is yes we do need it and much sooner
4:35
than you might probably think so a huge
4:38
shout out again to AMD for sponsoring our coverage of CES
4:42
2017 check out the new Vega GPU
4:45
architecture which supports A high bandwidth cache at the link in the video
4:48
description but we're going to make that easy for you it's v.g ve. GA and also be
4:55
sure to check out after the uprising on YouTube which we're going to have Linked
4:59
In the top right corner right there