HOLY $H!T - The biggest SSD I've ever seen!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
2,239 words · ~11 min read
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so this is something that's always bothered me it seems like everyone else
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gets high density high capacity storage whether it's usb thumb drives that have
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been available in capacities as big as you know 256 gigs fairly cheaply for
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years or even up to a terabyte if you want to spring for one of those kingston ones phones are all the way up to 128
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gigs microsd cards i think are available in like 256 gig at this point
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msata ssds i mean we're talking full blown ssds are available in up to one
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terabyte capacities so why is it
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that when it comes to two and a half inch ssds for your full size laptop or
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your desktop we've been stuck at the same damn one terabyte capacity for so
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long with samsung only recently releasing a two terabyte SSD
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so in today's video we're going to be introducing two things number one
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is the largest SSD that i have ever had my hands on this is a
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3.84 terabyte SSD
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and number two is a new format inspired
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by this thing that we're calling holy
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tunnelbear is the easy to use vpn service that lets you browse the
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internet as though you're in one of 20 different countries check out the link
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in the video description to learn more and try it for free
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so i think the appropriate way to start something like this when you got like
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something really cool and interesting and different
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is with one of our classic unboxings so let's go ahead and rip this baby open
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and find out what exactly a 3.84 terabyte
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SSD looks like
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the answer is that aside from the
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horrendous box with the three-year warranty policy
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thing in it clearly designed for people who don't care about the retail packaging
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exactly the same as any other SSD i mean
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okay sure you've got the 3.84 terabyte
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capacity written on there there's probably some other specs like uh
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there's your power consumption so it consumes about 4.1 watts of power when
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it's being written to it's rated at 540 megabytes per second read 480 megabytes
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per second right and can handle 99 000 iops when it comes to random
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4k at a q depth of 32 so that's pretty
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respectable but only about 18 000 iops
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and again that's 4k random at a q depth of 32 when it comes to writes meaning
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that this is definitely a reads optimized drive in terms of the form
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factor if you check it out it's got a standard state of power standard SATA
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data yes my friends everything that's interesting about this drive
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pretty much is under the hood so why don't we open it up
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i don't know if i'll ever stop appreciating the irony of these kits
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being called ifixit when they let me use one because i never use them to fix
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anything i'm usually breaking stuff whatever warranties are for chumps
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anyway and if if i didn't open it up how would i show
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you where all the magic blue smoke gets uh
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gets held while the drive is operating all right so first thing you're going to
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notice a bunch of flash chips actually not that many in the context of how large the
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drive is each one of these is about 480 gigabytes of capacity wrap your freaking
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brain around that and the way they achieve that is in a couple of ways first of all they are tlc flash which
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means that they can store three bits per cell that gives better capacity and
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lower cost per capacity although you do
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trade off some right endurance as well as right performance and then the other
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one the big one is the fact that they are using samsung's 3d v nand with 32
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layers of flash memory stacked instead
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of just relying on moore's law to continue to spread out all of those
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cells so that is what has enabled them to deliver this puppy both at a
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reasonable cost and in a reasonable form
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factor but of course there's more technology on board as well so you're
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gonna find a tantalum capacitor on here that's going to allow the cache to flush
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to the nand chips in the event of a sudden power loss as well as well you
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won't be able to see it but inside samsung's proprietary controller you'll
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find some ecc correction technology as well as wear leveling trim and all that
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good stuff that allows the drive to perform as well as it does and this is
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cool in spite of the fact that it uses tlc
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flash this drive is rated at a 2 million hour mean time between failure and rated
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at 5 600 terabytes of total data written
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and within its sort of useful life span so to put that in perspective that would
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be writing the entire capacity of this drive 3.84 terabytes per day for four
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years every day before you would use up what samsung rates it at
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but enough about that let's go ahead and plug it into a bench and well if nothing
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else find out if it still works basically what i'm doing right now is
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i'm demonstrating exactly how to not benchmark an SSD and i'm going to copy a
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file from my SSD onto a RAM disk so you can see
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it's actually not going that fast and the reason for
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that is that this SSD is not designed
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for large contiguous file transfers it is designed rather
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for something more like the application that we are going to be using it for
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which is multiple users hitting it for something like streaming video all at
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the same time so these ssds are going to act as a read cache for our video
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editors to edit video files off of so they're going to be scrubbing back and
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forth through video files they're going to be asking it for this clip and then
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that clip and then you know moving through the timeline adding things
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removing things and that is the kind of workload that something like this is
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great for where we will be writing video clips to
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it but we'll actually be reading them back many times for every time that we
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write to them all right Linus so a video about a drive the cool things
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about which you can't really demonstrate
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thumbs actually hold on nope there are some things i can demonstrate and one of
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them is the sheer data density of this so just for comparison
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this is Intel 750 series NVMe SSD this
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is a 1.2 terabyte drive and unlike that
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drive what samsung has managed to do here is within that seven millimeter
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form factor so it'll fit in pretty much any laptop or certainly any desktop
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they have delivered 3.84 terabytes and
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that's pretty impressive but you know
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micro sd cards right like they're huge no no this is where it gets really cool
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so this is as good as it gets for a hard drive these days this is almost as good
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as it gets for even three and a half inch hard drives now so to put it in
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perspective this is about half the capacity of this guy right here
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very cool but not actually the coolest thing about it the coolest thing about
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this puppy is the cost per Gigabyte and
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you guys are like oh yeah i knew he was coming to this eventually how much does it cost so this guy right here is going
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to set you back about 2 200
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u.s dollars to which most of you are probably going to go
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excuse me you're going gonna tell me this is a value in terms of cost per
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Gigabyte uh yeah actually because while i
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am not here to tell you guys that you should all run out and buy one of these
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today so you can keep all your steam games on one SSD yay because most games
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loading times are not even any faster on faster storage no no no where the cost
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per Gigabyte benefit comes in is in the sheer density of it like in a data
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center application let's say netflix for example wants to roll out you know racks
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on racks on racks of new servers with you know all the latest hey say for
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example cool movies that you and all your friends want to watch well rather
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than just the cost of this guy to worry about it's only about 55 cents per gig
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which is pretty good especially given like a few
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years ago we were paying over a dollar there's more to worry about than just
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this cost there's the cost of the drive cage it sits in the cost of the SATA
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controller that controls that cage the cost of the CPU that runs that system
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the cost of the actual real estate inside a data center that that server
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has to sit inside so if you can double the amount of storage that again
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someone like a video streaming service can have per drive sled you are gonna
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have a whole lot of folks saying shut up
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and take my money and that is the most impressive thing about this puppy but
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what's the application to you you might ask well right now not a whole lot like
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i said i'm not recommending that you run out and buy one of these although if you
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are a baller then i you could certainly do a lot worse um
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no the applicability to you is that bleeding edge hardware like this always
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starts in the enterprise space and within whether it's two years or ten
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years eventually makes its way down to the consumer level so the fact that it's
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finally started we finally have ssds
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that not only even on a density
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level but also just on a sheer capacity level are catching up to hard drives
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means that that can't be that far away
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so this is cool we've actually got a giveaway to announce we've collaborated
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with rockette makers of gaming peripherals to give away not one not two
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not three not four not five not six not seven but eight of their gaming mice so
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there's a couple of different models and depending on how you get drawn by the
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way you enter at the link to the forum in the video description you can win
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either a cairo which has a 2000 dpi
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sensor up to 4000 stable with their overdrive mode as well as a clean
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ergonomic design a soft touch service and a design that is optimized for both
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right and left-handed use or you could win yourself a kova so that features
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their pro-optic r6 sensor which is a 3500 dpi sensor which can handle up to
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7000 with their overdrive mode it's got their smartcast intuitive button layout
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that doubles the standard m1 and m2 functions it features two levels 16.8
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million multi-color illumination on the scroll wheel and the mouse rim and that
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one is designed to be ambidextrous as well so head over to the link in the
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video description and leave a comment on the video saying hey thanks rocket we
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love these kinds of giveaways you should do more of them because they're freaking
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awesome but don't wait you've only got seven
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days to enter starting from the post date of this video so
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get on it alright guys so thanks for watching this
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first episode of holy sh it's just a
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cool product let us know if you like this format it's kind of similar to our
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old unboxing format but we're really going to stay focused on stuff that
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really is sort of out of this world so let us know if you want to see more of
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it if you dislike the video though hit the dislike button if you liked it hit
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like if you really liked it get subscribed maybe even consider
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contributing by using our amazon affiliate code to buy stuff there's
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instructions for how to do that up there buying a cool shirt like this one or even just giving us a contribution
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through our form you get a cool little contributor badge and i think that
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pretty much wraps it up so thanks again for watching oh and if you're looking
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for something else to watch don't miss any of our awesome ces 2015 coverage
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we're gonna have some highlights maybe also linked up there and like a playlist
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or something like that lots of cool stuff at the show this year which if
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you're watching this video on vessel won't make any sense because you'll have
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watched this before our ces coverage starts but don't worry too much about that