back to article Anyone fancy testing the 'unlimited' drive writes claim on Nimbus Data's 100TB whopper SSD?

Nimbus Data has introduced its 100TB ExaDrive DC series SSD, the highest-capacity flash drive available. It has some unusual characteristics but, first, let's show its size advantage by checking out the competition: Toshiba PM5: 30.72TB, 2.5-inch case, 12 Gbit/s SAS interface, 1, 3, 5 and 10 drive writes per day (DWPD) …

  1. Jamie Jones Silver badge
    Happy

    "Anyone fancy testing the 'unlimited' drive writes claim on Nimbus Data's 100TB whopper SSD?"

    Yes, sure, send me a couple. You have my address.

    1. Shadow Systems

      Do I want to test a 100TiB drive?

      FUCK YES! Gimmiegimmiegimmie!

      *Cough*

      Ummm... errr... I meant to say "Yes please. I would be happy to test it for you. Exhaustively, over a period of decades."

      Now shut up & GIMMIE! =-D

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Do I want to test a 100TiB drive?

        FUCK YES! Gimmiegimmiegimmie!

        How many hours of "adult content" do you have if you want one of these?

        By my reckoning that's about 50,000 hours of skin-flicks, and if you watched a full eight hours a day, it'd be the year 2035 before you'd finished watching.

        1. Shadow Systems

          At LedSwinger...

          It's not *ALL* porn, I swear! (Mumbles "I may have missed deleting one of the other files.") =-)p

        2. Chemical Bob
          Happy

          Re: Do I want to test a 100TiB drive?

          "How many hours of "adult content" do you have if you want one of these?"

          All of it...

        3. ptbbot

          Re: Do I want to test a 100TiB drive?

          "it'd be the year 2035 before you'd finished watching." - You mean another word beginning with w, surely?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Speed "...online transaction processing-type applications are not for this drive..."

    Speed "indicates that online transaction processing-type applications are not for this drive."

    Actually, once a given transaction is completed and its data set calms down and is ready for archiving (after about a minute), then the associated data can be moved to slower drives. You'd think that such an system array could be 99.9% slow drives and 0.1% ultra fast drives to ensure that the active transactions are kept on non-volatile storage and properly journaled at every step.

    Hopefully they're not dealing with 100TB of transactions every few minutes.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Deep storage?

    Is that an underground data centre, or what happens when we have had enough of these bullshit terms and rammed a usb stick up their arse?

  4. springsmarty

    If my math is right, at 500 MB/s for a 100TB drive, the fastest you can feed it is less than half a drive write per day. If the flash can handle even one drive write per day, then you will never exceed that. So it really is unlimited.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Trollface

      Even better.

      They won't be around when it fails at infinity -1 days use!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Reality check

    "The same ExaDrive-sourced capacity [100PB] would need one rack, 990 drives and draw about 16kW"

    These are 3.5" drives, according to the article. How exactly are they planning to fit 990 of them into a single rack?

    Let's be very optimistic and say there is 48U usable space in the rack (no power distribution, no networking) so you can fit 12 x 4U chassis in there. They still need to fit 83 x 3.5" drives per chassis.

    Even the Backblaze storage pod v6 only does 60, with disk utterly jammed in - and it overhangs the end of the rack by over 4 inches.

    And the cost... well let's just not go there :-)

    1. CheesyTheClown

      Re: Reality check

      Agreed... I was also considering the power footprints. On a drive that takes about 40 hours to read completely, I was thinking that the drive has no purpose other than cold object storage. That being said, 16KW seems a bit silly. Why the hell would anyone consider keeping all these drives powered at all times? If they optimized the boot performance of the drive, it should be possible to leave these drives powered down except when needed. As the data gets older, it seems that data can stay offline for possibly months or years at a time. If there are 60 of these in a single 4U enclosure, most hyper scale companies couldn’t generate 4U of data a year. 6PB is actually quite a lot. Of course, these would be mirrored at least three ways in different locations.

      But in the end, 16KW to power a rack... possibly for years at a time seems like a really bad idea. It’s not really a valuable measurement to compare a “wasting power” footprint.

      1. Alan Brown Silver badge

        Re: Reality check

        "Why the hell would anyone consider keeping all these drives powered at all times?"

        They wouldn't. They'd move to MAID mode and drop that by about 70%

    2. chris 143

      Re: Reality check

      12 X 3.5" in 1U exists and supermicro make 90 drives in 4U options.

      https://www.supermicro.nl/products/system/1U/6019/SSG-6019P-ACR12L.cfm

      https://www.supermicro.nl/products/system/4U/6048/SSG-6048R-E1CR90L.cfm

      Probably have to use a 1200mm deep rack though

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Reality check

        Thanks for the pointer to the 4U SM box.

        At 970mm deep (compared to 853mm for the Backblaze) it will indeed need a pretty hefty rack. And it comes with quad 1000W PSUs...

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      990 drives per rack

      A 7U module would allow for front-loading 51 drives (3x17) and a rack could hold 6 of them, which is 306 drives. However, other than making hot swap difficult there's nothing stopping you from using the full rack depth, which would allow 1836 drives in a standard 42U one meter deep rack.

      OK, you probably need a few bays for electronics to connect to all those drives, but there's plenty of room to pack them a little less than maximally tight and still have room for backplane, controllers and fans, and reach 990 without maximal packing density. Not suggesting its a good idea, but its possible.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Reality check

      This 4U90 storage server from Supermicro will do it!

      https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/6048/SSG-6048R-E1CR90L.cfm

    5. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: Reality check

      "These are 3.5" drives, according to the article. How exactly are they planning to fit 990 of them into a single rack?"

      1: How deep is your rack?

      2: How wide is your rack?

      I have 1.2 metre deep Netshelters at the moment and I can't be the only one who remembers 1.6metre deep PR1ME cabinets.

      19 inches isn't the only width you can get - 22 and 26" are also available.

      Even at 4U 19" - see https://www.ixsystems.com/ix-server-family/server-jbod-enclosures/ and the ix4090jtl

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Funny claim

    Well, at 500 MB/s one gets 1800 GB/h and just 43.2 TB/d. So it isn't all that hard to claim unlimited drive writes per day...

  7. Jason Bloomberg Silver badge

    "unlimited write endurance"

    Does that include filling the drive up, repeatedly rewriting just a single block in an attempt to wear that out?

    1. chris 143

      Re: "unlimited write endurance"

      The controllers wear levelling should attempt at least to limit the damage

  8. Throatwarbler Mangrove Silver badge
    Go

    Where's your bottleneck?

    Here's the thing about these ultra high-speed drives . . . what are you putting them in? If it's a standard controller-based array, the controller will run out of performance before your drives do, so an array of lower-speed drives will actually serve most workloads just fine. If you're using NVMeOF, that may be a different story, but for a lot of workloads, this drive will be perfectly adequate and massively superior to old-school spinning rust.

    1. hellwig

      Re: Where's your bottleneck?

      These drives seem perfect for online consumer backups. Assuming the price per GB to run these is cheaper than HDDs (energy costs, space, cooling, etc...), it seems like a perfect fit.

      Companies like backblaze don't care about speed, just cost and durability.

    2. Alan Brown Silver badge

      Re: Where's your bottleneck?

      " If it's a standard controller-based array, the controller will run out of performance before your drives do"

      if you're going to spend the money to attack this, then you're better off building a ZFS based system, not something based on a RAID controller.

  9. Mayday

    Arrays

    Bear in mind these things wont be sitting in some rack or some server somewhere waiting to be filled before moving onto the next one. They would be in an array where the controller will manage redundancy and writing to multiple SSDs at once, so your "write speed" for the array would exceed the 500MB/s.

    This is assuming (which is unlikely) that all the SSDs in the array are all of this type and faster discs aren't sitting in front caching before it writes to the slower discs.

    PS give me one (just one) to test. My internet speed at home wont be able to write at 500MB/s so no bottlenecks on the SSD.

  10. chris 143

    SATA ssd

    Those performance numbers are completely reasonable for a SATA ssd.

    The ssds you've pull performance figures from are all nvme.

    1. phuzz Silver badge

      Re: SATA ssd

      The SSDs in the article are all either SAS or SATA, no NVMe. From TFA:

      Toshiba PM5: 30.72TB, 2.5-inch case, 12 Gbit/s SAS interface

      Micron 5100, 5200 Eco: 7.68TB, 2.5-inch case, SATA 6gig interface

      Samsung PM1643: 30.72TB, 2.5-inch format, 12 Gbit/s SAS

  11. J. R. Hartley

    30TB?

    Those are rookie numbers.

    1. Danny 2

      Re: 30TB?

      Truth? You can't backup the truth!

  12. Area52

    Small Loop

    Put the drive into a write/read loop over a 100mb area. Write that one area over and over an over again. Such would be a realistic actual use condition. at 500mb/s it would be 5 writes per second, 300/minute, 18,000 per hour, 432,000 per day, 3,024,000 writes in a week..... See how long the drive survives in this test.

    1. Charles 9

      Re: Small Loop

      Aren't you overlooking the wear leveling built into SSD's these days? They'll make sure you don't hit the same cells over an over again.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Does Tom the CEO still handle support?

    asking for a friend...

    1. Smoking Gun

      Re: Does Tom the CEO still handle support?

      Haha it's funny because it's true. I honesty did not know what to make of it, a hands on CEO or a 2 man band, because Brittany worked the twitter account.

  14. Piro Silver badge

    SATA 6Gbps? They're having a laugh, aren't they?

  15. Roj Blake Silver badge

    Deep Storage chief scientist Howard Marks

    It's good to see that Mr Nice has managed to go straight at last.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Coat

      Re: Deep Storage chief scientist Howard Marks

      It's good to see that Mr Nice has managed to go straight at last.

      And from the other side. Presumably through a storage medium.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    No Problem

    "Anyone fancy testing the 'unlimited' drive writes claim on Nimbus Data's 100TB whopper SSD"

    Whats that, a couple of Windows patches a month?

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    which is unusual as the majority if SSDs are skewed

    s/if/of

  18. Andy The Hat Silver badge

    size isn't everything ...

    Comparing a 100Pb rack an saying Sammy's offering would require 6x45U racks may be true but they're 2.5" units, how big is the equivalent Nimbus racking based on 3.5" units, perhaps half the size? Certainly not one third as inferred by simple "capacity per unit whilst ignoring the physical size" calculation ...

  19. earl grey
    Trollface

    is it April 1st?

    I really need to see the price before i commit to a rack of these for my educational materials.

  20. WillConquer

    Testing the Nimbus Data's 100TB SSR

    I would like to test, ad nauseum, the Nimbus Data's 100TB SSD; I think it would be necessary to test the write/read process in an optimised, sequential process (optimised against the operational characteristics of this drive) - and over the whole 'surface' of this drive.

    It could then be said that - at the completion of each sequential cycle, 'n' number of write/reads had occurred on every write/read area of the storage (where 'n' is the number of sequential cycles)...

    Keeping the drive going 24/7 for an agreed number of sequencial cycles to emulate the average number of power downs (after, say a number of trillion, quadrillion, quintillion write/reads or sequential cycles - could also give anothet realistic metric - until the drive fails (if it fails)...

    etc., etc..

    William

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