@JourneymanGeek Just wondering about the storage density of SSDs in the 2.5-inch 15mm enterprise high-density form factor

I suppose you could stack three PCBs for 8TB+ of capacity

I know it's odd to talk about this here in CR, but this is only viable in a enterprise environment where storage density and performance count more than unit price

Well, week swears by 10/15k rust drives :p

Werk even

Do these sorts of ultra-high-density SSDs exist?

We tend to use a load of 2.5 inch SAS drives. Almost no solid state storage at all

Not really. At some point you just go pci-e. 1tb seems to be the current upper bound. My guess is the controllers can only handle so many chips?

sandisk.com/enterprise/sas-ssd/optimus-max-ssd

Ahh. Shows how little I know :p

If this sort of storage density is possible, why aren't there more products of this sort?

Again, enterprises care about cost per GB or IOPS, not cost per unit.

The most I've seen from hard disks in this form factor is 2 TB.

Not that much demand for them?

With V-NAND, 8+ TB can be attained with current technology.

If you wants iops you would go with pci-e tho

Just look at how small the PCBs are in the Samsung SSD 850 PRO.

XD. Not got my paws on one yet. I might in a few paychecks, so that I can move my 840 down to my laptop

Enterprise hardware would use some of the extra space in the 15mm form factor for power fail capacitors, etc. but 8 TB is easily doable with a stack of three PCBs.

@DragonLord: and spare space.

In fact, I think enterprise drives in general have a ton more spare space to handle failure.

If you enlarge the PCB on the 850 PRO and put 8 dies into all packages (AnandTech says 850 PRO 8 dies on half the NAND chips, 4 dies on the other half), 3 TB per board is possible.

The room otherwise used for the controller on additional boards can be used for power-fail capacitors and spare NAND.

assuming the controller can handle more packages/dies

and have performance up to scratch

tweaktown.com/news/38249/…

That's 4TB using 19nm planar NAND.

extremetech.com/computing/…

"First, this drive isn’t particularly fast. SanDisk is claiming a 400MB/s for read and write speeds, with 75K IOPS of read and 15K IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) of write performance. The company’s 800GB Lightning Ultra Gen II SSDs, in contrast, top out at 1,000/600 MB per sec read-write performance and 190K and 100K of read-write IOPS respectively."

So better than spinning rust, but not particularly fast by most standards.

The price for this SSD: About $6,000.

Not surprising, but a huge sum for even an enterprise drive.

8 TB of V-NAND and you're probably looking at a $15,000 to $20,000 device

Yup. Makes more sense to just get a load of smaller drives, a drive bay and a raid controller. Then maybe stick a shitload of 2.5 inch drives into a 5.25 inch bay. I mean, what else are they good for? ;p

You could get a bunch of consumer drives and spare, go SUPER aggressive on spare space...