My manager ordered four “4TB” external SSDs from AliExpress a few weeks back. He paid £60 total for them, delivered.
My Sus alarm started clanging, so I grabbed one off him and ran some tests on it.
After a couple of days of the tests chuntering along, I ended up reasonably convinced that they’re - at most - 40GB. And even at that capacity they’re useless, transferring at around 10MB/s
I know right. Why is this not a thing already? I mean I understand the various U.2, U.3, and EDSFF are great for high density data center installs. We have a 1U box in production that could be as high as 1 PB given current densities with E1.L drives but that’s enterprise level stuff. I just want a huge 3.5 SSD I could put in these pro-consumer level NAS boxes or maybe even one I could build myself for my home lab.
Well, 3.5" SSDs are certainly possible, but 2.5" (or in fact m.2) might just be a better form factor for SSDs. The thing is, an SSD is just a bunch of chips on a PCB, so they really don’t need the extra height afforded to them by a 3.5" bay.
You could probably fit 2 pcbs one on top of the other within a 3.5" drive, but that would probably need a third PCB to connect the two which would be more complicated to manufacture and be worse for cooling than using two individual 3.5" or m.2 cards.
Also, for a bunch of reasons smaller is usually better. Generally, it tends to be cheaper to use a few large capacity chips on a small board than it is to use a lot of lower capacity chips on a larger board. Of course fewer parts also means fewer potential points of failure, so better for quality control. And again, smaller cards are better for case airflow and cooling.
Basically, smaller form factors are probably just better in this case. 3.5" drive bays were designed with more complicated mechanical drives in mind, and given how nand flash memory works, they don’t make as much sense for SSDs.
CAN WE PLEASE JUST GET 3.5" SSDS. PLEASE
Best I can do is a 3.5’’ inch SATA to USB adapter case with one of these tiny SSDs glued in
Don’t forget to include the hacked controller firmware that reports the drive size as triple what it actually is.
My manager ordered four “4TB” external SSDs from AliExpress a few weeks back. He paid £60 total for them, delivered.
My Sus alarm started clanging, so I grabbed one off him and ran some tests on it.
After a couple of days of the tests chuntering along, I ended up reasonably convinced that they’re - at most - 40GB. And even at that capacity they’re useless, transferring at around 10MB/s
Yeah, in my last IT job I tried to get my manager to run the big purchases by me first. Eventually he started to see why.
(He was a good manager, just not a huge hardware nerd)
Triple? That’d rookie numbers.
Aren’t a lot of the 2.5" ones already empty space?
How big, and how expensive, would a 3.5" SSD be, if it actually filled enough of the space with NAND chips for the form factor to be warranted?
Well, Kioxia sells a 30TB 2.5in SSD right now for about $5k. I’m sure they could make a 60+TB SSD by just stacking 2 of them in a 3.5in case.
I feel like heat would start to become a serious issue at that point.
Put a fan in it, you have space
I know right. Why is this not a thing already? I mean I understand the various U.2, U.3, and EDSFF are great for high density data center installs. We have a 1U box in production that could be as high as 1 PB given current densities with E1.L drives but that’s enterprise level stuff. I just want a huge 3.5 SSD I could put in these pro-consumer level NAS boxes or maybe even one I could build myself for my home lab.
Thru exist but they’re all several hundred dollars and 480 GB for some reason.
I have a few 960GB (ish? can’t remember exact size) 2.5in at work that are almost useless.
Well, 3.5" SSDs are certainly possible, but 2.5" (or in fact m.2) might just be a better form factor for SSDs. The thing is, an SSD is just a bunch of chips on a PCB, so they really don’t need the extra height afforded to them by a 3.5" bay.
You could probably fit 2 pcbs one on top of the other within a 3.5" drive, but that would probably need a third PCB to connect the two which would be more complicated to manufacture and be worse for cooling than using two individual 3.5" or m.2 cards.
Also, for a bunch of reasons smaller is usually better. Generally, it tends to be cheaper to use a few large capacity chips on a small board than it is to use a lot of lower capacity chips on a larger board. Of course fewer parts also means fewer potential points of failure, so better for quality control. And again, smaller cards are better for case airflow and cooling.
Yeah, why aren’t there any?
There are: https://nimbusdata.com/products/exadrive/specifications/
They are just not listed in shops for poor people. (joking)
64TB and 100TB, niiiice
I just addressed that in a post above yours.
https://lemmy.world/comment/17434700
Basically, smaller form factors are probably just better in this case. 3.5" drive bays were designed with more complicated mechanical drives in mind, and given how nand flash memory works, they don’t make as much sense for SSDs.