Samsung To Offers 8TB PM883 6Gbps SATA SSD and 16Gb-64GB DDR4 RDIMM

Is there a reason they can't put these in the 3.5" form factor?
Surely, if they have enough room to put the chips in, they can make 4 times this size at least.
I don't understand why everyone thinks we all have to be 2.5".

 

When it comes to big data it is critical to have a huge number of simultaneous channels connecting you to your data. You can achieve far more throughput connecting to 4 2.5 inch SATA/SAS SSDs than 1 larger (physical and capacity) 3.5 inch SSD over a single SATA/SAS port.

You are absolutely correct that a 3.5 inch drive could have 4 times the capacity of a 2.5 inch drive but accessing the data would be ~4 times slower.

 

I understand what you're saying but it doesn't add up. There are RAID systems that have supported 4+ 3.5 inch drives for a long time now, and many of them are still in use. In other words, there shouldn't be anything preventing companies from having the option of double-capacity 3.5 inch SSDs, that they maybe could use with their existing hardware. In other words, there is no such restriction of "you can either have 4x 2.5 inch drives or 2x 3.5 inch drives". Considering how much everything is shrinking nowadays, I'm sure mainframes are not struggling to find space. In fact, having 8x 2.5 inch drives would likely take up more space than 4x 2.5 inch drives, when you consider the systems operating them.

It's not like companies can't make both form factors. After all, hard drives have ranged from 1.8 inch drives to 5.25 inch, maybe even larger (for x86-based computers).

 

Look at the form factor of modern servers. The drive bays are vertical and 2.5 inch, it makes for very compact and fast storage.

The shrinking you speak of is very real but is still being outpaced by the demand for parallel access. SATA/SAS had its bandwidth maxed out by NAND so increasing capacity alone is not giving customers what they need.

If you switched from a NAS/DAS/SAN with 8 8TB 3.5 inch HDDs to 16 8TB 2.5 inch SSDs VS 8 16TB 3.5 inch SSDs you get the same capacity increase either way but with double the drives you could potentially have double the speed.

The bolded part in particular is very much not true. Big data and AI demand is outpacing technological progress by a huge margin currently.

 

Agreed, but the point ultimately remains the same: 3.5 inch drives are more space efficient when doubling your capacity. If doubling your capacity is not a primary objective, then stick with 2.5 inch drives. Again - there's no reason both can't exist.

It's not unanimously true, but it still applies in a lot of cases. You do have a valid point about big data, but AI is relatively niche. AI is a growing market but the vast majority of businesses do not have mainframes dedicated to it, at least not to the degree that universities or companies like Google are interested in.

 

Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if there were giant 3.5 inch SSDs, I could pair a 16TB SATA SSD with a 900P cache drive and have virtually unlimited blazing storage.

it just seems that the industry as a whole is not interested in 3.5 inch SSDs.

Its more than a little annoying that cases still come with like 50 3.5 inch bays, I have not used one (other than to install a 3.5 -> 2.5 adapter) in a single build for about 2 years now.

Even the U.2 drive in my last build is still 2.5 inch form factor.