External 8 TB SSDs before internal?

[Hardcore Games]

8TB SSD demand is low due to very high cost per MB/GB/TB.

Today 4TB M.2 SSD prices are starting to segment capacity and speed grades as commodity NAND prices fall.. Crucial P3 are $305 for 4TB at NewEgg in Canada while the P3 plus is $40 more for the same capacity suggesting the parts price differential is now getting narrower.

i own many laptops and all use M.2 NVMe SSD so I am constantly looking at prices and performance. Performance I like is idle power and endurance in addition to speed and capacity.

I am thinking of using my old P52 which has dual M.2 slots to test real endurance in SSD products. Could be eye opening..

 

[iameatingjam]

I'm wondering if there's some kind of cartel agreement with HDD drive makers, to divide the consumer space between small SSD drives and larger HDD disks?

There have been some news several times in the past years on how we're on the brink of SSD drive capacity expansion, latest in the past month about WD with titles like "SSDs are about to become massive, thanks to WD", but when you read the article, it's all about some undefined future...

SSDs are about to become massive, thanks to WD

I always thought it was just the nature of the technology that made things turn out like that.

SSDs are good at going fast. HDDs are good at storing lots of data. Once they were both in the ecosystem, ssds kept getting faster, a lot faster than they were getting bigger. HDDs just kept getting bigger and if there's been any speed improvements it hasn't been much.

I'm honestly kind of curious what would have happened if HDDS kept trying to go faster rather than (or in addition to) getting bigger. In say some alternate reality where ssds never come to be.

(or maybe in that reality we all use intel optane.... JK.)

 

[chrcoluk]

What's with the latest push for ultra expensive external 8 TB SSDs, before we even got internal consumer 8 TB nVME SSDs?

Besides usual SSD makers there's also bunch of no name makers with seemingly legit products, and apparently tons of scammer products even on legit shops that offer 8 TB, but are much smaller drives, disguised as 8 TB!

Why do all these drives look and are marketed as "lifestyle" products, aimed at wealthy content creators that want to move their content from their ultra expensive laptop to ultra expensive tablet?

There's almost no reviews on usual PC tech sites, there are some on more general tech sites?

There's:


Samsung Portable SSD T5 EVO USB 3.2 Gen 1 for $1060

SanDisk - 8TB Desk Drive USB Type-C Desktop External SSD for $680

Glyph 8TB Atom PRO Portable Thunderbolt 3 NVMe SSD for $1400

VectoTech 8TB External SSD USB-C Portable Solid State Drive (USB 3.1 Gen 2) for $620

Teamgroup M200 8TB (eventually)

...

Maybe the external market is less price sensitive? It also could be used for games consoles as well so a bigger market.

 

[ypsylon]

SATA consumer segment is dead and nobody invest time into it. I wouldn't count on many more consumer 8TB SATA SSDs (especially not QLC variety) coming to market. Enterprise SATA is ludicrously expensive and unless you're forced to, nobody buys it. Kind of surprised nobody is creating M.2 22110 for consumers where you have enough space for 8TB without additional capacitors and PLP circuitry known from server grade drives. Couple existing M.2 8TB are ludicrously expensive because of thermal constraints in stupidly limited 2280 and very low volume production.

Premise that there are no internal 8TB drives which consumers can use is not entirely true. All you need is simple PCIe adapter and U.2/U.3 cable. There is plenty of 7.68TB enterprise drives which are much, much better devices and if you not pushing for bleeding edge drives you can easily find drives like Micron 7400 Pro. It's older NAND, but still plenty fast compared to Micron 7450 Pro. Price difference (with VAT and stuff) is 550 $. Right now 7400Pro 7.68 cost equivalent of 825$ while top of the line Gen 4 7450 Pro is 1375$. There is microscopic difference in Write IOPS between generations, but both are gen 4 and rock solid. Sadly top of the line enterprise drives (like 7450 or 9400) going up and up and up every month. Stupid AI fad shows no signs of abating.

If you fish long enough you can find older Gen3 drives for peanuts. Seriously don't need even gen4 if you will put games of store movies there. I have still very limited access to Micron 9300 Pro 7.68TB. These are ~900$ Gen3, but those are full fat server stuff 3600 R/W. Basically unless DOA, it's indestructible for storage in consumer workload/rendering workstation. Excellent for backup pooled storage with tons of writes every day.

Forgive me if my Micron fanboyism is too obvious, but I respect companies which don't lock us, little folks, from software and firmware updates behind some corporate wholesale BS (most do including Samsung, WD or Kioxia).

 

[DaemonForce]

Imagine, from 64 GB to 8.000 GB in 10 years, that's 62% growth every year, we could be at:

2020: 13TB
2021: 21TB
2022: 34TB
2023: 55TB
2024: 89TB
2025: 144TB

You think we could get 1/10 of that in the next year, please?

I was in a tough spot filling up 4.9TB on my largest volume so in Q4 2021 I went straight for the jugular:

Internal 16TB volume that can be wired to any computer with SATA II and newer without performance penalty.
Did the math for it and decided to shuck it into the Athlon 64 box that goes BRRRR in the side of my desk.
The same one that handles all of the iSCSI traffic for my Steam and Epic libraries which should be well provisioned for the life of the disk.
Sure the writes are kinda junk and that's a direct consequence of how I have these technologies arranged. The reads are fast af boi. ✔

People are not lugging around 8TB external drives and even if they are, there's no chance it's anywhere near the importance of just keeping it in a server.
I don't care how big the ZIP or language models have become, it's just not mission critical or convenient no matter how many ways you slice it.

This right here. Even 8TB HDD's are not that common, and it's not consumers that drive the need for that kind of storage.

I'm not so sure about that one. Sure some of us have some data hoarder behaviors but some of us prefer to keep our media in a convenient central or highly accessible environment. The way every other product and service is going through some inexplicable predatory encroachment has people taking precautions or outright doom spending to fix whatever lingering insecurities they have about data.

For my largest volume I made the jump from 4.9TB to 16TB.
Am I really in need of 16TB when I maybe accumulate ~200GB of real world archive stuff per year? No.
Will I have to go through this process in the near to medium term? Noooooo.
Is this the kind of technology that will eliminate existing capacity problems, bottlenecks and/or other storage issues? Yes. Bigger storage, more cache, better thermals and less noise = win.
If some kind of emergency were to happen, would I have the chance of recovering the volume in another computer? Yes.
Is it likely to outlive the other volumes and take over their roles? Hell yes.

8TB SSD demand is low due to very high cost per MB/GB/TB.

If 8TB becomes the new cost effective volume to breathe new life into my X570 system after EOL then I'll probably pick up a pair of them for RAID 0.
There's no situation where I'll ever need that much FAST onboard storage but it's fun to think about.
Maybe I could shuck one into a PCI-E x1 card and use them in other computers too.
The future is amazing.

 

[Hardcore Games]

I amusing 2TB NVMe SSD in my machines until 4TB come down more and then I might migrate but my Lenovo P52 has dual M.2 slots so it gets the hand me down from other machine upgrades.

The WD SN580 is rather interesting as it is TLC so it has speed and better endurance

 

[A Computer Guy]

I was in a tough spot filling up 4.9TB on my largest volume so in Q4 2021 I went straight for the jugular:

View attachment 359548

Internal 16TB volume that can be wired to any computer with SATA II and newer without performance penalty.
Did the math for it and decided to shuck it into the Athlon 64 box that goes BRRRR in the side of my desk.
The same one that handles all of the iSCSI traffic for my Steam and Epic libraries which should be well provisioned for the life of the disk.
Sure the writes are kinda junk and that's a direct consequence of how I have these technologies arranged. The reads are fast af boi. ✔

People are not lugging around 8TB external drives and even if they are, there's no chance it's anywhere near the importance of just keeping it in a server.
I don't care how big the ZIP or language models have become, it's just not mission critical or convenient no matter how many ways you slice it.

I'm not so sure about that one. Sure some of us have some data hoarder behaviors but some of us prefer to keep our media in a convenient central or highly accessible environment. The way every other product and service is going through some inexplicable predatory encroachment has people taking precautions or outright doom spending to fix whatever lingering insecurities they have about data.

For my largest volume I made the jump from 4.9TB to 16TB.
Am I really in need of 16TB when I maybe accumulate ~200GB of real world archive stuff per year? No.
Will I have to go through this process in the near to medium term? Noooooo.
Is this the kind of technology that will eliminate existing capacity problems, bottlenecks and/or other storage issues? Yes. Bigger storage, more cache, better thermals and less noise = win.
If some kind of emergency were to happen, would I have the chance of recovering the volume in another computer? Yes.
Is it likely to outlive the other volumes and take over their roles? Hell yes.

If 8TB becomes the new cost effective volume to breathe new life into my X570 system after EOL then I'll probably pick up a pair of them for RAID 0.
There's no situation where I'll ever need that much FAST onboard storage but it's fun to think about.
Maybe I could shuck one into a PCI-E x1 card and use them in other computers too.
The future is amazing.

Way back in 2009 I used to use an Areca 1120 RAID controller with some onboard cache for my first file server. It was great especially for buffering those pesky small file writes and eliminating the bottleneck Norton A/V was creating during disk scans. Even with SATA passthrough something like that might help improve the performance with your disk. The one I had was PCI-X with my old Asus P5E-WS motherboard but there are models for PCIe as well. In fact I just picked up some from ebay for <$50 because I still have some useful capacity disks from older NAS setups that I wanted to find a use for. Areca 1120 (PCIe2, SATA2, 256MB ecc cache) and Areca 1882i (PCIe3, SATA3, 1GB ecc cache) while old have current Win10/11 driver sets and seem to work fairly well today. For less than $50 today it's an amazing deal if you need/want to take the edge off dealing with the slowness of regular HDD's with a cache enabled controller.

When you need to move data around on spinning disks pushing 500+MB/s file transfers feels good but also because the onboard controller does the heavy lifting making the PC more responsive (at least noticeable back in 2009 when PC's were much slower). I recently got the Areca 1882i after realizing it was available on ebay and was doing some benchmarking here https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/...ils-storage-score-for-ssd.320992/post-5316763 NewEgg has some 14TB enterprise refurbished units for only $99 and I was very tempted to get some now.

 

[Bwaze]

To go back to SSDs - I've seen several articles and commercials about this:

WD_BLACK SN850P NVMe™ SSD for PS5® consoles - 8TB

Is there really more excitement on getting 8 TB disk in a gaming console, to store more games, than there is for using it in PC environment, with all the content creation etc.?