Comment by omeysalvi
6 hours ago
Can someone who knows explain what is the benefit of having all that data in one ssd instead of splitting it up into hundreds of individual drives? Does the single ssd benefit is more performance or does it really tuen out to be cheaper than hundreds of individual drives?
It’s about density in a datacenter. With this you have 1PB in 4 drives, fitting in a 1u rack, which is just incredible. Also these drives don’t use regular SATA or SAS, they use PCIe, so these drives are also quite fast in comparison. Density has a power efficiency aspect as well both in just having fewer drives and requiring fewer servers to put drives into.
For when you need to store a copy of the internet, and have been granted immunity for your copy of Anna's Archive.
A 42U rack filled with 1u servers with 8 drives each, will have 84PB of data. It feels like it was a few month ago where you could buy a rack with 1PB of storage, and that was awesome. Not anymore.
You’re actually right, it’s just that datacenters like density and will gladly split your data onto hundreds of these little amazing magical bits of technology rather than hundreds of less magical ones in the same physical volume.
Higher density, less power. Those are the bottlenecks in current and new data centers that are built out.
So it's not exactly about cost savings, but having the option to do more, faster.
Also, you could also get much higher bandwidth density out of this vs HDD, and this is great for AI training
Probably for a similar reason why I would rather buy a single 4TB SSD than fourty 100MB SSDs.
They’ll still have hundreds of individual drives. Of these drives.
And thanks to the density, they won’t need as many racks as they used to.
DENSITY. Hyperscalers want to store as much data per rack and per data center as possible. They will eventually have hundreds of thousands of these drives.