Quote:Nimbus Data introduced its new 100TB ExaDrive DC100 SSD today. The company claims this is the largest SSD ever produced, and by our recollection, it is correct. This SSD, unlike its 50TB forefather, sports a SATA connection. Even though it is designed primarily for the data center, the SATA connection means it is compatible with just about every desktop PC.

So what does 100TB of SSD storage give you? Nimbus Data claims it can store up to 20 million songs or 20,000 HD movies, but unlike the normal SATA SSDs in your PC, this model comes in the 3.5" form factor, meaning it is the size of a standard hard drive.

The SSD also comes with unlimited write endurance over a five-year warranty period, which we haven't seen since the days of SLC NAND. For reference, most competing enterprise SSDs now have a 2-5 DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day) endurance rating. Many enterprise SSDs also have a dirty secret: they throttle performance as you approach per-day endurance limitations. In contrast, the ExaDrive DC100's unlimited write endurance allows it to operate at full performance throughout its lifespan.
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Nimbus Data certainly isn't a household name, but it has over 200 customers for its enterprise all-flash arrays that include such names as Microsoft, eBay, PayPal, and Disney, among others. Now the company is moving into the broader SSD market and is already sampling early adopters. The company says the drives will be generally available in summer 2018, but it hasn't disclosed the pricing yet. It did say that dollar-per-GB pricing should be comparable to existing MLC SSDs for OEMs, which means these drives will carry a hefty premium compared to client drives. We expect more details as the drives come to market.

Quote:We’re not aware of any third-party analysis of this method, its performance, or its suitability for various workloads and performance metrics compared with more traditional NAND controllers and interfaces. Nimbus Data claims up to 100K IOPS in random read/write workloads, and while that’s a standard figure for random reads, it’s above-average for random writes. Overall drive throughput is listed at 500MBps, without any clarification on how these figures were measured. Nimbus is claiming that the drive is rated for an “unlimited” number of drive writes per day, but this may reflect how long it takes to actually write a full drive of data as opposed to any significant improvement in longevity.

Consider: An SSD capable of sustaining 500MBps of throughput can write a gigabyte of data every two seconds, or 30GB of data per minute. That’s 1.8TB of data per hour, or 43.2TB of data per day. But how meaningful is the notion of drive writes per day when the SSD is literally incapable of writing a full drive of data in the relevant time frame? It’s not clear that Nimbus Data has made a meaningful improvement in NAND reliability, so much as it jettisoned a metric that might not make sense if applied to its own enormous products.

We’ll be curious to see if any of these drives practically ship or win wide deployment. Announcing enormous SSDs has become something of a storage market pastime and a way for NAND manufacturers to claim advances in sheer size over spinning disks, but the massive difference in cost has thus far blunted the impact of these enormous capacities. Right now, even the cheapest 4TB SSDs are $1,800 (for non-enterprise models), while a 12TB WD Gold Enterprise drive is $489. That gives spinning disks an ongoing ~10x advantage in cost per GB, and while that’s shrunk compared to what it used to be, it’s not nothing, either. Still, the company claims some major advances in power consumption and cost per GB overall, so if this multi-controller approach bears fruit, we’ll likely see it deployed more widely going forward.