Samsung's 850 Evo SSD family gets a massive 4TB model

Jos

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Samsung pushed the SATA interface to its limit in with the 850 Pro and then made it cheaper with the 850 Evo. Now, the company is making another leap in the storage market, by doubling the top-end capacity to 4TB -- the highest offered by any consumer SSD.

The 4TB Samsung 850 Evo SSD uses the company’s new 48-layer 256Gbit V-NAND, which it says “delivers unsurpassed performance, reliability and capacity.” Samsung claims the 850 Evo 4TB is able to deliver 540 MB/s sequential read and 520 MB/s sequential write speeds, and up to 98,000 random read and 90,000 random write IOPS.

That’s in line with Samsung’s advertised performance for the line’s 500GB, 1TB and 2TB models. In terms of features it’s a familiar picture as well: there’s data encryption through TCG Opal and Microsoft's eDrive, TurboWrite to speed up write speeds through an SLC cache, and extra overprovisioning for internal operations like wear leveling and garbage collection to maintain performance consistency in long term use.

The 4TB Samsung 850 Evo SSD carries a MSRP of $1499 with a five-year warranty and 300TB write endurance rating. That’s more than most people will pay for an entire system but its cost per gigabyte is in line the 2TB model at $0.37. The current 2TB 850 EVO sells for $675 on Amazon. Still, if you want a massive amount of fast storage in a small space, the 4TB Evo 850 comes in the standard 2.5 inch form factor and is only 7 millimeters thick.

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Man... it ain't gonna be long till that goes all the way down to a few hundred dollars :D
 
Not really sure why SSD drives are only available in the 2.5 inch and internal M.2 form factors. You would think that they could easily increase the capacity of these drives using the same technology by using a physically larger form factor. Most desktop computers and NAS devices use 3.5 inch drives, which are physically about 3 times the height and larger width/length. If they can squeeze 4TB's in a 2.5 inch SSD, shouldn't they be able to put 12TB+ into a 3.5 inch form factor that is about 3 times the height??? Heck, many computers and computer cases still accommodate 5.25 inch drives. Imagine the capacity of an SSD in a 5.25 inch drive form factor..... They are 5 times the height and 3 times the width/length than a 2.5 inch SSD. That's 15 times the volume. That would be 60TB..... While you and I couldn't afford it for a while, can you imagine the amount of space a large data center would save if they could install 60TB's in one drive bay?
 
Not really sure why SSD drives are only available in the 2.5 inch and internal M.2 form factors. You would think that they could easily increase the capacity of these drives using the same technology by using a physically larger form factor. Most desktop computers and NAS devices use 3.5 inch drives, which are physically about 3 times the height and larger width/length. If they can squeeze 4TB's in a 2.5 inch SSD, shouldn't they be able to put 12TB+ into a 3.5 inch form factor that is about 3 times the height??? Heck, many computers and computer cases still accommodate 5.25 inch drives. Imagine the capacity of an SSD in a 5.25 inch drive form factor..... They are 5 times the height and 3 times the width/length than a 2.5 inch SSD. That's 15 times the volume. That would be 60TB..... While you and I couldn't afford it for a while, can you imagine the amount of space a large data center would save if they could install 60TB's in one drive bay?

Yeah well... your premise is wrong in 2 parts, the first one is that no one could afford a 12TB drive, and even those who could probably wouldn't buy it, the second part, SSDs are not meant for long time storage (data centres) and also not a big fans of a huge amount of write operations means they are not for data-centres, add the price tag to it and no thank you sir.
 
Personally, I'm just happy to see them making further advancements ... all of which bring the lower end products down into the very reasonably priced range! I'd love to see a 12 TB model ... that would bring the 4 TB model down to ...... chicken feed! And that's a ****-a-doodle-do for me and youuuuuu!!!!!!
 
Not really sure why SSD drives are only available in the 2.5 inch and internal M.2 form factors. You would think that they could easily increase the capacity of these drives using the same technology by using a physically larger form factor. Most desktop computers and NAS devices use 3.5 inch drives, which are physically about 3 times the height and larger width/length. If they can squeeze 4TB's in a 2.5 inch SSD, shouldn't they be able to put 12TB+ into a 3.5 inch form factor that is about 3 times the height??? Heck, many computers and computer cases still accommodate 5.25 inch drives. Imagine the capacity of an SSD in a 5.25 inch drive form factor..... They are 5 times the height and 3 times the width/length than a 2.5 inch SSD. That's 15 times the volume. That would be 60TB..... While you and I couldn't afford it for a while, can you imagine the amount of space a large data center would save if they could install 60TB's in one drive bay?
Funny, because they already do put almost 12TB in a conventional 3.5" hard drive disk.
https://www.hgst.com/products/hard-drives/ultrastar-archive-ha10

Certainly this (and Seagate's similar solution) is not as fast as the NAND storage of SATA or NVRAM that is becoming popular in M.2 drives, but it would be probably an order of magnitude less expensive. Until fast solid state storage reaches parity with hard disk drives, it really is hard to see high capacity hard drives not staying relevant in cloud, enterprise, and archival systems.
 
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Not really sure why SSD drives are only available in the 2.5 inch and internal M.2 form factors. You would think that they could easily increase the capacity of these drives using the same technology by using a physically larger form factor. Most desktop computers and NAS devices use 3.5 inch drives, which are physically about 3 times the height and larger width/length. If they can squeeze 4TB's in a 2.5 inch SSD, shouldn't they be able to put 12TB+ into a 3.5 inch form factor that is about 3 times the height??? Heck, many computers and computer cases still accommodate 5.25 inch drives. Imagine the capacity of an SSD in a 5.25 inch drive form factor..... They are 5 times the height and 3 times the width/length than a 2.5 inch SSD. That's 15 times the volume. That would be 60TB..... While you and I couldn't afford it for a while, can you imagine the amount of space a large data center would save if they could install 60TB's in one drive bay?
Funny, because they already do put almost 12TB in a conventional 3.5" hard drive disk.
https://www.hgst.com/products/hard-drives/ultrastar-archive-ha10

Certainly this (and Seagate's similar solution) is not as fast as the NAND storage of SATA or NVRAM that is becoming popular in M.2 drives, but it would be probably an order of magnitude less expensive. Until fast solid state storage reaches parity with hard disk drives, it really is hard to see high capacity hard drives not staying relevant in cloud, enterprise, and archival systems.

Not only that Intel has SSD's that are made for data centers!
 
I have long suspected that industry leaders could rapidly push the envelope and develop the technology faster to result in much larger drive capacities. But if SSD's can slowly be released in smaller increases they could continue to generate revenue.

It would not be the first time there has been collusion and price fixing with technology. (2002 DRAM price fixing)
 
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