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no, absolutely not. orbital datacenters are never going to happen, it doesn't matter whether you try to frame them as compute or storage or whatever else.

the extreme density of these SSDs is actually an anti-feature in the context of spacecraft hardware.

the RAD750 CPU [0] for example uses a 150nm process node. its successor the RAD5500 [1] is down to 45nm. that's an order of magnitude larger than chips currently made for terrestrial uses.

radiation-hardening involves a lot of things, but in general the more tightly packed the transistors are, the more susceptible the chip is to damage. sending these SSDs to space would be an absurd waste of money because of how quickly they would degrade.

and then there's the power consumption & heat dissipation. one of these drives draws 25W [2] and Dell is bragging about cramming 40 of them into one server. that's a full kilowatt of power - essentially a space heater in a 2U form factor.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD5500

2: https://americas.kioxia.com/content/dam/kioxia/en-us/busines...

For the sake of the generations that come after us, we really should not dump valuable material into space. I somehow doubt the electronics in space would be recovered and recycled properly.

Or you could use fibre, which has the advantage of not needing to use > 1kw of concentrated microwave to get ~2gig of throughput

Or even better not yeeting it into an environment where its cooked/cooled every 90 minutes

Or even better where its not absolutely pelted by cosmic rays enough to obliterate a good GB a day of data.

Or space data centre.

If I correctly understand what you're suggesting, then that could save on uplink bandwidth. Sending one copy into space, and then sending it back down over and over again sounds nice.

But does it solve a problem that we actually have? Is uplink bandwidth a pressing limitation?

/me turning in my sleep muttering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic

All it really means is that big corps that have already existing sales relationships with Dell will be purchasing them in the next fiscal year. Anyone else that needed this level of storage density has already built their own boxes.

The list price seems to be ~40M. https://www.dell.com/en-hk/shop/servers-storage-and-networki... Select the 40 slot chassis and put 40 of those 245TB disks in. Comes out at ~HK$317M. Of course HK prices might also be higher than what Dell USA offers.

Now how heavy the discounts you can get I don't know.

I believe the rationale is that they are so much denser than they will compensate the price difference over the entire lifetime of the system. A 10 TB install is a full rack otherwise and this is 5% of the space. Colocation for HFT tends to be expensive and using 5% of the space for the same amount of data might make sense.

It is kinda neat how the density can trickle down. When an individual SSD can hold tens of TBs, recent-gen drives can do millions of random reads/s each, and one socket can handle lots of RAM and many cores, it doesn't take the fancier chassis with two sockets or lots of storage bays to handle pretty substantial data work.

On the other hand, current part prices are not neat; a commodity platform only helps so much if none of what you want put in it is affordable! And other factors like power and cooling can push you away from optimizing for density. I just like that along with the ludicrious becoming possible, merely great stuff becomes more feasible.

I'd double your guess on this one

QLC already beats out HDD in power constrained hyperscalar environments. Capex is not the only factor.

Max per drive is 25 W, so even a rack with 20 servers of 40 drives each is probably less than the average GPU rack even after the other overheads.

Kioxia was my eMMC supplier until earlier this month, when they said they couldn't fill my orders anymore. They're sold out.

So, yes.

9.8 PB?

Those records are going to be pretty negligible in terms of storage. It is only a couple new records per day. Even if you add things like detailed mobile and tracking telemetry, it is a few MB per person per day.

I can't remember where I saw it, but I think each of these high capacity drives is in well into the 15-25k price range.

So a petabyte will be $600-800k alone, plus a server with enough high-speed PCIe lanes to serve the 40+ drives, definitely $1m+

They are likely 200USD+ per TB, so one 250TB drive would be ~50,000USD.

There’s probably bulk pricing, but if you bought 40 drives separately thats 2,000,000USD in storage alone.

$500 on Facebook Marketplace in 20 years time.

More than you can afford cause you had to ask, ha

You can't buy this stuff anymore. They are leased and rented through layers of middlemen.

Just waiting for the Gavin Belson edition box.

I went to QLC for my NAS last cycle. The $/TB was worse, but not by a huge margin, and the performance is quite a bit better (not that it matters).

I've been wanting to update my (100TB) NAS for over five years, but I haven't yet found anything that I feel is worth upgrading to. One of these with a QSFP56 interface would be nice, but I would need to sell one of my houses to pay for it, so I'll be waiting a little longer...

Sadly none of that enterprise hardware will ever make it to you due to being wastefully shredded

NVME SSDs are consumable items more so than HDDs are.

These drives will arrive in the secondary market to be snapped up by businesses lower in the food chain. By the time you can find them they will be ridden hard and put away wet that you probably wont want them.

Please don't sneer at imaginary people on HN. We're trying for something better than that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Not quite yet.

The interesting thing here is ~256TB in a single drive, but it's in E3.L form factor.

I have about 160TB on hard drives that I'm waiting to offload onto a single SSD.

But that needs to come with a connector that has adapters to USB-C, so I can attach it to my Macbook Neo.

Hopefully they get it a bit more dense soon and into the 2.5" NVMe form.

Hitting a little too close to home with this comment.

Data retention is probably unusable for archival purposes.

These drives all use standard enterprise storage interconnects, and the server chassis is like other Dell server chassis. Not using ATX or EATX, but it's status quo for Dell, and many old Dell servers wind down their old age in homelabs.

Hopefully one of these 10 PB monsters will be under $2,000 someday, at which point I will pop it in my homelab :)