15.34TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs $1K?

[tigweld0101]

I know we've normally got used deals, but hear me out:

NEW Micron PRO 7450 15.36TB for $1170 with quantity discount: Micron PRO 7450 PRO 15.36 TB Solid State Drive - 2.5" Internal - U.3 [PCI 649528926265 | eBay
NEW Solidigm D5-P5430 for $1012: SOLIDIGM D5-P5430 15.36 TB - 2.5 Internal - U.2 [PCI Express NVMe 4.0 x4] - Read 840307301598 | eBay

There's even that big 30TB Micron 6500 ION STH just reviewed for $2500 new but that's more on a $/TB basis: Micron 6500 ION 30.72 TB MTFDKCC30T7TGR-1BK1DFCYYR Enterprise encrypted SSD 649528938640 | eBay

I know they're not used, but if I'm paying $400-500 for a 7.68TB drive then a 15TB drive for the same price per TB at the top end seems really good, especially for new Gen4 drives. They're read intensive, but that's a lot of storage. I was thinking about getting 4TB drives and a card and doing RAID 0 but then I looked at those drives and it's like the same price, maybe only a little more and I've got a single drive instead of a RAID array.

Given the price of these new drives I'm thinking they're actually a good deal if you've just got a lot of stuff you're wanting to move off of disk and onto SSDs. I was pricing out the 3.84TB drives, 4TB m.2's, the 7.68TB drives. Then I just looked for fun and saw the new drives are not much more expensive especially after adapters and cables.

Maybe this means the used 7.68TB drives are too expensive now at $400-500 since usually there's a big drop off between new and used drives. That's especially true when looking at high capacity new drives.

 

[redeamon]

Just a few points to add to the post above:

15.36TB is the sweet spot. If you can get a 30.72TB for the same TB/$ as a 15.36TB that's not a bad deal, but keep in mind you get better performance from 2x15.36TB and much lower airflow requirements (each drive operates at a lower idle temperature and you have more surface area to dissipate heat). Performance tends to drop after 15.36TB due to heat/space constriction of chips. Moreover, the idle airflow requirements are much higher for 30.72TB (8-15w) vs 15.36TB (4-7w) which may not be ideal for a 24/7 home lab environment.

In general I would stay away from 30.72TB unless you get a great deal or have specific requirements (limited NVMe bays, density requirements, server is going into a datacenter so fans can run at high speeds, etc.)

Finally, some brands are more efficient than others- i.e., Intel and some 30.72TB's have low idle wattage- but that comes at the cost of performance.

 

[zac1]

I had a similar realization (new being cheaper than used) when looking for ECC UDIMMs. At least for 32GB DIMMs, you can get them cheaper, new with warranty from Micron, than used on eBay.

Love these kinds of analyses. Thank you for taking the time to share!

 

[Patrick]

That is quite interesting. I just sent it to the team.

 

[is39]

Prices of used NVME SSDs have not caught up completely yet with recent drops in new SSD prices, but it's now in $300 range for 7.68TB; i expect further decrease to ~$250.

 

[adman_c]

Holy smokes. Good find OP! I was able to get Gen3 7.68TB drives for less than this per TB ($325 per drive), but these are incredible deals for density and performance. They even use less power than the DC1500M drives I bought, to boot. Looking forward to upgrading to these in a year or two.

 

[KC@Gadgetblues]

You also save a lot of lanes with 15.36 TB vs. 7.68. There are 4x U.2 to x16 cards available cheap if your slot supports bifurcation. I would definitely stick some fans on there though.

 

[adman_c]

You also save a lot of lanes with 15.36 TB vs. 7.68. There are 4x U.2 to x16 cards available cheap if your slot supports bifurcation. I would definitely stick some fans on there though.

Good point. If these had been available a few months ago I probably could have even saved money vs the cheaper 7.68T drives since I wouldn't have had to upgrade my server to EPYC for MOAR PCIE. And definitely a good point about cooling. On an open testbench with no air flow my Gen 3 drives throttled on heavy write benchmarking. Now that they're in my case with a couple of 140mm fans blowing air over them they're staying nice and cool though.

 

[bitbckt]

I wouldn't have had to upgrade my server to EPYC for MOAR PCIE.

You're on STH. You still would have.

 

[adman_c]

You're on STH. You still would have.

I feel personally attacked.

 

[Wasmachineman_NL]

Damn I wish 4TB enterprise M.2 SSDs would be cheaper, I definitely could use some of them.

 

[Wasmachineman_NL]

SAMSUNG PM983 960GB M.2 PCIe SSD NVMe Solid State Drive 22110 MZ-1LB9600 | eBay

A representative will respond quickly.

www.ebay.com

this is such a ****ing joke what the hell eBay, a 960GB PM983 is cheaper than a goddamn SM863. HOW

 

[ano]

kioxia CD8 & CD6 are also very cheap btw, we are using a lot of them,a nd CM6 as well

same for PM9a3

we are paying less for nvme gen4, than SAS 12g theese days

 

[RTM]

Interestingly the drives are available here (DK/EU) from retailers at the same price (when you factor in VAT) (probably it is being sold by the same distributor behind the scenes).

So it sounds like it may be a more broad thing than just some seller on eBay.

It almost makes me want to build a new NAS, if only there were some cool and small cases focusing on 2.5" nvme drives.

 

[adman_c]

Interestingly the drives are available here (DK/EU) from retailers at the same price (when you factor in VAT) (probably it is being sold by the same distributor behind the scenes).

So it sounds like it may be a more broad thing than just some seller on eBay.

It almost makes me want to build a new NAS, if only there were some cool and small cases focusing on 2.5" nvme drives.

One of these and one of the Asrock Rack ITX boards with 10GbE built in would be a great start. Sadly there are no enclosures for something like this. And I suppose that depending on your drive layout, 8x NVME would be pretty substantially bottlenecked by even 10GbE. But damn that'd be cool!

 

[Samir]

Very cool to see this and the analysis. What's interesting about this is the 30TB is by far the most storage available for 2.5". But that made me think outside the box when the issues with density and cooling were mentioned--why not make the same in a 3.5" form factor? More space for cooling, less density required, and it's not like 2.5" is the only common size in servers as plenty still have 3.5" bays as well. And let's not even think about what type of capacity someone could pack in a classic 5.25" full height bay--if it's 8x of these sized drives, that would be a meaty 240TB of pure ssd speed.

The 5.25" trick was one that Quantum used back in the day with their 'Bigfoot' drives as it was a way to have the same capacity as more dense 3.5" drives but keep costs lower since it didn't require as much density. The marketing part of that worked pretty well as some oems bought the drives, but generally the product sucked, lol. I still have one somewhere.

 

[RTM]

Very cool to see this and the analysis. What's interesting about this is the 30TB is by far the most storage available for 2.5". But that made me think outside the box when the issues with density and cooling were mentioned--why not make the same in a 3.5" form factor? More space for cooling, less density required, and it's not like 2.5" is the only common size in servers as plenty still have 3.5" bays as well. And let's not even think about what type of capacity someone could pack in a classic 5.25" full height bay--if it's 8x of these sized drives, that would be a meaty 240TB of pure ssd speed.

Yeah, unfortunately the problem is that mobile racks tend to be pretty bad and have annoying fans, assuming you can even find cases with 5.25" bays.

Lian li used to make a case (not sure if they still have something like it) where the front was basically all 5.25 bays, so would be "perfect" for a file server with a whole bunch of mobile racks.

Honestly what I would like, is something a lot smaller, itx mobo + maybe 4-6 2.5" bays (enough to do a "raid 6" configuration without losing too much capacity) or perhaps even just 2 drives (for a RAID 1 configuration).

 

[piranha32]

WD's Velociraptors were 2.5" 10k HDDs, packaged into a big-ass heatsink of the size of a regular 3.5" drive.

 

[Samir]

Yeah, unfortunately the problem is that mobile racks tend to be pretty bad and have annoying fans, assuming you can even find cases with 5.25" bays.

Lian li used to make a case (not sure if they still have something like it) where the front was basically all 5.25 bays, so would be "perfect" for a file server with a whole bunch of mobile racks.

Honestly what I would like, is something a lot smaller, itx mobo + maybe 4-6 2.5" bays (enough to do a "raid 6" configuration without losing too much capacity) or perhaps even just 2 drives (for a RAID 1 configuration).

There's still a lot of companies that make drive racks like sans digital: Hard Drive Rack HDDRACK5

The other thing to do is see if one can find an old CD-ROM duplicator tower and retrofit that.

As far as what you're looking for, it already exists and is called a 'u-nas' case: https://www.u-nas.com/desktop.html?nav=products

 

[Samir]

WD's Velociraptors were 2.5" 10k HDDs, packaged into a big-ass heatsink of the size of a regular 3.5" drive.

Some of them were. There's also the 3.5" that had a physical clear window where you could see the head armature move. What funny is how slow these drives are even in comparison to 5400rpm 'class' drives of today.