Yes, yes, I know, "I'm nuts"
Or am I?
We all know about the plethora of top loading 42-60-90 bay JBOD drawers that hit the market over the last 10-15 years, but the paradigm just changed.
At the low end, SMR drives are being submarined into the market in CMR clothing - and being pushed as RAID drives when they have appalling performance. This is pushing us into buying higher spec drives.
Meantime Micron have introduced a couple of new lines of SSDs such as the 5510 ION /5200 ECO range as archival/nearline units which aren't that much more expensive than those higher spec drives, but have power and seek ratings that eat them for lunch - and quite frankly if I don't see 10 year lifespans out of them I'd be highly surprised. (They're enterprise drives with power loss protection and 5 year warranties, unlike Samsung's QVOs, but priced 10% lower than the QVO range. Write performance is considerably lower than the Samsungs but they don't utilise an array of internal rewriting trickery to optimise write speeds, then sort it out in the background that the Samsungs use)
Micron are also rightfully pointing out that spinning drives wear out on reads whilst SSDs DON'T and the effective lifespan of most spinning media is around 0.2-0.3DWPD, so the low DWPD of these units doesn't matter if they're nearline/archive oriented (and they have higher spec SSDs available for not much more money anyway).
What's lacking to deploy these in anger is a suitable enclosure to stuff them into. Putting 60 of these into one of my existing JBOD enclosures would look more than a little silly, even if it would be an effective way of doing things and halve the drawer's power consumption.
So, the challenge now is "how about a suitable 3U 120-drive (or thereabouts) SAS enclosure with 12Gb/s expander, redundant PSU, decent thermals (drives must not exceed 70C internally - even if NAND likes being hot the controllers don't) and relatively low noise? (I try to keep my server room below 85dBa at 23C ambient)
Ideally case depth should not exceed 1000mm, which I feel is an easy target
Or am I?
We all know about the plethora of top loading 42-60-90 bay JBOD drawers that hit the market over the last 10-15 years, but the paradigm just changed.
At the low end, SMR drives are being submarined into the market in CMR clothing - and being pushed as RAID drives when they have appalling performance. This is pushing us into buying higher spec drives.
Meantime Micron have introduced a couple of new lines of SSDs such as the 5510 ION /5200 ECO range as archival/nearline units which aren't that much more expensive than those higher spec drives, but have power and seek ratings that eat them for lunch - and quite frankly if I don't see 10 year lifespans out of them I'd be highly surprised. (They're enterprise drives with power loss protection and 5 year warranties, unlike Samsung's QVOs, but priced 10% lower than the QVO range. Write performance is considerably lower than the Samsungs but they don't utilise an array of internal rewriting trickery to optimise write speeds, then sort it out in the background that the Samsungs use)
Micron are also rightfully pointing out that spinning drives wear out on reads whilst SSDs DON'T and the effective lifespan of most spinning media is around 0.2-0.3DWPD, so the low DWPD of these units doesn't matter if they're nearline/archive oriented (and they have higher spec SSDs available for not much more money anyway).
What's lacking to deploy these in anger is a suitable enclosure to stuff them into. Putting 60 of these into one of my existing JBOD enclosures would look more than a little silly, even if it would be an effective way of doing things and halve the drawer's power consumption.
So, the challenge now is "how about a suitable 3U 120-drive (or thereabouts) SAS enclosure with 12Gb/s expander, redundant PSU, decent thermals (drives must not exceed 70C internally - even if NAND likes being hot the controllers don't) and relatively low noise? (I try to keep my server room below 85dBa at 23C ambient)
Ideally case depth should not exceed 1000mm, which I feel is an easy target