Why? We can cram 61TB into a slightly overgrown 2.5” and like half a PB per rack unit.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 5 weeks ago
So can someone make 3.5" SSDd then???
enumerator4829@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
LodeMike@lemmy.today 5 weeks ago
Because we don’t have to pack it in too much. It’d be higher capacities for cheaper for consumers
enumerator4829@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
It’s not the packaging that costs money or limits us, it’s the chips themselves. If we crammed a 3.5” form factor full of flash storage, it would be far outside the budgets of mortals.
earphone843@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
You could make the chips bigger, which should be cheaper to produce.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 5 weeks ago
Skill issue
ramble81@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Given that there are already 32TB 2.5” SSDs, what does a 3.5” buy you that you couldn’t get with an adapter?
KinglyWeevil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
Native slotting into server drive cages. No concerns about alignment with the front or back.
catloaf@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
What kind of server? Dell’s caddies have adapters, and I’m pretty sure some have screw holes on the bottom so you don’t need an adapter.
jj4211@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
The market for customers that want to buy new disks but do not want to buy new storage/servers with EDSFF is not a particularly attractive market to target.
earphone843@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
They should be cheaper since theres a bunch more space to work with. You don’t have to make the storage chips as small.
jj4211@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Chips that can’t fit on a 76mm board do not exist in any market. There’s been some fringe chasinng of waferscale for compute, but it’s a nightmare of cost and yield with zero applicable benefits for storage. You can fit more chips on a bigger board with fewer controllers, but a 3.5" form factor wouldn’t have any more usable board surface area than an E1.L design, and not much more than an E3.L. There’s enough height in the thickest 3.5" to combine 3 boards, but that middle board at least would be absolutely starved for airflow, unless you changed specifications around expected airflow for 3.5" devices and made it ventilated.
synicalx@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
A big heat sink like they used to put on WD Raptor drives.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 5 weeks ago
Build quality
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
A better price as low density chips are cheaper.
And you can fit in more of those in a bigger space = Cheaper.jj4211@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
The lowest density chips are still going to be way smaller than even a E1.S board. The only thing you might be able to be cheaper as you’d maybe need fewer SSD controllers, but a 3.5" would have to be, at best, a stack of SSD boards, probably 3, plugged into some interposer board. Allowing for the interposer, maybe you could come up with maybe 120 square centimeter boards, and E1.L drives are about 120 square centimeters anyway. So if you are obsessed with most NAND chips per unit volume, then E1.L form factor is alreay going to be in theory as capable as a hypothetical 3.5" SSD. If you don’t like the overly long E1.L, then in theory E3.L would be more reasonably short with 85% of the board surface area. Of course, all that said I’ve almost never seen anyone go for anything except E1.S, which is more like M.2 sized.
So 3.5" would be more expensive, slower (unless you did a new design), and thermally challenged.
xyguy@startrek.website 5 weeks ago
Relevant video about the problems with high capacity ssds.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Fourty minutes? Yeah, no. How about an equivalent text that can be parsed in five?
jj4211@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I’m not particularly interested to watch a 40 minute video, so I skinned the transcript a bit.
As my other comments show, I know there are reasons why 3.5 inch doesn’t make sense in SSD context, but I didn’t see anything in a skim of the transcript that seems relevant to that question. They are mostly talking about storage density rather than why not package bigger (and that industry is packaging bigger, but not anything resembling 3.5", because it doesn’t make sense).
Valmond@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I want them like my 8" floppies!
Eldritch@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
They can be made any size. Most SATA SSD are just a plastic housing around a board with some chips on it. The right question is when will we have a storage technology with the durability and reliability of spinning magnetized hard drive platters. The man flash chips used in most SSD and m.2 are much more reliable than they were initially. But for long-term retention Etc. Are still off quite good bit from traditional hard drives. Hard drives can sit for about 10 years generally before bit rot becomes a major concern. Nand flash is only a year or two.
db2@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
Longer if it has some kind of small power. I think I read that somewhere.