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.
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.
Nope. Larger chips, lower yields in the fab, more expensive. This is why we have chiplets in our CPUs nowadays. Production cost of chips is superlinear to size.
Not economical. Storage is already done on far larger fab nodes than CPUs and other components. This is a case where higher density actually can be cheaper. ”Mature” nodes are most likely cheaper than the ”ancient” process nodes simply due to age and efficiency. (See also the disaster in the auto industry during covid. Car makers stopped ordering parts made on ancient process nodes, so the nodes were shut down permanently due to cost. After covid, fun times for automakers that had to modernise.)
Go compare prices, new NVMe M.2 will most likely be cheaper than SATA 2.5” per TB. The extra plastic shell, extra shipping volume and SATA-controller is that difference. 3.5” would make it even worse. In the datacenter, we are moving towards ”rulers” with 61TB available now, probably 120TB soon. Now, these are expensive, but the cost per TB is actually not that horrible when compared to consumer drives.
So can someone make 3.5" SSDs then???
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.
Given that there are already 32TB 2.5” SSDs, what does a 3.5” buy you that you couldn’t get with an adapter?
They should be cheaper since theres a bunch more space to work with. You don’t have to make the storage chips as small.
I want them like my 8" floppies!
Why? We can cram 61TB into a slightly overgrown 2.5” and like half a PB per rack unit.
Because we don’t have to pack it in too much. It’d be higher capacities for cheaper for consumers
Also cooling
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.
Skill issue
You could make the chips bigger, which should be cheaper to produce.
Nope. Larger chips, lower yields in the fab, more expensive. This is why we have chiplets in our CPUs nowadays. Production cost of chips is superlinear to size.
Then lower the storage density. Making things as small as possible almost always ends up being more expensive.
Not economical. Storage is already done on far larger fab nodes than CPUs and other components. This is a case where higher density actually can be cheaper. ”Mature” nodes are most likely cheaper than the ”ancient” process nodes simply due to age and efficiency. (See also the disaster in the auto industry during covid. Car makers stopped ordering parts made on ancient process nodes, so the nodes were shut down permanently due to cost. After covid, fun times for automakers that had to modernise.)
Go compare prices, new NVMe M.2 will most likely be cheaper than SATA 2.5” per TB. The extra plastic shell, extra shipping volume and SATA-controller is that difference. 3.5” would make it even worse. In the datacenter, we are moving towards ”rulers” with 61TB available now, probably 120TB soon. Now, these are expensive, but the cost per TB is actually not that horrible when compared to consumer drives.
Relevant video about the problems with high capacity ssds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2i8wZCXDF4
Fourty minutes? Yeah, no. How about an equivalent text that can be parsed in five?