in my hand is 16 terabytes of mechanical
storage
and the crazy part is that's not even
cutting edge
wd just announced 18 and 20 terabyte
hard drives
both of which get absolutely
correct buy this
this is the 100 terabyte
aptly named exadrive from
nimbus data i have been waiting
literally months to get my hands
on the highest capacity ssd
on the planet welcome to a very exciting
installment
of holy sh
it's worth 40 000 us dollars
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how bad is my hair right now it's fine
the first thing you'll notice about the
extra drive dc series
is the size it uses the same three and a
half inch form factor
as a typical desktop mechanical hard
drive
by comparison anything from
a desktop ssd like this one all the way
up to a high
capacity enterprise-grade ssd like this
7.68 terabyte one from micron
uses the two and a half inch form factor
which back in the days when mechanical
drives ruled the roost
was only really used for laptops
it does this for a couple of reasons
number one
is that the exodrive is really
considered
by the manufacturer to be more of a
competitor for
hard drives than it is for you know high
performance ssds like
this pci express one over here from
liquid
reason number two is this is just great
look at this they just
need all that space this has to be
one of the most densely packed products
that i have ever seen it's
nothing but floor to ceiling
wall-to-wall nand flash
inside the entire enclosure it's
actually even heavy
i mean most ssds like they kind of don't
really weigh anything and if they do
it's just because they're using like a a
big thick chassis so that it feels
quality or whatever this is not that far
off the weight
of an actual hard drive but i guess
that's just what it takes to get
a hundred terabytes of storage into a
three and a half inch drive
to put that capacity in the appropriate
context for y'all
okay like what's uh what's a pc game
that takes up an unfathomable amount of
storage
call of duty warzone you could have 500
copies of warzone
on this drive i mean not quite because
it's going to be closer to like
you know 90 terabytes by the time you
actually format it and account for
overhead obviously i was being facetious
just there if you actually had
100 terabytes of game data
it would be way more economical to store
it on a hard drive
with a modestly sized solid-state cache
sitting in front of it
thing is a single user could never need
low latency access to such an enormous
and random distribution of data that
they would need the entire library to be
stored
on solid state guys you can only play
one game at once right well except that
time we played two games at once but
still
even two no justification for this so
okay let's play around with it shall we
i've actually got
atto disc benchmark running right now
and you can see these numbers are
not that impressive
yep at 512 bytes
we're looking at nine megabytes of
second writes and
13.81 megabytes of second reads and in
fact
getting all the way up to one two and
four
megabyte transfers we are still sitting
in the
300 to 450 megabytes a second range
so wow considering that this is an
ssd that is
not super fast but but but
but it's really big so in the data
center
the advantages of an approach like this
are
very real the biggest one is unrivaled
storage density
a stornator xl like we used in our most
recent petabyte project
hold 60 of these standard three and a
half inch drives
now with the 16 terabyte drives that
we're using today
one of those units gives us about one
petabyte of raw space
in a 4u chassis that's about 0.75
petabytes of accessible space
after accounting for raid redundancy and
other zfs overhead
by comparison one of those chassis full
of these puppies
gives us six petabytes of raw capacity
and over five petabytes of usable
capacity
as long as we've got a cool 2.4 million
dollars
for the drives alone but don't let that
price fool you into thinking that
there's no market for these things
increasing your storage density by 5
to 6x has some very real advantages
starting with the fact that you will
need fewer servers to plug them into
now in the context of two and a half
million dollars worth of drives
the 10 grand or so that you might save
per server box
might not sound like a big advantage but
this is the
but wait there's more moment fewer
servers
also means less expensive data center
rack space
and less rack space means less cooling
each of these sucks back about 8 watts
while idle
and 16 watts while active at 16 watts
that's the reason we actually had this
fan on here while we were running
benchmarks possibly
the biggest possible savings is that
depending on what kind of software
you're running
enterprise licensing which can be
thousands or tens of thousands of
dollars per year
is often handled on a per server or per
cpu socket basis
meaning that if you can consolidate your
server count
from five down to one over a span of
five years or more
those recurring costs could end up
eating a lot of the savings that you
would get
by going with hard drives not to mention
that the performance
of an all ssd setup versus all hard
drives
is going to be in another league even if
that's not that impressive
for a modern ssd now as i mentioned
before
a lot of that ground could be made up
with a higher speed ssd tier
sitting in front of your spinning rust
but if you're working with
i don't know let's say a gigantic
scientific data set where you have
no way of predicting what's going to be
accessed next
and all ssd setup will have a latency
advantage which can even help improve
cpu utilization efficiency because the
system
will spend less time waiting around for
a slow storage subsystem
it can even help with reliability one of
the scariest parts of any server
maintenance
project is rebuilding a failed or
degraded drive
in a raid array and this is especially
true with mechanical drives
these things have reached the point
where their capacities are
so high and the speeds that you can
access them at
are so low that the wear and tear on
them
during a rebuild increases the odds of a
subsequent failure
during the rebuild to the point where it
is not trivial
well an extra drive like any ssd
has no moving parts it has higher random
performance
and it's got higher sustained speeds
reducing the time for these risky
operations
so that all sounds great but
there are definitely some gotchas and i
mean aside from the price
nimbus data here i've actually got their
data sheet right here
nimbus data boasts a five-year warranty
with unlimited drive rights per day
wow how on earth are they doing that
unlimited my friends are they using some
kind of
special flash that that doesn't wear out
is it
magic ssds no
no it's not so uh uh whatever
this right here is a sata interface
meaning that it's limited to
six gigabit per second by contrast
this right here is a liquid honey badger
capable of over
50 times that speed
and like that's not necessarily a
bad thing here i mean the honey badger
is a very different product
it takes up a pci express 16x gen 4 slot
and can't reach nearly the capacity that
an extra drive can
all it means is that practically
speaking they can offer an
unlimited right warranty on this thing
because you
cannot write data to it fast enough over
that interface
to wear out the 100 terabytes of nand in
five years it actually takes over two
days
of continuous sequential data right into
it in order to fill it up
now if you guys are anything like me
this
is the part of this video you were
waiting for not all this theoretical
monkey business and all that nonsense
linus when are you gonna open the thing
up and show us how it ticks
right now now it's not strictly speaking
part of our loan agreement for this
drive to
open it up but the way that i see it
they had to know who they were dealing
with okay
so oh wow not all the screws are the
same better keep track of where those go
and there's just something about
unlimited power
and besides isn't it just delightfully
naughty to avoid the warranty on a 40
000
product like that ready
oh interesting very interesting
see how that's kind of glossy on there
like that
i thought that that might just be
because there was some leftover
residue from like a thermal pad or
something but there isn't
see look there's nothing on the
underside of the enclosure
so what this probably is this is a
strategy i've seen before
is a method of
wiping off the markings from these chips
and then they've actually glued the
outside of it
to make it more difficult to reverse
engineer the product
very clever nimbus data very clever
indeed
these look like standard sata connectors
here and then some kind of power
interface that i'm unfortunately not
familiar with
on each of these daughter boards
requires quite a bit of
stress on these posts here to pop these
additional
daughter boards up so okay we'll take
off the second one each of these
is 25 terabytes
isn't that crazy um okay i don't like
the stream that this is putting on this
thing here is there a way to pop those
posts out or something don't think of it
in terms of how much money it's worth
think of it in terms of
the people need to see it just
come on get it there we go okay
so even though they're using what
looks like um the same connector
as like a u.2 nvme drive here
you can actually see right on their pcb
custom pin out
do not insert sff 8639 cable slash
backplane this is what splits out to
this so here's all the sata interfaces
for
the individual 25 terabyte
kind of slices
now this one i'm pretty sure it would be
fairly rude of me
to show because compared to the slices
this seems to be where the actual brains
is but i'm going to look at it
yup we're looking at an altera fpga
looks like some memory there is some
very custom logic being done here that's
a that's not a cheap processor
i figured out how they assemble it
brendan these posts
they unscrew there's absolutely no
reason whatsoever
to uh put all that strain on them hey
there it goes
i don't remember what order they were in
so hopefully
that doesn't matter but yeah you just
put the slicey slices on there
10 out of 10 slices
i mean imagine it okay adding 25
terabytes of storage to your computer is
that easy
just do it four times and 100 terabytes
and then i can just screw this in into
the bottom there
no problem i'm sweating right now from
taking this thing apart
see i play it off like i'm like yeah
yeah you know whatever it's like yeah
whatever it's like ssd or whatever but
like
i do not want to break this i'm pretty
sure we're on the hook for it if i do
all right moment of truth then hey
there's a bunch of activity leds i
didn't actually notice those before
oh you know what i bet if i uh i bet if
i put them together in the wrong order
they probably need to at least be
reformatted
i don't know what kind of logic that
fpga is programmed with though like i
don't maybe it's smart enough to
just put it back together it definitely
don't see the capacity d is not
accessible
let's just give it a quick reboot i
think this was right oh look at that we
got a disk checking
prompt it's showing up in disk
management it's got the full capacity
what if we just delete the volume uh
okay unallocated new simple volume hey
hey hold on this all this all looks
pretty normal let's do a quick format
here
oh jake did warn me it takes a spicy
minute to format
the system cannot find the file
specified uh that's not a great sign
well i guess they're gonna have to sort
out which order the things go
on in bye
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are you rolling yes autodisk benchmark
hold on d drive start
oh thank goodness it's working okay i
had the two
top ones swapped i i just totally brain
farted and i put the i put the wrong
ones
in that wrong order it's working
everything's good
right we can shoot the thumbnail now