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IOPS? This thing has slower IOPS than an old SATA SSD (~40k / QLC). I think it is meant for sequential operations only.

65 hours to restore a full backup

Apparently TDP is 30 watts¹, according to the product brief. I would imagine it's a single PCB with flash chips on both sides then thermally bonded to the aluminum chassis. That should keep all chips at approximately the same temperature. On its own it could be easily air cooled, but with 24 in a 2U chassis you'll be having some decently hefty forced air over the drives.

1. For comparison, an HDD usually comes in around ~10 watts

The U.2 form factor is a 2.5" drive, not larger than it.

"U.2" does not change anything in the mechanical characteristics of a 2.5" drive, it just replaces the SATA or SAS electrical interface with a NVMe electrical interface.

You can mount a U.2 drive in any location intended for 2.5" drives, as long as its height can fit there.

However, 2.5" drives come in various heights. Many laptops and mini-PCs that accept 2.5" drives accept only some of the smaller heights and they do not accept the greater heights, like 15 mm, which are typical for enterprise SSDs and HDDs, regardless whether they have a NVMe, i.e. U.2, or a SAS interface or a SATA interface.

This new high-capacity U.2 SSD has the standard 15 mm height of the 2.5" form factor.

The transfer rates limit how much each chip can be active at any given time, so a heat-aware writing allocator can pick the least active blocks for the next writes and distribute the heat accordingly. Even if it’s not heat-aware, the tendency will be that the writes will be distributed over as many chips as there are, and so will be the heat generated.

Now, I would LOVE to see this much SLC flash on a direct to bus attachment setting.

Over the past few years the main improvement in SSD capacity has been due to them stacking an ever-increasing number of NAND layers in a single chip, with state-of-the-art SSDs already having over 300 layers.

No need to worry about cooling when each layer in the sandwich is only a fraction of a micrometer thick!

the u.2 form factor indeed evolved from chassis designs that were originally 2.5" drives. It's now kind of becoming obsolete with new designs using things like E1S, E1L (exactly the correct height to be slotted into a 1U server, it's like a slightly wider M.2, but meant to be insertable and removable), and E3S and E3L.

Note that the 245TB is an E3L, the half size version of it come in smaller size.

https://americas.kioxia.com/en-ca/business/ssd/solution/edsf...

https://www.exxactcorp.com/blog/storage/edsff-e1s-e1l-e3s-e3...

https://www.simms.co.uk/tech-talk/e1s-e1l-the-new-server-for...

even my AWS IP is let in without trouble

works for me. akamai doesn't like you

No problems here ...

4-5x times what it would have been if not for the demand from AI. According to my rough calculation 4-8tb ssd drives were going to reach parity with hdd this year

They haven't released details but I was able to find a Solidigm D5-P5336 122.88TB drive for around 40,000 USD, as a guideline. So ... more than that.

If you have to ask...

‘Contact us’

Dark mode.

It’s about density in a datacenter. With this you have 1PB in 4 drives, fitting in a 1u rack, which is just incredible. Also these drives don’t use regular SATA or SAS, they use PCIe, so these drives are also quite fast in comparison. Density has a power efficiency aspect as well both in just having fewer drives and requiring fewer servers to put drives into.

Probably for a similar reason why I would rather buy a single 4TB SSD than fourty 100MB SSDs.

You’re actually right, it’s just that datacenters like density and will gladly split your data onto hundreds of these little amazing magical bits of technology rather than hundreds of less magical ones in the same physical volume.

Higher density, less power. Those are the bottlenecks in current and new data centers that are built out.

So it's not exactly about cost savings, but having the option to do more, faster.

Also, you could also get much higher bandwidth density out of this vs HDD, and this is great for AI training

They’ll still have hundreds of individual drives. Of these drives.

DENSITY. Hyperscalers want to store as much data per rack and per data center as possible. They will eventually have hundreds of thousands of these drives.

Perhaps their usual buyers just care less about retention?

Those drives aren't going to be used for cold storage, and it is basically a guarantee that there will be checksums and some form of redundancy. Who cares whether the data is retained for 10 or for 15 years after writing when you can do a low-priority background scrub of the entire drive once a month, and when there are already mechanisms in place to account for full-drive failure?

You can trivially modulate flash endurance by tweaking the reported space - the less space you report, the more spares you have.