Kioxia and Dell cram 10 PB into slim 2RU server

The very first sentence of this article mistakes Terabytes and Petabytes. I used to dismiss the entire article as poor quality on seeing a mistake like this. But these days it also feels like an indicator the article was written by a human and might actually have something interesting to say.

Sadly not in this case though - the Kioxia drives are interesting, but the fact that Dell has put some in a box is much less so.

There's been a lot of talk about orbital DCs lately, but with these levels of density, orbital CDNs might be a more obvious usecase. It would be interesting to see if something like Starlink can use something like this to cache media content and reduce their overall data moving through the constellation. It could even be worth it to have some satellites in higher orbits (even GEO if the ground hw can reach it) dedicated to streaming media content. You can tolerate higher RTT for content that doesn't need to be real time.

At current enterprise NVMe prices, the drives alone for this must easily push past the $500k to $1M mark. It's fascinating to see this level of density, but it’s strictly going to be hyperscaler or high-end defense/research budget territory for a long time.

Full NICs takes about 666 minutes to fill this thing.

Satan’s NAS!

This is one of the case limited by PCIe speed, sharing it with SSD so Network could only do 5x400Gbps Network. This is on PCIe 5.0, luckily we have 7.0 spec ready and 8.0 is even in 0.5 draft status.

If we could somehow increase the density further by 5x, we would be able to store 1EB in a single rack.

The most interesting part to me is the last sentence.

>Scality tells us it’s working on supporting a future nearline-class SSD from Samsung, viewed as an HDD killer, with similar or even larger capacity and a roadmap out to a 1 PB drive.

Finally a HDD killer. May be in another 5 - 10 years time. The day of everyone having an SSD NAS / AI Cloud at home will come.

Tell me about the thermals.

If datacenters start buying these things, will we see consumer harddrives go up in price?

Time for my NAS to get an upgrade.

I could do some cool backups with this bad boy.

Someone please fix the title for this.

Now make it for consumers. Storage capacity per dollar has really stalled.

Now you put this in a cruise ship and you can move a lot of data

Can't wait to move my spinning rust NAS to this in 20 years.

10PB is probably the amount of data a medium sized country can collect about its all citizens (basic details, work history, all taxes, all financial records, all medical records, all police records, all biometric records and more) for their lifetime.

I think development like this might get many public sector focused firms sweating.

What would this cost?

Remember that season of Silicon Valley on HBO that was all about “the box”?

I feel like we’re in that season.

Some wealthy techbro from /r/datahoarders is going to purchase this to store all episodes of Doctor Who in uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2 FFV1 Matroska remuxes with redundant PAR2 recovery archives.

All the increases in density are impressive, but they come with the downside of repairability and recycling difficulties. I hope we can still repair this when parts of it break or at least recycle it properly. No matter how high tech it is, eventually this will break.