[jseliger]

I'm sure there's a market there, but I don't know how big it is. This is denser than current hard drives, but total cost is probably heavily in favor of hard drives for most use cases.

I'm not an expert on this, but my impression is that a lot of organizations that need a lot of space would be much happier with larger-capacity-but-slower drives because those drives can be so much cheaper than trying to build out more space.

[skuhn]

Density is nice, but I always look at that from a total cost perspective. So the real question is how much will this drive cost. I suspect it will be at least $1.20/gbyte -- not unreasonable considering that the Intel enterprise SSD lineup ranges from $0.80 - $1.60/gbyte.

With the Samsung 16TB SSD, I could fit 384TB in a 2U chassis and a total of 8.8PB in a rack (of 23 hosts). That's $10.6mm in disks in that one rack.

Or I could go with hard drives (8TB, 7200rpm, enterprisey, $700) and fit 288TB in a 4U chassis and 3.1PB in a rack. I would need three racks instead of one rack to equal the storage capacity. However, it costs me $832,000 in disks.

There's really no way that your fixed costs for 2 racks can make a dent in $9.7mm, even factoring in the differences in power utilization between the two. So you'd have to get a substantial benefit from the performance differential between a HDD and this SSD, but not to the point where you need the 82x performance improvement of a faster NVMe drive (such as the Intel P3500).