[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).