• dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️
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    7 hours ago

    No shit. All they have to do is finally grow the balls to build SSD’s in the same form factor as the 3.5" drives everyone in enterprise is already using, and stuff those to the gills with flash chips.

    “But that will cannibalize our artificially price inflated/capacity restricted M.2 sales if consumers get their hands on them!!!”

    Yep, it sure will. I’ll take ten, please.

    Something like that could easily fill the oodles of existing bays that are currently filled with mechanical drives, both in the home user/small scale enthusiast side and existing rackmount stuff. But that’d be too easy.

    • @jj4211
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      107 hours ago

      Hate to break it to you, but the 3.5" form factor would absolutely not be cheaper than an equivalent bunch of E1.S or M.2 drives. The price is not inflated due to the form factor, it’s driven primarily by the cost of the NAND chips, and you’d just need more of them to take advantage of bigger area. To take advantage of the thickness of the form factor, it would need to be a multi-board solution. Also, there’d be a thermal problem, since thermal characteristics of a 3.5" application are not designed with the thermal load of that much SSD.

      Add to that that 3.5" are currently maybe 24gb SAS connectors at best, which means that such a hypothetical product would be severely crippled by the interconnect. Throughput wise, talking about over 30 fold slower in theory than an equivalent volume of E1.S drives. Which is bad enough, but SAS has a single relatively shallow queue while an NVME target has thousands of deep queues befitting NAND randam access behavior. So a product has to redesign to vaguely handle that sort of product, and if you do that, you might as well do EDSFF. No one would buy something more expensive than the equivalent capacity in E1.S drives that performs only as well as the SAS connector allows,

      The EDSFF defined 4 general form factors, the E1.S which is roughly M.2 sized, and then E1.L, which is over a foot long and would be the absolute most data per cubic volume. And E3.S and E3.L, which wants to be more 2.5"-like. As far as I’ve seen, the market only really wants E1.S despite the bigger form factors, so I tihnk the market has shown that 3.5" wouldn’t have takers.

    • @[email protected]
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      05 hours ago

      I hope youre not putting m.2 drives in a server if you plan on reading the data from them at some point. Those are for consumers and there’s an entirely different formfactor for enterprise storage using nvme drives.

            • @[email protected]
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              12 hours ago

              TBH i have an old ssd for the host and rust for all my data. Don’t have m.2 or u.2 in my server but I’ve heard enough horror stories to just use u.2 if the time comes.

      • @jj4211
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        27 seconds ago

        Enterprise systems do have m.2, though admittedly its only really used as pretty disposable boot volumes.

        Though they aren’t used as data volumes so much, it’s not due to unreliability, it’s due to hot swap and power levels.

    • Justin
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      111 hours ago

      there are plenty of enterprise u.2 and m.2 22110 on ebay