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The u.2 form factor is slightly larger than a 2.5" drive. I can imagine the entire space in it taken by Flash chips. I can't imagine what cooling scheme do they employ for the chips in the middle.
Can someone who knows explain what is the benefit of having all that data in one ssd instead of splitting it up into hundreds of individual drives? Does the single ssd benefit is more performance or does it really tuen out to be cheaper than hundreds of individual drives?
QLC NAND

The datasheet shows 3GB/s sequential write, which for 245.76TB means writing the whole drive takes around 22h45m. Odd that the endurance is specified as "1.0 SDWPD", which is almost meaningless since the drive takes roughly that long to write at full speed.

At scale, 1.9 times more energy is required for an HDD deployment

...but those HDDs are going to hold data for far more than twice as long. It's especially infuriating to see such secrecy and vagueness around the real endurance/retention characteristics for SSDs as expensive as these.

On the other hand, 60TB of SLC for the same price would probably be a great deal.

I look forward to have my favourite hyperscaler grant me 1000 "premium" IOPS per VM on this monster.
What is this thing that all pictures of new devices need to come with this black background?
Would like to see what the internals of this look like, how many flash packages and PCBs are in that tiny chassis?
Data centers are winning.
Cost? Durability? Iops do we know?
I checked the specs here: https://www.micron.com/content/dam/micron/global/public/prod...

The interface looks equiv to 4x PCIe 5.0.

    > Sequential read (MB/s): 13,700
    > Sequential write (MB/s): 2,700
That is pretty awful write performance. Does anyone know more about this? I assume all of these hyperdense SSDs suffer from the same drawback. Also, I heard that the E3.L interface can support up to 16x lanes, but there are no practical commerical products at this point.
The word AI can be safely deleted wherever it occurs in this press release.

Very cool bit of tech.

Meanwhile I'm still dreaming about any consumer and affordable 32TB or even 16TB portable SSD. Innovation and market for consumers are going backwards.

Funny thing is that one of the best you can get is the Crucial (Micron) 8TB one but even that one gets more expensive. I have the feeling it will be gone completely soon.

“For AI workloads: The 245TB Micron 6600 ION provided up to 84 times better energy efficiency”

How big of a deal is this part in relation to the initial upfront costs? I’m not privy to the cost of power for SSD

Want, but then need two for reduncancy... then a spare for recovery... why not 3 raid or zfs... imagine the resilver time on this. It's hit the limit of data surety surely.
The press release is missing the key specification — how many Libraries of Congress fit on this thing?
God damn. I know somebody that became a multi-millionaire from web hosting in the 2000s and his entire data center back then could have been replaced with just one of these SSDs.
(Im)patiently waiting for this AI-generated memory crisis to pass (or the bubble to pop) so SSD prices can crash back down again. Been dreaming of replacing my RAID6 HDD setup with a RAID1 of SSDs and a hot spare.
We bought a 2TB Sandisk SSD back in 2024 for around $95 from best buy. Today 1TB ssd by sandisk is $166(the cheapest that i found, and it goes for $199 in walmart). Market is forcing people to become renters than buyers and there is no force countering that idea. Its a market failure that people will study 10-15 years from now.

EDIT- The same 2TB ssd is now $329.99 at bestbuy.

Last fall I bought a 4tb Samsung 990 pro drive for $260. Now it retails between $800-900.
Are you sure it’s the same ssd. The new nvme5 disks are 3x faster
A 245TB SSD completely changes the density math for database nodes. The reduction in rack space alone makes this a huge win.
In the fall, I bought a 4TB OWC Thunderbolt 5 external SSD for my Mac Studio 512 GB for $500. It was cheaper and faster than any other solution. Now the price of both have at least doubled. I've seen Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512 GB go for $20k+ but I don't know if those are real prices or scams. We are going on 6 years of global supply crunches, I'm really getting sick of it!
2 TB NVMe SSD on the German market:

* October 2020: around 200 EUR

* May 2026: around 230 EUR