Haven't they said that about magnetic tape as well?
Some 30 years ago?
Isn't magnetic tape still around? Isn't even IBM one of the major vendors?
this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2025
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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.
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.
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.
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there are plenty of enterprise u.2 and m.2 22110 on ebay
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I'll shed no tears, even as a NAS owner, once we get equivalent capacity SSD without ruining the bank :P
Considering the high prices for high density SSD chips...
Why are there no 3.5" SSDs with low density chips?
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Meanwhile Western Digital moves away from SSD production and back to HDDs for massive storage of AI and data lakes and such: https://www.techspot.com/news/107039-western-digital-exits-ssd-market-shifts-focus-hard.html
Yea but isn't that more because SanDisk is going to fully focus on that? Or what am I missing?
That SanDisk is it's own company now.
But I don't k ow if they are still a subsidiary or completely spun of WD.
So can someone make 3.5" SSDs then????
They can be made any size. Most SATA SSD are just a plastic housing around a board with some chips on it. The right question is when will we have a storage technology with the durability and reliability of spinning magnetized hard drive platters. The nand flash chips used in most SSD and m.2 are much more reliable than they were initially. But for long-term retention Etc. Are still off quite a good bit from traditional hard drives. Hard drives can sit for about 10 years generally before bit rot becomes a major concern. Nand flash is only a year or two iirc.
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Given that there are already 32TB 2.5” SSDs, what does a 3.5” buy you that you couldn’t get with an adapter?
Native slotting into server drive cages. No concerns about alignment with the front or back.
The market for customers that want to buy new disks but do not want to buy new storage/servers with EDSFF is not a particularly attractive market to target.
What kind of server? Dell's caddies have adapters, and I'm pretty sure some have screw holes on the bottom so you don't need an adapter.
They should be cheaper since theres a bunch more space to work with. You don't have to make the storage chips as small.
Chips that can't fit on a 76mm board do not exist in any market. There's been some fringe chasing of waferscale for compute, but it's a nightmare of cost and yield with zero applicable benefits for storage. You can fit more chips on a bigger board with fewer controllers, but a 3.5" form factor wouldn't have any more usable board surface area than an E1.L design, and not much more than an E3.L. There's enough height in the thickest 3.5" to combine 3 boards, but that middle board at least would be absolutely starved for airflow, unless you changed specifications around expected airflow for 3.5" devices and made it ventilated.
A better price as low density chips are cheaper.
And you can fit in more of those in a bigger space = Cheaper.
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A big heat sink like they used to put on WD Raptor drives.
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Why? We can cram 61TB into a slightly overgrown 2.5” and like half a PB per rack unit.
Because we don't have to pack it in too much. It'd be higher capacities for cheaper for consumers
Also cooling
It’s not the packaging that costs money or limits us, it’s the chips themselves. If we crammed a 3.5” form factor full of flash storage, it would be far outside the budgets of mortals.
You could make the chips bigger, which should be cheaper to produce.
Nope. Larger chips, lower yields in the fab, more expensive. This is why we have chiplets in our CPUs nowadays. Production cost of chips is superlinear to size.
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Relevant video about the problems with high capacity ssds.
I'm not particularly interested to watch a 40 minute video, so I skinned the transcript a bit.
As my other comments show, I know there are reasons why 3.5 inch doesn't make sense in SSD context, but I didn't see anything in a skim of the transcript that seems relevant to that question. They are mostly talking about storage density rather than why not package bigger (and that industry is packaging bigger, but not anything resembling 3.5", because it doesn't make sense).
Fourty minutes? Yeah, no. How about an equivalent text that can be parsed in five?
I want them like my 8" floppies!
Hdds were a fad, I'm waiting for the return of tape drives. 500TB on a $20 cartridge and I can live with the 2 minute seek time.
It's not a real hard disk unless you can get it to walk across the server room anyway.
Tapes are still sold in pretty high densities, don't have to wait!
Tape drives are still definitely a thing.
If you exclude the introductory price of the drive and needing specialized software to read/write to it it's very affordable €/TB
Spinning rust is a funny way of describing HDDs, but I immediately get it
Just replace then all with flash, along with bluray (or other optical storage) for archival.
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My datacenter is 80% nvme at this point. Just naturally. It's crazy.
Nvme is terrible value for storage density. There is no reason to use it except when you need the speed and low latency.
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Just like magnetic tape! Oh wait..
I doubt it. SSDs are subject to quantuum tunneling. This means if you don't power up an SSD once in 2-5 years, your data is gone. HDDs have no such qualms. So long as they still spin, there's your data and when they no longer do, you still have the heads inside.
So you have a use case that SSDs will never replace, cold data storage. I use them for my cold offsite back ups.
You're wrong. HDD need about as much frequently powering up as SSD, because the magnetization gets weaker.
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Nothing in this article is talking about cold storage. And if we are talking about cold storage, as others gave pointed out, HHDs are also not a great solution. LTO (magnetic tape) is the industry standard for a good reason!
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