In this blog we look at some recent storage and memory announcements on hard disk drives, solid state drives and emerging non-volatile memory from Backblaze, Western Digital, Liqid, Fantom Drives and Weebit Nano.
Blackblaze, a cloud storage company, has been tracking and reporting HDD, and more recently, SSD failure rates. They recently released their results for 259,084 HDD grouped into 32 different models, shown below. On average the quarterly annual failure rate (AFR) for these drives in Q3 2023 was 1.47% (that is about one and a half drive out of every 100 would fail during a year of use). This was down from 2.2% in Q2 2023 and also down from 1.65% a year ago. The quarterly AFR is based on just the data in that quarter.
The most recent addition to their arrays were 22TB WDC HDDs. 1,200 plus 4 of these drives are operational but with only 1 day of service in their Q3 2023 report. Seagate 6TB drives (ST6000DX000) with an average of 101 months in operation has zero failures in Q3 2023 with 883 drives and a lifetime AFR of 0.88%. Lifetime AFR for the entire drive population was 1.45%, very close to the Q3 2023 quarterly AFR.
Western Digital is shipping its 10-disk 24TB CMR HDDs for hyperscale, cloud and enterprise data center customers. Sampling since August, the new 28TB SMR HDD is also ramping. WDC’s 26TB SMR HDD exabyte shipments reached nearly half of its data center exabytes shipped in the first quarter fiscal year 2024. The company says that 28TB and 24TB HDDs are built with 40% (by weight) recycled content, and are 10%+ more energy efficient per terabyte, contributing to customers’ data center infrastructure power efficiency goals at scale. In particular, the 24TB Ultrastar DC HC580 CMR HDD provide 12% less Watt/TB2 compared to the company’s previous 22TB version.
At the 2023 Super Computing Conference Liqid was showing its UltraStack-L40S supercomputing system, using NVIDIA L40S GPUs, which are more readily available (and less expensive) than the more powerful H100 NVIDIA GPUs. The image below compares the L40S and H100 GPUs.
The image below shows the Liqid UltraStack system using 16 L40S GPUs, 64TB of Liqid Honey Badger NVMe SSDs and 768GB of GDDR6 DRAM memory. Running MLPerf 3.1 with an 16-L40S GPU UltraStack versus an 8-H100 GPU system resulted in 8% less performance but 40% less power consumption for a more energy efficient processing engine. Other workloads show different results.
Fantom Drives announced its VENOMX PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD for gaming, virtual reality and video production. These drives come in 1TB and 2TB models with read/write speeds up to 5,100/2,600 MB/s data rates. The drives has 1,500TBW (terabyes written) endurance and 1.5 million hours of mean time between failures (MTBF) with AES 256-bit encryption security.
Emerging memory startup Weebit Nano announced that it has received wafers with its embedded resistive random-access memory (ReRAM) from Global Foundries 22FDX platform (22nm process).
Backblaze reported 1.47% C3 2023 HDD AFR. WDC is shipping its 24TB CMR HDDs. Liqid showed its NVIDIA L40S GPU-based UltraStack with greater energy efficiency and close performance to H100-based systems for some workloads. Fantom Drives announced new SSDs and Weebit Nano has 22nm embedded ReRAM wafers from Global Foundries.
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