Storage veterans have devised a 3-tiered, 200TB hybrid SSD-HHD device, the DoItRite 2000, containing both spinning disk platters and a non-rotating platter of NAND chips combining NVMe SSD speed and extraordinary capacity.
The engineers at MackStor, veterans from Maxtor and other now vanished disk drive manufacturers, have taken a 9-platter, helium-filled, disk drive base system and replaced the top platter with a non-rotating disk containing 30TB of NAND. This is divided into 25TB of QLC (4 bits/cell) flash and 5TB of much faster SLC (1 bit/cell) flash to provide a fast landing zone for write data as well as low latency read access.
Dr Theodore Hirate, CEO and co-founder of MackStor, said in a statement: “We have solved the dilemma of choosing between disk capacity and SSD speed with the DoItRite 2000, by combining both media in a single drive that’s perfectly aligned with the post-pandemic data storage challenges facing us all.”
The eight disk platters hold 20TB of shingled magnetic recorded data. The drive controller’s software provides automatic and policy-driven tiering of data between the three tiers with machine learning algorithms identifying data for up- and down-tiering.
The controller uses three Arm chips; one for the disk platters, a second for the SSD, and third to provide management and data management services, including deduplication and compression. The effective capacity after data reduction is increased fourfold – to a staggering 200TB. Only deduplicated and compressed data is written to disk.
The drive transfers data across an NVMe PCIe gen 4 x 8 lane interface at 5GB/sec read and write and can deliver 2.6 million random read and 2.8 million random write IOPS. The latency is less than 500µs for 99.99 per cent of data requests. Power consumptIon is modest and heat generation no more than a standard, legacy hard drive. The drive is warranted for 5 years or 5 PB total data written; whichever comes first.
Jet Black Desiato, Chief Marketing Officer at MackStor, said: “This DoItRite 2000 drive will blow the socks pff the legacy disk and flash storage drive technology laggards out there. Our radically lower cost per terabyte will lead to wholesale domination of all enterprise and hyperscaler storage markets.”
The DoItRite 2000 drive is sampling shipping from today, April 1, 2021.
