Mushkin shows off a 4TB SSD with estimated price of US$500

[HEXUS]

But its configuration means that it only offers about 10K IOPS.

Read more.

[outwar6010]

My new steam drive. I would also like a 3.5" variant where they jam in as much as they could.

[scaryjim]

It may "only" do 10k IOPS, but that was fairly standard for early consumer SSDs, and is still a couple of orders of magnitude better than spinning rust At 4TB I'd use one as my main system drive more than happily...

[The Hand]

Prepared to be bombarded with emails from retailers trying to sell off smaller capacity SSDs! This 4TB would go nicely in a new 4K build with a 2016 gpu and cpu.

[smargh]

Oooh. There is a market for this - slow, large capacity, but hopefully reliable, and run cool. Obviously endurance might perhaps be of concern, but that might be less of a factor where the data doesn't really change much over time.

I have four 2TB drive in RAID1 which are noisy, are awkward to keep cool in a hot room, and the slowness compared to my SSD is really annoying. Two 4TB SSDs would replace them perfectly. Hopefully they wouldn't need much in the way of cooling.

Perhaps they could brand them as an "Archive SSD", as Seagate does with their high-capacity-cool-running-spinning-rust drives.

[shaithis]

"Only 10k IOPS"

I've seen Dell Equallogics full of 15k RPM enterprise drives doing 5k IOPS and serving a ton of servers!

[DemonHighwayman]

I hope this encourages other manufacturers to release their own large capacity/decent priced SSD's, I'm so sick of waiting for an affordable SSD which will hold my steam library with room for more.

[tonyd223]

Steam drive!

[Lanky123]

Surely the 2TB drives that make up each half of this will be roughly half the price...so why not just buy two of those and not suffer the drop in performance. For a laptop with only one drive bay I guess I can see a use...

[scaryjim]

Surely the 2TB drives that make up each half of this will be roughly half the price... ...

Depends on the BOM for the bridging/raid chip vs the cost for the additional PCB, SATA connector, drive case, packaging and shipping. If the RAID controller chip is cheap it could well be cheaper to manufacturer this drive than two separate 2TB drives. And a cheap controller might explain the comparatively low IOPS too....

EDIT:

Following the links from the original story, there's a bit of a discrepancy. The $0.25/GB figure quoted by Tech Report is actually for the 2TB drive, which would make that ~ $500. However, later in the story they also state the $500 is the target price for the 4TB drive (which would come out at $0.125). So either they're making an absolute killing on the 2TB version, or the 4TB version won't actually be made up of 2 Reactors. If the RAID chip won't support the throughput of a full-on Reactor anyway it might make sense to use lower binned controllers and flash, heavily underclocked, to create a cheap storage drive from components that might otherwise have been thrown out...?

[rpsgc]

Good enough for fast storage or gaming.

[MercutioUK]

Depends on the BOM for the bridging/raid chip vs the cost for the additional PCB, SATA connector, drive case, packaging and shipping. If the RAID controller chip is cheap it could well be cheaper to manufacturer this drive than two separate 2TB drives. And a cheap controller might explain the comparatively low IOPS too....

EDIT:

Following the links from the original story, there's a bit of a discrepancy. The $0.25/GB figure quoted by Tech Report is actually for the 2TB drive, which would make that ~ $500. However, later in the story they also state the $500 is the target price for the 4TB drive (which would come out at $0.125). So either they're making an absolute killing on the 2TB version, or the 4TB version won't actually be made up of 2 Reactors. If the RAID chip won't support the throughput of a full-on Reactor anyway it might make sense to use lower binned controllers and flash, heavily underclocked, to create a cheap storage drive from components that might otherwise have been thrown out...?

I'd imagine there's a thought something along the lines of keeping them as a "premium product". As soon as someone pumps out huge cheap ones, the overall market for them will start to balance somewhere in the middle as there will be a tonne of customers happy with the compromise.

Now one's broken ranks and done it (IF the price is even remotely correct) you can probably see the others start to wonder about their sales figures. I think there's an enormous market there for big "slow" ssd's, especially with NVMe starting to appear. The constant deals on the sandisk drives - followed by their hat in the ring towards NVMe (maybe only an M.2 I saw, I'll check properly). Maybe it's beginning to be a regular part and the NVMe can be the premium product. I'd be EXTREMELY happy to have a .5TB NVMe (paying the premium) and a 4TB sata SSD as my main systems only drives. Hell, I'll offer "I might even use em in a NAS box for power savings if you make em cheap enough, you can even make the throughput kinda crappy" too.

[iworrall]

Might even be big enough for the final build of Star Citizen!

[Ulti]

Yes please for someone like me! I find the noise of HDDs simply too loud in an otherwise silent build so I've gone with SSDs only. This is awesome as a storage/games drive!

[Axle_Grease]

I did some tests on my PCs using Iometer (4KiB 100% Read; 0% Random)

Samsung 850 Pro SSD (SATA 6Gb) 73K IOPS (299MBPS)
3 x 600GB WD Black Caviar HDD (RAID 0) 42K IOPS (172MBPS)
Seagate 512GB HDD does 23K IOPS (96MBPS)

So that 10K IOPS figure has got to be a mistake, otherwise it would mean that the Mushkin SSD has less than half the performance of a regular HDD.

[Splash]

I did some tests on my PCs using Iometer (4KiB 100% Read; 0% Random)

Samsung 850 Pro SSD (SATA 6Gb) 73K IOPS (299MBPS)
3 x 600GB WD Black Caviar HDD (RAID 0) 42K IOPS (172MBPS)
Seagate 512GB HDD does 23K IOPS (96MBPS)

So that 10K IOPS figure has got to be a mistake, otherwise it would mean that the Mushkin SSD has less than half the performance of a regular HDD.

There's something very wrong with your figures there - a typical sata 7.2k disk will give you something like 75iops, so putting 3 in RAID0 (ie no RAID tax) should give you something like 225 iops.