 In my hand is 16 terabytes of mechanical storage, and the crazy part is that's not even cutting edge. WD just announced 18 and 20 terabyte hard drives, both of which get absolutely f***ing s*** wrecked by this. This is the 100 terabyte aptly named ExaDrive from Nimbus Data. I have been waiting literally months to get my hands on the highest capacity SSD on the planet. Welcome to a very exciting installment of holy s***. It's worth 40,000 US dollars. But before that, gotcha, segue time. Ridge Wallet wants to redefine the wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates. Check out how they can help keep your wallet bulge down and use our offer code Linus to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. How bad is my hair right now? It's fine. The first thing you'll notice about the ExaDrive DC series is the size. It uses the same three and a half inch form factor as a typical desktop mechanical hard drive. By comparison, anything from a desktop SSD like this one, all the way up to a high capacity enterprise grade SSD like this 7.68 terabyte one from Micron uses the two and a half inch form factor, which back in the days when mechanical drives ruled the roost was only really used for laptops. It does this for a couple of reasons. Number one is that the ExaDrive is really considered by the manufacturer to be more of a competitor for hard drives than it is for high performance SSDs like this PCI Express one over here from Liquid. Reason number two is, and this is just great, look at this. They just need all that space. This has to be one of the most densely packed products that I have ever seen. It's nothing but floor to ceiling, wall to wall NAND flash inside the entire enclosure. It's actually even heavy. I mean, most SSDs, like they kind of don't really weigh anything and if they do, it's just because they're using like a big thick chassis so that it feels quality or whatever. This is not that far off the weight of an actual hard drive, but I guess that's just what it takes to get a hundred terabytes of storage into a three and a half inch drive. To put that capacity in the appropriate context for y'all. Okay, like what's a PC game that takes up an unfathomable amount of storage? Call of Duty Warzone. You could have 500 copies of Warzone on this drive. I mean, not quite, cause it's gonna be closer to like, you know, 90 terabytes by the time you actually formatted and account for overhead. Obviously I was being facetious just there. If you actually had 100 terabytes of game data, it would be way more economical to store it on a hard drive with a modestly sized solid state cache sitting in front of it. Thing is, a single user could never need low latency access to such an enormous and random distribution of data that they would need the entire library to be stored on solid state. Guys, you can only play one game at once, right? Well, except that time we played two games at once, but still even two, no justification for this. So, okay, let's play around with it, shall we? I've actually got Atto Disk benchmark running right now and you can see these numbers are not that impressive. Yep, at 512 bytes, we're looking at 9 megabytes a second writes and 13.81 megabytes a second reads. And in fact, getting all the way up to one, two and four megabyte transfers, we are still sitting in the 300 to 450 megabytes a second range. So, wow, considering that this is an SSD, that is not super fast, but it's really big. So in the data center, the advantages of an approach like this are very real. The biggest one is unrivaled storage density. A Storinator XL like we used in our most recent petabyte project holds 60 of the standard three and a half inch drives. Now with the 16 terabyte drives that we're using today, one of those units gives us about one petabyte of raw space in a 4U chassis. That's about 0.75 petabytes of accessible space after accounting for raid redundancy and other ZFS overhead. By comparison, one of those chassis full of these puppies gives us six petabytes of raw capacity, and over five petabytes of usable capacity. As long as we've got a cool $2.4 million for the drives alone. But don't let that price fool you into thinking that there's no market for these things. Increasing your storage density by five to six X has some very real advantages. Starting with the fact that you will need fewer servers to plug them into. Now in the context of $2.5 million worth of drives, the 10 grand or so that you might save per server box might not sound like a big advantage, but this is the, but wait, there's more moment. Fewer servers also means less expensive data center rack space and less rack space means less cooling. Each of these sucks back about eight Watts while idle and 16 Watts while active. That's 16 Watts, that's the reason we actually had this fan on here while we were running benchmarks. Possibly the biggest possible savings is that depending on what kind of software you're running, enterprise licensing, which can be thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year is often handled on a per server or per CPU socket basis. Meaning that if you can consolidate your server count from five down to one over a span of five years or more, those recurring costs could end up eating a lot of the savings that you would get by going with hard drives. Not to mention that the performance of an all SSD setup versus all hard drives is gonna be in another league, even if that's not that impressive for a modern SSD. Now, as I mentioned before, a lot of that ground could be made up with a higher speed SSD tier sitting in front of your spinning rust. But if you're working with, I don't know, let's say a gigantic scientific data set where you have no way of predicting what's gonna be accessed next, and all SSD setup will have a latency advantage, which can even help improve CPU utilization efficiency because the system will spend less time waiting around for a slow storage subsystem. It can even help with reliability. One of the scariest parts of any server maintenance project is rebuilding a failed or degraded drive in a RAID array. And this is especially true with mechanical drives. These things have reached the point where their capacities are so high and the speeds that you can access them at are so low that the wear and tear on them during a rebuild increases the odds of a subsequent failure during the rebuild to the point where it is not trivial. Well, an extra drive, like any SSD, has no moving parts, it has higher random performance, and it's got higher sustained speeds, reducing the time for these risky operations. So that all sounds great, but there are definitely some gotchas, and I mean, aside from the price. Nimbus Data, here, I've actually got their data sheet right here. Nimbus Data boasts a five-year warranty with unlimited drive rights per day. Wow, how on earth are they doing that? Unlimited, my friends. Are they using some kind of special flash that doesn't wear out? Is it magic SSDs? No, no, it's not. So, ah, whatever. This right here is a SATA interface, meaning that it's limited to six gigabit per second. By contrast, this right here is a liquid honey badger capable of over 50 times that speed. And that's not necessarily a bad thing here. I mean, the honey badger's a very different product. It takes up a PCI Express 16X Gen 4 slot and can't reach nearly the capacity that an extra drive can. All it means is that, practically speaking, they can offer an unlimited write warranty on this thing because you cannot write data to it fast enough over that interface to wear out the 100 terabytes of NAND in five years. It actually takes over two days of continuous sequential data writing to it in order to fill it up. Now, if you guys are anything like me, this is the part of this video you were waiting for. Not all this theoretical monkey business and all that nonsense. Linus, when are you gonna open the thing up and show us how it ticks? Right now. Now, it's not, strictly speaking, part of our loan agreement for this drive to open it up, but the way that I see it, they had to know who they were dealing with. Okay. So, oh, wow, not all the screws are the same. Better keep track of where those go. And there's just something about unlimited power. And besides, isn't it just delightfully naughty to void the warranty on a $40,000 product like that? Ready? Oh! Oh, interesting. Very interesting. See how that's kinda glossy on there like that? I thought that that might just be because there was some leftover residue from like a thermal pad or something, but there isn't. See, look. There's nothing on the underside of the enclosure. So, what this probably is, this is a strategy I've seen before, is a method of wiping off the markings from these chips, and then they've actually glued the outside of it to make it more difficult to reverse engineer the product. Very clever, Nimbus data. Very clever indeed. These look like standard SATA connectors here, and then some kind of power interface that I'm unfortunately not familiar with on each of these daughterboards. Requires quite a bit of stress on these posts here to pop these additional daughterboards up. Okay, we'll take off the second one. Each of these is 25 terabytes. Isn't that crazy? Okay, I don't like the strain that this is putting on this thing here. Is there a way to pop those posts out or something? Don't think of it in terms of how much money it's worth. Think of it in terms of the people need to see it. Just need to, just pop. Come on, come on, there we go. Okay, so even though they're using what looks like the same connector as like a U.2 NVMe drive here, you can actually see right on their PCB, custom pinout, do not insert SFF8639 cable slash backplane. This is what splits out to this. So here's all the SATA interfaces for the individual 25 terabyte kind of slices. Now this one, I'm pretty sure it would be fairly rude of me to show because compared to the slices, this seems to be where the actual brains is, but I'm gonna look at it. Yep, we're looking at an Ulterra FPGA. Looks like some memory. There is some very custom logic being done here. That's not a cheap processor. I figured out how they assemble it, Brendan. These posts, they unscrew. There's absolutely no reason whatsoever to put all that strain on them. Whoop, hey, there it goes. I don't remember what order they were in, so hopefully that doesn't matter. But yeah, you just put the slicey slices on there. 10 out of 10 slicey. I mean, imagine it, okay? Adding 25 terabytes of storage to your computer is that easy. Just do it four times and boom, 100 terabytes. And then I can just screw this in into the bottom there. No problem. I'm sweating right now from taking this thing apart. See, I play it off like I'm like, yeah, yeah, you know, whatever, it's like, yeah, whatever, it's like SSD or whatever, but like, I do not wanna break this. I'm pretty sure we're on the hook for it if I do. All right, moment of truth then. Hey, there's a bunch of activity LEDs. I didn't actually notice those before. Oh, you know what? I bet if I put them together in the wrong order, they probably need to at least be reformatted. I don't know what kind of logic that FPGA is programmed with though. Maybe it's smart enough to just put it back together. I definitely don't see the capacity. He is not accessible. Let's just give it a quick reboot. I think this was right. Oh, look at that. We've got a disk checking prompt. It's showing up in disk management. It's got the full capacity. What if we just delete the volume? Ah, okay, unallocated, new simple volume. Hey, hey, hold on. This all looks pretty normal. Let's do a quick format here. Oh, Jake did warn me. It takes a spicy minute to format. The system cannot find the file specified. That's not a great sign. Well, I guess they're gonna have to sort out which order the things go on in. Bye. Boy. Do you want 50 bucks? And to finally learn what making money with money means, TradeStation is one of the top brokers to do just that. They make it easy because you can trade stocks anywhere with their award-winning mobile app and desktop app, TradeStation 10. 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