Samsung T7: Why no 3TB or 4TB models?

[gthm]

The T7 is widely popular but they stop at 2TB which is not enough for what I want to do.

Specifically, I have 1TB worth of samples and VI content and want to put it all on one large drive (I like to keep my drives at 1/3 capacity whenever possible). So a 3TB or 4TB drive would be ideal (and more affordable than the competition as well I'm pretty sure).

It looks like I'm stuck with two 2TB T7s for my collection at the moment but a 3TB model would be more convenient. 4TB? Even better!

I'm not really looking for a different brand either.

Just wondering.

[Darryl Ramm]

You are creating a problem where none exists.

There is little rhyme or reason to keep a sample based SSD at some small fraction of its total capacity. The only reason you might want spare capacity is to make it easy to do housekeeping on samples, have enough spare space to move things around. There are no performance gains from keeping extra free space like on a HDD where you might want to avoid file fragmentation and encourage disk track clustering etc. And there are no SSD specific reasons like wanting to try to maintain free space for SSD drive wear... that drive is already doing that for you/you can't see it and since a sample drive it's almost all read-only there is really no drive wear.

So you don't have any issues, buy a cheap 2TB T7 stick your 1TB samples on it and you have 1TB more space to add more stuff to.

[Darryl Ramm]

And why not larger drives?

Global chip supply chain shortages

Likely NAND market demand/looming undersupply

Pricing... not sure how many folks would pay ~ 1.4 to ~2X uplift over a 2TB for a 4TB single drive.

T7 likely needs a new controller to handle larger/more modern NAND and I expect upgrades are more significant than adding more chips to an existing controller.

Thermals might get more challenging, will be interesting to see what Samsung does.

I expect Samsung might go 4TB on the higher-end X-series before doing so on the T-Series since they (clearly) make much higher margins there. So maybe look out for that. The X-Series badly needs a new redesign/repackage.

If you needed larger single compact drives today a M.2 NVMe/PCIe drive in a Thunderbolt 3 case will give more performance than the USB 3.2 Gen 2/NVMe T7 and can be found in 4TB and larger sizes. Thermals and packaging you want to be careful with.

[albee1952]

I agree with not leaving so much empty space on any drive. 15-20% is enough on a spinner, so I would expect an SSD to be perfectly happy if treated the same. My system drive(Samsung SSD) sits at 80-90 % and has been fine for 3 years. And it often goes into red(downloads default to C:\Downloads) until I move those files onto another drive.

[BScout]

Originally Posted by gthm

The T7 is widely popular but they stop at 2TB which is not enough for what I want to do.

Specifically, I have 1TB worth of samples and VI content and want to put it all on one large drive (I like to keep my drives at 1/3 capacity whenever possible). So a 3TB or 4TB drive would be ideal (and more affordable than the competition as well I'm pretty sure).

It looks like I'm stuck with two 2TB T7s for my collection at the moment but a 3TB model would be more convenient. 4TB? Even better!

I'm not really looking for a different brand either.

Just wondering.

Over-provisioning is what you do for SSDs (not just leaving space unused.) And over-provisioning over 20% is pretty useless by every studied metric (including from Samsung themselves.) Data centers have lots of data on OP usefulness. Leaving 66% empty is not useful in the least -- just a waste of space.

You can buy Samsung SSD (m2) drives and put them in other hardware/thunderbolt boxes as external drives and build to any size you want.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by BScout

Over-provisioning is what you do for SSDs (not just leaving space unused.) And over-provisioning over 20% is pretty useless by every studied metric (including from Samsung themselves.) Data centers have lots of data on OP usefulness. Leaving 66% empty is not useful in the least -- just a waste of space.

You can buy Samsung SSD (m2) drives and put them in other hardware/thunderbolt boxes as external drives and build to any size you want.

These drives are over provisioned ~7%, that's hidden, you can't see that as a normal user. And that's overkill for a read only/mostly sample drive.

[gthm]

I see, thanks for the info fellas!

I'm still following spinner rules in '22..

About the T7s, I use them temporarily until I pick up a Sonnet Echo Express SE IIIe and throw in my 980 Pros as per Darryl's great fan equipped enclosure recommendation from another thread. I may also get the heatsink 980 Pros to go the extra mile as far as cooling goes.

I am also curious what the updated X Series will be like.

Thanks again guys for helping a storage caveman