hmm, swear I read that somewhere...but its probably connected to the previously no longer reliable memory, so, no longer sure.
Okay, but for which silicon?
See, there's a number of SAS expander silicon manufacturers, including PMC Sierra (PM-80xx), LSI (LSISAS2x36), Maxim (MAX70238B), etc. Those are SAS2 part numbers but there were even a few more mfrs back in the SAS1 days. See these things are basically specialized little communications processors. So it's certainly possible that there were firmware updates for one or more of the SAS1 expanders that were available.
technically, we don't foresee this happening in the near future due to current projections an known technologies, but something could change and totally rewrite it with a new invention. the point of pointing it out was to show the absurdity of the max size of sas2+ compared to current and likely future drive sizes.
Still not going to happen. There's a point of impracticality that you will pass.
We passed the point of impracticality for HDD and small file storage years ago. Back in the days of 1GB HDD, running at maybe 100 seeks per second, and approximately two million addressable sectors, you could fill a disk using random sector writes in about 20,000 seconds (quarter of a day). By comparison, a modern 14TB HDD running at maybe 200 seeks per second, the math result is way different. You have twenty seven billion addressable sectors and need about 137 million seconds (1580 days) *just* to fill it. So these are basically impractical for random read/write of sector-sized data, and the only reason HDD still works out is because we usually have large sequential runs of stuff to store.
You can look at SSD on SAS2 to see that there is a practical limit that exists with SAS2. At a generous 550MByte/sec fill rate, you can write 47TB/day or 87PB in the expected 5 year lifespan of a storage device -- doing absolutely no other operations (though SAS2 is bidirectional and dual port so it has possibilities). So you can probably create some hypothetical situation with SAS2 where you have a write-only device that's going constantly at 550MByte/sec for like 10 years and you actually manage to touch each 48-bit LBA once... but I deem this impractical with a "stupid too" bonus multiplier
same. ran across some 7TB SSD...for ONLY $25,000 @ a steal being on sale for $8,000 off.....
Well the interesting thing is that the vast amount of bits I see being stored on stupid-expensive flash out there are not actually being rewritten often enough to justify the stupid-expensive flash.
I've been deploying consumer-grade flash in hypervisors since 2010-2011. Because most of my applications are "must-run", the typical dodge of just buying a single enterprise SSD and hoping for the best wasn't in the cards. I put them behind an LSI RAID (the actual real ones, not fake-HBA ones) and most of those survive to this day. I think I won, since I was paying well less than half what an enterprise SSD would have been. I do have some workloads that actually require the enterprise SSD, and those get that. *shrug*.
The experience with the 2015 480GB Intel 535's was also enlightening. That year, prices had been plummeting for SSD's, and projections were for this to continue. So I put several TB of 480's out in our data center, two RAID1 datastores with a spare in each hypervisor, knowing that we were going to blow through their 40GB-per-day endurance. I figured on buying new ones in a year or two. Some of those survived, some didn't. I was wrong about future pricing trends but that info came from people more knowledgeable than I about the trends.
Thing is, I'm pretty certain that if larger consumer SSD's were put out, they'd sell, but they might not sell to consumers. Not all enterprise workloads demand 1DWPD. As a matter of fact, I think most of them do NOT. But right now a lot of that is being managed on conventional HDD storage arrays because the price for enterprise is hideous, as you note. Other bits of it are being stored on hideously expensive enterprise SSD.
If you look inside a modern 2.5" SSD you will find it mostly empty air. I wish they'd cram the damn thing full of flash for like a 32TB SSD
