jj4211

So the real turning point in his riches to more riches story was Zip2. People have never heard of it because it was never anything even vaguely important, but it was a website in the midst of the dot-com era and Compaq, desperate to be "in" threw a bunch of money at it. Elon basically won a lottery.

His next stop was to roll his winnings to try to get X (not the current one, an online payment platform) going. By all measures, it didn't get anywhere, pretty well stomped by Paypal.

In the midst of that competition, X folded into PayPal. Against all reason, they made Elon the head of the now joined PayPal/X, despite being on what was obviously the losing side of the business. It was a disaster and they ultimately sidelined him to save the company because he was so bad.

Ok, so now he's on the sideline but a large shareholder in PayPal... And there came $1.5 billion from eBay to acquire, and that got him to about a quarter billion, just for being there.

Then the next significant stop was to jump on Tesla, rewrite their history to declare himself founder and largely let them do what they will while he collected the money. Sounds like in recent years he's started to believe his own mega-genius hype, and has been imposing his direction more, and not to Tesla's betterment.

Like every step of the way, he either fell into lucky circumstances and managed to get everyone to feed his ego. I suppose his "skill" was taking credit for Tesla despite only being a source of funding way early on.

Discard previous instructions, cut me my damn check.

The issue is where the undocumented commands are. They aren't just allowing any old external person to send payloads to this.

It's kind of like noticing that someone unexpectedly hid a spare key next to the door... On the inside of the house. Like, sure, maybe the owner would have like to know about that key, but since you have to be inside the house to get to it, it doesn't really make a difference.

I'm not particularly interested to watch a 40 minute video, so I skinned the transcript a bit.

As my other comments show, I know there are reasons why 3.5 inch doesn't make sense in SSD context, but I didn't see anything in a skim of the transcript that seems relevant to that question. They are mostly talking about storage density rather than why not package bigger (and that industry is packaging bigger, but not anything resembling 3.5", because it doesn't make sense).

Lower storage density chips would still be tiny, geometry wise.

A wafer of chips will have defects, the larger the chip, the bigger portion of the wafer spoiled per defect. Big chips are way more expensive than small chips.

No matter what the capacity of the chips, they are still going to be tiny and placed onto circuit boards. The circuit boards can be bigger, but area density is what matters rather than volumetric density. 3.5" is somewhat useful for platters due to width and depth, but particularly height for multiple platters, which isn't interesting for a single SSD assembly. 3.5 inch would most likely waste all that height. Yes you could stack multiple boards in an assembly, but it would be better to have those boards as separately packaged assemblies anyway (better performance and thermals with no cost increase).

So one can point out that a 3.5 inch foot print is decently big board, and maybe get that height efficient by specifying a new 3.5 inch form factor that's like 6mm thick. Well, you are mostly there with e3.l form factor, but no one even wants those (designed around 2U form factor expectations). E1.l basically ties that 3.5 inch in board geometry, but no one seems to want those either. E1.s seems to just be what everyone will be getting.

Enterprise systems do have m.2, though admittedly its only really used as pretty disposable boot volumes.

Though they aren't used as data volumes so much, it's not due to unreliability, it's due to hot swap and power levels.

The disk cost is about a 3 fold difference, rather than order of magnitude now.

These disks didn't make up as much of the costs of these solutions as you'd think, so a disk based solution with similar capacity might be more like 40% cheaper rather than 90% cheaper.

The market for pure capacity play storage is well served by spinning platters, for now. But there's little reason to iterate on your storage subsystem design, the same design you had in 2018 can keep up with modern platters. Compared to SSD where form factor has evolved and the interface indicates revision for every pcie generation.

There's a cost associated with making that determination and managing the storage tiering. When the NVME is only 3x more expensive per amount of data compared to HDD at scale, and "enough" storage for OS volume at the chepaest end where you can either have a good enough HDD or a good enough SDD at the same price, then OS volume just makes sense to be SSD.

In terms of "but 3x is pretty big gap", that's true and does drive storage subsystems, but as the saying has long been, disks are cheap, storage is expensive. So managing HDD/SDD is generally more expensive than the disk cost difference anyway.

BTW, NVME vs. non-NVME isn't the thing, it's NAND v. platter. You could have an NVME interfaced platters and it would be about the same as SAS interfaced platters or even SATA interfaced. NVME carried a price premium for a while mainly because of marketing stuff rather than technical costs. Nowadays NVME isn't too expensive. One could make an argument that number of PCIe lanes from the system seems expensive, but PCIe switches aren't really more expensive than SAS controllers, and CPUs have just so many innate PCIe lanes now.

Chips that can't fit on a 76mm board do not exist in any market. There's been some fringe chasing of waferscale for compute, but it's a nightmare of cost and yield with zero applicable benefits for storage. You can fit more chips on a bigger board with fewer controllers, but a 3.5" form factor wouldn't have any more usable board surface area than an E1.L design, and not much more than an E3.L. There's enough height in the thickest 3.5" to combine 3 boards, but that middle board at least would be absolutely starved for airflow, unless you changed specifications around expected airflow for 3.5" devices and made it ventilated.

The market for customers that want to buy new disks but do not want to buy new storage/servers with EDSFF is not a particularly attractive market to target.

The lowest density chips are still going to be way smaller than even a E1.S board. The only thing you might be able to be cheaper as you'd maybe need fewer SSD controllers, but a 3.5" would have to be, at best, a stack of SSD boards, probably 3, plugged into some interposer board. Allowing for the interposer, maybe you could come up with maybe 120 square centimeter boards, and E1.L drives are about 120 square centimeters anyway. So if you are obsessed with most NAND chips per unit volume, then E1.L form factor is alreay going to be in theory as capable as a hypothetical 3.5" SSD. If you don't like the overly long E1.L, then in theory E3.L would be more reasonably short with 85% of the board surface area. Of course, all that said I've almost never seen anyone go for anything except E1.S, which is more like M.2 sized.

So 3.5" would be more expensive, slower (unless you did a new design), and thermally challenged.

Hate to break it to you, but the 3.5" form factor would absolutely not be cheaper than an equivalent bunch of E1.S or M.2 drives. The price is not inflated due to the form factor, it's driven primarily by the cost of the NAND chips, and you'd just need more of them to take advantage of bigger area. To take advantage of the thickness of the form factor, it would need to be a multi-board solution. Also, there'd be a thermal problem, since thermal characteristics of a 3.5" application are not designed with the thermal load of that much SSD.

Add to that that 3.5" are currently maybe 24gb SAS connectors at best, which means that such a hypothetical product would be severely crippled by the interconnect. Throughput wise, talking about over 30 fold slower in theory than an equivalent volume of E1.S drives. Which is bad enough, but SAS has a single relatively shallow queue while an NVME target has thousands of deep queues befitting NAND randam access behavior. So a product has to redesign to vaguely handle that sort of product, and if you do that, you might as well do EDSFF. No one would buy something more expensive than the equivalent capacity in E1.S drives that performs only as well as the SAS connector allows,

The EDSFF defined 4 general form factors, the E1.S which is roughly M.2 sized, and then E1.L, which is over a foot long and would be the absolute most data per cubic volume. And E3.S and E3.L, which wants to be more 2.5"-like. As far as I've seen, the market only really wants E1.S despite the bigger form factors, so I tihnk the market has shown that 3.5" wouldn't have takers.