U.2 /U.3 SSD are they preformatted or unformatted when bought new?

Hardware Hub Storage
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I have been intrested in maybe making a U.2 flash server and seeing the size of these drives at say 15.36 TB or 30.7 TB and even the 60.what ever and the 128 size and the price of these are not cheap and yes they are Enterprise grade lvl storage.

My question is simply if I where to purchase a 15.36 TB brand spanking new SSD of this quailty do I need to format like I would do on a normal spinning rust HDD when bought, or are these just pop it in your System and start using the Storage out of the box.

If its connect then format and you lose allot of storage space at this cost and then have to set up a raid array with these after that is ruddy costly…

$60,000 say for a 128 TB drive having to format that thing and loose up to about 20 TB in space in the process is going to hurt the old wallet, some what ?

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Nope, you never bought it in the first place :roll_eyes: You’ve fallen victim to marketing BS. Long story short: computers use a different method to calculate storage space then humans and marketeers abuse this to advertise higher capacities then there really is on the drive. So, it was never there to start with.

So, in short: yes, you will need to format the U.2 or U.3 drive before use. And that will reduce the advertised capacity to the real capacity of the drive. Understandably you feel robbed. Don’t blame the computer, blame marketeers :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

2 Likes
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The drop in capacity from advertised is one of the unfortunate side effects of trying to use metric system prefixes rather than a more apt measuring system (binary prefixes).

The marketing isn’t lying, they are just using the metric system.

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See also Binary prefix - Wikipedia

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My CIS teacher made this one of his first lessons when I was going to high/votec school. He was a wealth of useful knowledge and is a teacher at a university now.

He’d also play the Footmen Frenzy mod in Warcraft III with us if our work was finished. Beware the COCOMAMASHANK.

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Thank you for that feed back, my thinking was simply with the U.2 / U.3 flash format and the cost you got more bang for your buck with the Enterprise level tech was achievable in this day and age.