alt Hacker NewsThere's been a lot of talk about orbital DCs lately, but with these levels of density, orbital CDNs might be a more obvious usecase. It would be interesting to see if something like Starlink can use something like this to cache media content and reduce their overall data moving through the constellation. It could even be worth it to have some satellites in higher orbits (even GEO if the ground hw can reach it) dedicated to streaming media content. You can tolerate higher RTT for content that doesn't need to be real time.
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For the sake of the generations that come after us, we really should not dump valuable material into space. I somehow doubt the electronics in space would be recovered and recycled properly.
Or you could use fibre, which has the advantage of not needing to use > 1kw of concentrated microwave to get ~2gig of throughput
Or even better not yeeting it into an environment where its cooked/cooled every 90 minutes
Or even better where its not absolutely pelted by cosmic rays enough to obliterate a good GB a day of data.
Or space data centre.
If I correctly understand what you're suggesting, then that could save on uplink bandwidth. Sending one copy into space, and then sending it back down over and over again sounds nice.
But does it solve a problem that we actually have? Is uplink bandwidth a pressing limitation?
/me turning in my sleep muttering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledesic
no, absolutely not. orbital datacenters are never going to happen, it doesn't matter whether you try to frame them as compute or storage or whatever else.
the extreme density of these SSDs is actually an anti-feature in the context of spacecraft hardware.
the RAD750 CPU [0] for example uses a 150nm process node. its successor the RAD5500 [1] is down to 45nm. that's an order of magnitude larger than chips currently made for terrestrial uses.
radiation-hardening involves a lot of things, but in general the more tightly packed the transistors are, the more susceptible the chip is to damage. sending these SSDs to space would be an absurd waste of money because of how quickly they would degrade.
and then there's the power consumption & heat dissipation. one of these drives draws 25W [2] and Dell is bragging about cramming 40 of them into one server. that's a full kilowatt of power - essentially a space heater in a 2U form factor.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD5500
2: https://americas.kioxia.com/content/dam/kioxia/en-us/busines...