The SSDs were shipped to the International Space Station by Kioxia, a storage solution manufacturer separated from Toshiba, in June 2018, equipped inside computer systems manufactured by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. The two-hour HPE Spaceborne Computer is equipped with up to 130 TB of SSD for astronauts and scientists working on the ISS to carry out experiments that require the processing power of high-performance computing systems.
Before the Spaceborne Computer 2 was launched to the ISS, to process the data generated from space experiments, astronauts and scientists working on the space station had to send this huge amount of data to Earth to take advantage of the power of the home supercomputers.
The current design of the Spaceborne Computer 2 applies to HPE’s Edgeline and ProLiant servers. In terms of storage, this high-performance computer system consists of eight 1TB NVMe drives, four 960GB SAS SSDs, and four business-friendly SAS SSDs, each with a capacity of 30.72 TB, totaling more than 130TB. There’s never been a refueling mission to the ISS carrying such a large amount of storage capacity.
According to Kioxia, solid hard drives are a better solution for outer space tasks than drives from HDDs, as they ensure the requirements for power consumption, data retrieval speed, and durability. The SSD doesn’t have any mechanical components like the HDD, and the NAND chip flash speeds are many times faster than the magnetic disk. The Japanese unit will be monitoring the health of the 130TB SSD they’re equipped with for the computer system that serves astronauts on the ISS every day, both for support and to understand how flash memory works in outer space environments.
