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The world’s largest solid-state drive (SSD) has just been announced, and it’s a doozy — the 32TB monster can store up to 64 4K movies at once in its stratospherically high-capacity storage. But there’s one glaring problem with this technological marvel: its eye-watering price tag of $5,000 (not including additional hardware needed to use it). That puts it out of reach of most consumers — and even if you could afford to buy it, where would you put it?
Introduction
Intel has just announced a new line of Xpoint based storage drives that will be in competition with the existing NAND flash technology. Called Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Series, these are enterprise and data center applications. These drives are capable of storing up to 10 terabytes per square inch of space – meaning it is 1,000 times denser than traditional hard drives. The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X series comes in two models: 375GB priced at $1,520 and 750GB priced at $3,020. The price for this device makes one realize that they have entered into a new era where data is worth more than gold. However, the drive does come at a steep cost but it’s no doubt seen as worthwhile because there is virtually no limit on how much data you can store. Storage space may not be at a premium anymore but rather how long you can store your data before it disappears into digital oblivion.
The World’s Biggest SSD
The world’s biggest solid state drive has just been announced by Samsung. The PM1643 is a 16 terabyte drive with a price tag that will make your eyes water. It costs $10,000 for the hardware and $7 million per petabyte to store data on it.
The drive is based on Samsung’s third generation of 3D NAND technology and can read data at twice the speed of its predecessor, which led to its introduction as one of their key components in their Data Center First strategy. Not only are there three times more layers than previous versions, but they also use the company’s proprietary vertical NAND (VNAND) architecture. In layman’s terms this means the chips are taller rather than wider – meaning more can be packed into each wafer and more into each chip itself.
The Price Tag
It takes something extraordinary to set new records in storage technology. But that’s exactly what SanDisk has done with their latest breakthrough – a 1 terabyte (1 TB) solid state drive that’s so fast it can transfer data at up to 2 gigabytes per second! The price tag is also eye-watering at $1,000 and it’s not expected to be available until 2016. That’s too bad because this could have been a great Christmas gift for the office IT guy. I guess we’ll just have to wait.
It was announced on October 8th, 2015 by Western Digital Corporation who owns SanDisk as well. Western Digital Corporation CEO John Coyne commented: We are always looking for ways to provide people with more of what they want – anytime, anywhere access to the things that matter most.
The product includes a host of performance improvements including speed, durability and capacity. And while it’s still two years away from being released at least we know now how much they’re going to cost!
The Implications
100TB is quite a lot of storage. Even if you don’t know how much a terabyte is, it’s clear that it’s a whole lot of space. What does this mean for us? Well, for starters, it means that we’re probably never going to have to worry about running out of space on our computer ever again. We’ll also be able to store photos and videos in high definition formats with ease, which will lead to improved quality as well. With such a huge amount of data at our disposal, the possibilities are endless. It could be used for storing backups of all your important documents or information in case anything happens to your personal laptop; you could install Windows 7 and keep it safe from viruses by making sure there’s always a back up copy somewhere else; or even use it to build a model replica of Earth from scratch!
Conclusion
The world’s biggest SSD is coming this year from Samsung. The PM1643 is a beast of a drive with 2.5 terabytes per second reads and 1.3 terabytes per second writes, but it won’t come cheap: for $11,000 USD you’ll get 12 of these drives in a RAID array. For most businesses and consumers this may seem pricey – but when you’re talking about storing all your data in one place it starts to make sense. The NVMe interface allows for higher performance than traditional hard disks and can reduce latency by 50%.
It also has a 10 million hour MTBF rating which means that the chance of failure is less than 0.4% over the life time of this product!
In addition, its power efficiency means it uses much less power than other enterprise class storage products.
This translates into longer battery life on laptops or desktops as well as lower costs associated with powering data centers.
