Seagate just revealed a 60TB monstrosity of an SSD

Moore’s law is still alive and kicking for NAND technology; Seagate has just announcement the new record-holder for the world’s largest SSD, a 60-terabyte behemoth. If you’ve been patiently waiting for an SSD solution that crams as much storage as physically possible into a miniature form factor, then you might have to continue waiting; this bad boy’s asking price is forecasted at many times the average American families’ savings.

Seagate unveiled the SSD at this year’s Flash Memory Summit in California — the same location that Samsung chose to reveal last year’s “world’s largest SSD,” its 15.36 TB PM1633a. Solid state though they may both be, the two drives aren’t exactly comparable. Samsung’s unit measures 2.5-inch in length, while Seagate’s new drive measures 3.5-inches with an HDD form-factor, adding a significant amount of extra real estate that’s presumably filled with Micron’s ultra-dense 3D NAND flash memory ranging from 256 GB to 6 TB in capacity. There aren’t too many other options for memory chips.

Ars Technica speculates that if Seagate were using Micron’s 1Tbit (125 gigabytes) package, the current highest-capacity chip in mass production, 480 discrete chips would be stuffed inside the 3.5-inch enclosure. A more likely scenario is that Seagate has gotten a hold of some early samples of Micron’s 3TB or 6TB chips.

With its high-capacity and power efficiency of just 4TB/watt (15 watts in total), Seagate states that the 60TB SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) SSD is intended for large-scale enterprise data centers requiring maximum storage and computing performance with high efficiency. I7 units are all that’s needed to hit 1PB of storage, making it ideal for large local or cloud-based storage arrays, active archives, online video, and read-intensive environments.

Seagate hasn’t officially revealed performance and longevity specs, but Anandtech reports the drive ports dual port 12Gb/s SAS, with a sequential read and write speeds of 1.5Gbps and 1Gbps, respectively. Seagate does, however, claim that the drives streamline the process of accommodating “hot” and “cold” data — information that is frequently or infrequently accessed — eliminating the need to parcel out it based long-term versus near-term use.

We anticipate the device to go on sale at some point in 2017, though Seagate references the drive as a “technology demonstration,” meaning there may still be kinks to work out. As far as pricing is concerned, expect it to fall somewhere within the $30,000 to $40,000 range; Samsung’s PM1633a began shipping this past March for $10,000. And remember, you’ll want two of them; 60TB of data is way too much to risk losing due to a single drive failure.

Source: ExtremeTech , ZDNet , and Ars Technica