In what sounds like a wet dream for data hoarders who have fantasized about storing their entire collections into a single, compact, whisper-quiet system, Nimbus Data CEO Thomas Isakobich has confirmed that his company is developing a new SSD with an even greater capacity that’s set to blow even its pre-existing 100 TB solid-state drive out of the water. The executive played coy with the exact capacity of the drive in his recent email exchange with TechRadar, but based on what he teased in an older interview with the publication, this new SSD—presumably a new 3.5-inch ExaDrive model—will boast a record-breaking 200 TB, a ridiculous amount of space that’s capable of fitting over 2,000 of the biggest 4K Blu-ray rips (1:1) with plenty of room left over. The SSD could be revealed by Nimbus Data as early as the end of this year, and while Isakobich didn’t say anything about pricing, it is sure to be stupidly expensive. (The 100 TB ExaDrive DC already costs $40,000.)
“We are working on a successor to the 100 TB SSD that will deliver even more capacity, performance, and energy-efficiency than the ground-breaking 100 TB, and expect to deliver this next-generation SSD in 2022,” Isakobich told TechRadar.
Exclusive: The world’s highest capacity SSD is about to be blown out the water (TechRadar)
In an interview in 2020, 200TB was the magic number cited by Isakovich. Back then, 2021 was the expected arrival date for a solid state drive of that capacity, but Covid later took hold and disrupted supply chains like never before.
Now that things have almost gone back to normal, plans for a larger-than-100TB drive are back on track. For context, 200TB is ten times the capacity of the largest hard disk drive currently in production (e.g. Seagate Exos 20TB and Seagate IronWolf Pro 20TB).
The reason the Exadrive DC exists is to replace existing hard disk drives in data centers, so sticking to 3.5-inch would make sense, as would a SATA/SAS interface.
Back in 2018, 256Gbit NAND dies were used. But 1024Gbit ones are now available which, in theory, would allow for 400TB SSD to be rolled out. Meanwhile, 512Gbit NAND are no longer cutting edge and are likely to carry a lower price because of demand and supply.
Discussion (11 replies)
Join Discussion →That's a lot of porn.
On a more serious note, I wonder how hot those things get when you hammer them a bit.
Drives of this capacity are meant for storage not speed of access. As a single user you'll be fine but I wouldn't put a transactional database on this.
1. For speed it would need to be NVME.
2. It would likely need some sort of active cooling.
3. Even in a home NAS (which I bet it will be priced crazy high so thsts out for a while.) Its going to struggle keeping up with more than a half dozen data streams.
So for home use a few users at most pulling and writing data over a network... you'll be fine.
For enterprise I would see it as bulk data for cold storage. An easy petabyre. Just nothing with big access demands. I suspect the data retrieval will be costly in time.
When are they coming up with truly long lasting storage? An agreement needs to be made on a 100y standard for media, file types and drives that read it. People are just blundering about, probaly losing all files at any moment. How does one change behavior, I don't know, but on top of it, there aint good enought anything to do really long term storage. This 200tb ssd is just and efficient way of losing a lot of data at once.
Not sure we are going to get any better than Edison in our lifetimes.
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Any long lasting storage is going to need to be active redundant storage that is maintained, with failing devices removed and rebuilt.
Long term reliable passive storage is just a pipe-dream.
Everything fails over time, and the more complex (data dense) it gets the more likely it will be to fail, meaning that as time goes on active management of storage will only become more and more necessary.
Yeah, much like the 100TB SSD no one except multi million dollar organizations will have these in a data center somewhere.
With that being said, who care about this? Show me something I can actually you know, use in my desktop.
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Do you have ANY idea how close I came to ordering this!?
I'll send you a home-made one if you want.
This.