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Final month — last month — Samsung launched a 30TB SSD with 1 of the highest single-bulldoze capacities we've yet seen. Seagate launched a 60TB SSD even earlier, though that appears to have been more than a publicity stunt than a shipping production; the company's Nytro enterprise SSD landing page shows no such bachelor capacity, topping out at 15TB. But the question of whether Seagate or Samsung deserves credit for largest SSD has been rendered somewhat moot by the claims of another challenger: Nimbus Information and its ExaDrive DC100, with a whopping 100TB capacity, at least in theory (more on that in a moment).

Nimbus Data is claiming that the ExaDrive DC100 consumes 85 per centum less power per TB (just 0.1W). There's some implication that the device hits these low power targets by emphasizing affordability and capacity rather than sheer speed. Unlike the Seagate and Samsung hardware, the ExaDrive uses both conventional SATA and SAS (Serial Attached SCSI).

Nimbus-Data-1

Nimbus has blown by its competitors in raw chapters by leveraging what information technology refers to every bit a multi-processor compages, and what sounds like a RAID-similar method of splitting data betwixt multiple NAND controllers. The company writes:

Conventional SSDs are based on a single flash controller. As flash chapters increases, this monolithic compages does non calibration, overwhelmed by error correction operations and the sheer amount of flash that must exist managed. In dissimilarity, ExaDrive is based on a distributed multiprocessor architecture. Within an ExaDrive-powered SSD, multiple ultra-low power ASICs exclusively handle fault correction, while an intelligent flash processor provides wear-leveling and capacity management in software.

We're not enlightened of whatsoever third-party analysis of this method, its performance, or its suitability for diverse workloads and functioning metrics compared with more traditional NAND controllers and interfaces. Nimbus Information claims up to 100K IOPS in random read/write workloads, and while that'due south a standard figure for random reads, information technology's to a higher place-average for random writes. Overall bulldoze throughput is listed at 500MBps, without any clarification on how these figures were measured. Nimbus is claiming that the bulldoze is rated for an "unlimited" number of drive writes per day, but this may reflect how long it takes to really write a full drive of information as opposed to any meaning improvement in longevity.

Consider: An SSD capable of sustaining 500MBps of throughput tin write a gigabyte of data every 2 seconds, or 30GB of information per minute. That'south 1.8TB of data per hr, or 43.2TB of data per twenty-four hour period. But how meaningful is the notion of bulldoze writes per day when the SSD is literally incapable of writing a full drive of information in the relevant time frame? It's not clear that Nimbus Data has made a meaningful improvement in NAND reliability, then much as it jettisoned a metric that might not make sense if applied to its own enormous products.

Nosotros'll exist curious to run across if any of these drives practically ship or win wide deployment. Announcing enormous SSDs has become something of a storage market pastime and a way for NAND manufacturers to claim advances in sheer size over spinning disks, simply the massive difference in price has thus far blunted the impact of these enormous capacities. Right now, even the cheapest 4TB SSDs are $1,800 (for non-enterprise models), while a 12TB WD Gold Enterprise drive is $489. That gives spinning disks an ongoing ~10x reward in price per GB, and while that's shrunk compared to what it used to be, information technology's non nothing, either. Still, the visitor claims some major advances in power consumption and cost per GB overall, so if this multi-controller approach bears fruit, we'll likely come across information technology deployed more widely going forward.

Now read: How practice SSDs work?