Just a few years ago, we were losing our minds over Samsung’s 16TB solid state drive. Now, in 2018, you can get 50TB and 100TB SSDs, as long as you’re willing to pay enterprise prices for them, of course. Still, that doesn’t take away from the fact that, while flash hasn’t beaten magnetic on cost yet, it’s well and truly punching hard in the space department.
The California, US-based Nimbus Data, which specialises in fat storage of the solid-state kind, revealed the chunky 100TB ExaDrive DC100 earlier this week.
Unsurprisingly, it’s a 3.5-inch form factor drive, with Nimbus boasting performance in the range of 100,000 IPOS (input/output operations per second) and a throughput of 500MB/s.
The drive’s 100TB density is thanks to 3D NAND, which allows flash manufacturers to cut layers into the silicon and stack memory cells on top of each other.
[referenced url=”https://gizmodo.com.au/2017/10/microwave-tech-could-produce-40-tb-hard-drives-in-the-near-future/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_original/ezrx3vnac8bvy43d8bac.jpg” title=”Microwave Tech Could Produce 40TB Hard Drives In The Near Future” excerpt=”We’re all generating data faster than storage providers can keep up, and that problem is only going to get worse. On Friday, Western Digital announced a potential game changer that promises to expand the limits of traditional HDDs to up to 40TBs using a microwave-based write head, and the company says it will be available to the public in 2019.”]
So, how much can you pack into 100TB? I’ll let Nimbus Data explain, using an entirely new unit of measurement, known as the “iPhone”:
Using 3D NAND, the DC100 provides enough flash capacity to store 20 million songs, 20,000 HD movies, or 2,000 iPhones worth of data in a device small enough to fit in your back pocket. For data centers, a single rack of DC100 SSDs can achieve over 100 petabytes of raw capacity.
If you’re kooky enough to want one of these and you’re not Google or Apple, too bad: Nimbus hasn’t released any pricing info.
But expect it to cost tens of thousands of dollars, easily.
[Nimbus Data, via PetaPixel]