Seagate’s new 60TB SSD is world’s largest

[Tunez]

Seagate has unveiled the world's largest SSD: a 60-terabyte monster. Pricing isn't available, but the company says the drive will provide "the lowest cost per gigabyte for flash" memory today.

The 60TB SSD was unveiled at the Flash Memory Summit in California—the same location thatSamsung chose to reveal its 15.36TB SSD last year, which at the time was the world's largest hard drive.

The two drives aren't directly comparable, though, as the Samsung unit is a standard-size 2.5-inch SSD and the new Seagate drive uses the 3.5-inch hard drive form factor. Despite that, Seagate still claims that its drive has "twice the density" of Samsung's. I don't think the maths quite work out, considering a 3.5-inch drive has a far greater volume than a 2.5-inch drive, but Seagate is probably referring to the density of the memory chips themselves. Moore's law is still alive and kicking for NAND, apparently.

Speaking of memory chips, the Seagate drive uses Micron's latest NAND flash. We've asked Seagate for more details on what chips are actually being used—but to be honest, given the extreme storage density of the drive, there aren't many feasible options. We are almost certainly looking at one of Micron's 3D NAND packages, which range in capacity from 256Gb to 6Tb. If Seagate is using the 1Tbit (~125 gigabytes) package, which is currently the highest-capacity chip in mass production at Micron, then there would be about 480 discrete memory chips inside that 3.5-inch enclosure. Seagate may have got its hands on some early samples of the 3Tb or 6Tb chips, though.

We don't have any details on performance or longevity either, but generally drives of this size eschew the former in favour of the latter. We do have a figure on power consumption: 1W per terabyte. Other enterprise SSDs tend to sit at around 2W-per-TB at idle.

When the Samsung drive finally started to trickle out this year there were reports that it cost upwards of £8,000 or $10,000. Likewise, Seagate isn't planning to release the 60TB drive immediately, but may release it early next year. Pricing is anyone's guess, but you probably won't get much change from £30,000 or $40,000—about £0.50 per gig, which is actually fairly reasonable... if you have 30 grand to blow, anyway.

Seagate’s new 60TB SSD is world’s largest

Drive will die in a month

 

[Mowgli]

Drive will die in a month

You won't have time to fill it up before it breaks

 

[Serious]

Who needs to store that much porn

 

[Microfracture]

@Ciggavelli You copping?

 

[Morose Polymath]

Unless you're running a server this shyt is useless to the general public

 

[KevCo]

Who needs to store that much porn

I know a few on this site

 

[daze23]

Drive will die in a month

Seagate

 

[B86]

With us being in the streaming age, how can you even fill that up? I have 5TB total in my gaming PC... Let's just say I'm a POWER USER and I haven't even filled up all that space. What the hell would I do with 60TB?

 

[ThatTruth777]

Who needs to store that much porn

challenge accepted

 

[Malik1time]

i remember the good ole days when games would be 1gb-9gb nowsdays its 20gbs to fukking 60gbs and thats not including the DLC and patchs. 1tb or your doing it wrong

 

[Doomsday]

With us being in the streaming age, how can you even fill that up? I have 5TB total in my gaming PC... Let's just say I'm a POWER USER and I haven't even filled up all that space. What the hell would I do with 60TB?

I can see it being useful for the new xbox scorpion. I have 5tb plus the 500gb that the XBONE comes with, and If it wasn't for me copping hard discs, it would be full

With 60tb you can download everything and never have to worry.

 

[GreenGrass]

Yeah, this is good if you have a server where people are constantly adding data or removing data from the hard drive 24/7. Not everybody has slow internet connections.

 

[Serious]

With us being in the streaming age, how can you even fill that up? I have 5TB total in my gaming PC... Let's just say I'm a POWER USER and I haven't even filled up all that space. What the hell would I do with 60TB?

My school has an unlimited account on google drive.....

I might need to make that switch

 

[daze23]

Unless you're running a server this shyt is useless to the general public

not to mention the price will be astronomical

 

[Biblical Goon]

yall nikkas man im pretty sure 10 years ago yall would have said the same shyt when we started to go past 500gb. Now we can cop them under $50 PC Drive Reaches 500GB

They will continue to push memory boundaries so that in the future the technology will be readily affordable to the consumer and of course the price is going to be crazy right now because its not meant for the average consumer yet but the developers. Let them cook, it will be beneficial to us in the end.