The storage space race never seems to end. With ever-increasing storage demands on both consumers and storage facilities, it’s not surprising. We’re creating more digital content than ever before. Whether it’s text, photos or videos. Now, Nimbus Data have beaten out Seagate’s 60TB proof-of-concept SSD and completely annihilated Samsung’s recent 30TB SSD announcement.
Aimed more at data centres than home users, Nimbus Data has announced the ExaDrive, which holds a ridiculous 100TB of data. Unlike the 2.5″ Samsung, the ExaDrive comes in a 3.5″ SATA form factor to make it fit better with server and rack size standards. The company says that the ExaDrive DC100 is “optimized for capacity and efficiency”.
100TB is a hell of a lot of space. Nimbus Data say that it’s around 20 million songs, 20,000 HD movies or 2,000 iPhones worth of data. a Single rack of DC100 SSDs in a data centre can reach over 100 petabytes of capacity. But the benefit isn’t just that they can store more. It’s power efficiency, too. If a data centre can store a petabyte on 10 drives instead of 50 or 100 drives, that’s much lower energy consumption.
With power usage at 0.1 watts per TB, it’s extremely efficient. Nimbus Data claim that over a 5 year period it will cost 42% less per terabyte over existing enterprise SSDs.
The ExaDrive DC series contains drives two drives in 100TB And 50TB flavours. The drive is currently sampling with select customers and will go on general sale in Summer 2018. There’s no word on price yet, but I imagine it will be out of the range of most consumers. You can find out more on the Nimbus Data website.
It would be nice, though. It’d take me a long time to fill up one of these.
