300TB SSD are coming soon, but they will be shockingly expensive
Pure Storage expects to sell 300TB Flash modules within next few years
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It’s been almost five years sinceNimbus Data unveiled its $40,000, 100TB Exadrive 3.5-inch SSD.
NowPure Storage, one of the stalwarts of AFA (All Flash Array) storage, has disclosed plans to build a 300TB Flash drive within three years.
Pure CTO Alex McMullan showed a chart toBlocks & Filesthat reveals Pure’s plan to launch a 300TB DFM (Direct Flash Module) by 2026, putting it far ahead of40TB hard disk drivesexpected to be launched that year.
Next level
Now a DFM is not your usualSSD; you won’t be able to take one of these and slot in yourworkstationorbusiness PC.
Instead, you have to buy an entire system, and they don’t come cheap. Pure Storage launched its FlashBlade//E on March 1 2023, and while it costs only $0.20 per GB, the minimum purchase order is a staggering 4PB (or $800,000), not your usualportable SSD,orNASfor that matter.
Pure says although the new offerings are more expensive, compared toHDDalternatives, FlashBlade//E uses far less power and space, is up to 20x more reliable, generates less than a sixth of the e-waste and has a 60% less operational cost.
The race to Petabyte
The newly-launched product uses 40 x 48TB DFMs per chassis (working in pairs to get to 4PB). 300TB DFMs would bring total capacity to 12PB, a near-sevenfold improvement that can be achieved by hoping that the likes ofSamsungand Solidigm increase the number ofNAND layersto around 500.
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Other ways of increasing capacity would be by increasing the physical size of DFMs and moving toPLC(Penta-layer cell), the successor of mainstreamQLC, a technology that is currently being tested and likely to be rolled out in 2023.
One thing is sure though, hard disk vendors are having a hard time keeping up with the rate of progression of solid state storage.Seagatehas yet to roll out (officially) its Exos X22 22TB hard disk drive (it’s in the wild but unannounced) and there’s no sign of that elusive26TB hard disk drivethat Toshiba promised in its 2022 Financial year (one that ends in 29 days). Western Digital is the only hard drive vendor that is shipping 22TB drives en masse with its datacenter-only 26TB drive being thelargest hard disk drivecurrently available.
Petabyte for the masses: DNA storage could come as cartridges by 2030>A solid state drive with 1,000 TB ‘usable capacity’ could launch by 2023>Petabyte tapes are on the horizon - but don’t hold your breath
Extra high capacities will drive down prices of SSD per TB even lower while increasing the average capacity of an SSD. 2TB is currently the sweet spot for consumer-grade SSD and with prices likely to fall under $0.04 per GB. Right now the cheapest new hard disk drive per capacity is a 14TB enterprise drive with a per GB price of $0.14, about a third of the lowest-priced SSD.
While the technology espoused by Pure Storage - i.e. having actual SSD - will survive in the enterprise realm, one might see that the writing is on the wall for both discreteRAMand SSD in the consumer/end user/client market with economies of scale and performance gains dictating that memory and compute should be closer.
And based on what we’re seeing in the market (AMD’s recent announcementandAppleM1/M2 series), it’s only a matter of time before we see storage brought either in the package or on die.
Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled inwebsite buildersandweb hostingwhen DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.
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