World's largest SSD hits 100TB

Need a lot of space? The new 100TB Nimbus Data ExaDrive DC100 might be the drive for you.

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The ExaDrive DC100, which is built around 3D NAND flash, packs the 100TB of storage into the standard 3.5-inch form factor of a regular hard drive, which means that it can act as a plug-and-play replacement for existing server and storage platforms.

But having the world's largest capacity isn't the only accolade the ExaDrive DC100 claims. It's also the world's most energy efficient SSD, drawing as little as 0.1 Watts per TB, which is about 80- to 90-percent lower than the competition.

This reduced power consumption translates into power, cooling, and rack space savings of as much as 85 percent per terabyte compared to SSDs from the competition.

That 100TB capacity also means that a single 3.5-inch drive can offer eight times more capacity than the current largest hard drive.

On the endurance front, Nimbus Data offers a five-year warranty covering an unlimited DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day), in stark contrast to the regular two to five DWPD that the competition offers.

On the performance front, the ExaDrive DC100 offers up to 100,000 random read and write IOPS and up to 500 MBps throughput. While the random read speeds are only slightly better than regular enterprise-grade SATA SSDs, the random write speeds is very impressive. According to Nimbus Data, this performance also helps improve CPU performance by "50 percent or more."

The ExaDrive DC100 comes in both SATA and SAS flavors.

"The release of such a high capacity flash device that is fully compatible with HDD form factors opens up the opportunity to turbo charge big data platforms while at the same time improving reliability, significantly reducing device count, increasing data mobility, and lowering the TCO of multi-PB scale storage platforms," said Eric Burgener, research vice president of storage at IDC. "Devices of this class will allow flash to cost-effectively penetrate a broader set of use cases outside of tier 0 and tier 1 applications."

No word on pricing, but assume that it will be eye-watering! Nimbus Data says that that dollar-per-GB pricing will be comparable to existing MLC SSDs.

The ExaDrive DC100 will be generally available in summer 2018.

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