Seagate Launches World’s Highest Capacity SSD

Storage heavyweight Seagate has unveiled a 60TB SSD, the world’s largest capacity solid state flash drive.

The new addition to Seagate’s data centre portfolio blows Samsung’s recently-announced 15TB SSD drive out of the water.

Seagate’s 60TB SAS SSD boasts twice the density and four times the capacity of the next highest-capacity SSD available today. In layman’s terms, Seagate claims that it has the equivalent capacity needed to accommodate 400 million photos or 12,000 DVD movies.

HDD 3.5 inch

But the device isn’t aimed at consumers looking for long-term memory storage. The device, which is still in a HDD 3.5 inch storage form factor, will be put to work in data centres for access to large amounts of data, negating the need to add additional servers or management steps.

“Given the demands on today’s data centres, optimal technologies are those that can accommodate an immense amount of data as needed—and without taking up too much space.

“As such, we are constantly seeking new ways to provide the highest density possible in our all-flash data centre configurations,” said Mike Vildibill, vice president, Advanced Technologies and Big Data, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

“Seagate’s new 60TB SAS SSD offers an exciting possibility for customers to achieve higher server storage performance and capacity configurations never seen before.”

Seagate adds that it will soon be able to scale up the capacity of the drive to 100TB in the near future, but still retain the same form factor of 3.5 inches.

Right now, Seagate is just demonstrating the technology, and commercial sales won’t start until next year. The price is also yet to be revealed, but the company said that it can deliver “the lowest cost per gigabyte for flash available today”.

Seagate also unveiled the 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD this week, targeting hyperscale data centres. It features a single PCIe interface for high-speed data transfers and four separate controllers, and Seagate said it can be easily integrated into all-flash arrays.

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