Seagate Develops World’s Largest SSD at 60TB

Seagate has unveiled its titanic 60TB solid-state drive (SSD) this week, setting a high benchmark in flash memory and easily outstripping Samsung’s 15.36TB drive. It’s worth noting how quickly and dramatically Samsung’s SSD, which was formerly the world’s largest and began shipping just last week, was upstaged. Tech records are seemingly broken almost as soon as they are set, which bodes well for the rest of us.

Seagate’s 60TB serial attached SCSI (SAS) SSD comes in a HDD 3.5-inch format, according to ZDNet, and has twice the density and four times the capacity of Samsung’s largest SSD offering. Beyond the 3.5-inch form factor, which is commonly used, it also supports both hot and cold data, which should make it easier for data centers to swap out their old SSDs for Seagate’s, The Verge reports.

There’s no word yet on how much Seagate’s 60TB serial attached SCSI (SAS) colossus will cost. If the $10,000 price tag on Samsung’s 15.36TB SSD is any indication, however, it likely won’t come cheap. That’s fine, because who needs 60TB worth of data (that’s 400 million photos or 12,000 DVD movies) anyways?

Seagate’s drive, which is meant for enterprise use and commercial data storage, is set to be demoed at the 2016 Flash Memory Summit, and will not be commercially available until 2017.

Samsung’s 15.36TB SSD remains for now the largest commercially available until Seagate moves past the demo stage and begins producing these at scale.