Seagate launches a monstrous 60TB SSD

If you've been wanting as much storage as possible in an SSD form factor that doesn't break the bank, well, you'll have to keep waiting. But for those few with enough money to buy a private island -- or at least a private data center -- Seagate Technology has taken the wraps off of an unbelievable 60TB solid state drive (pictured above) at the Flash Memory Summit in Silicon Valley. The drive features a power efficiency of just 4TB/watt (15 watts total), comes in a 3.5-inch form factor packed with ultra-dense 3D NAND flash from Micron, and delivers more density than two 16TB 2.5-inch SSDs as a result.

The 60TB SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) SSD is intended for large-scale enterprise data centers that need maximum storage and compute performance. With just 17 of these drives, you can hit 1PB of storage; Seagate says it's ideal for large local or cloud-based storage arrays, active archives, online video, and read-intensive environments. According to Anandtech(Opens in a new window), the drive sports dual port 12Gb/s SAS, with sequential read and write speeds of 1.5Gbps and 1Gbps, respectively. Seagate claims the drive simplifies the process of accommodating "hot" and "cold" data, eliminating the need to separate data out for "near-term availability or long-term storage." Seagate also says the drive can hold 400 million photos or 12,000 DVDs, and that the design can scale to a 100TB version as well.

The Seagate 60TB SAS SSD is due to arrive sometime in 2017, the company says. As for price, we imagine it's a classic case of "if you have to ask," though Seagate is promising the lowest cost-per-gigabyte on the market today. That said, the company is calling the 60TB SAS SSD a "technology demonstration," so it may still have some work to do on the reliability side before it's ready for sale.

Either way, the drive qualifies as literally the world's largest SSD, almost quadrupling the size of the 16TB SSD that Samsung announced last year and began shipping this past March for a cool $10,000.

At the same event, Seagate also unveiled the 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD, which features a single PCIe interface and four separate controllers. The goal for this drive, Seagate says, is to deliver as much performance as possible using a single PCIe slot, crucial for high-performance computing in weather modeling and other types of science research. The 8TB Nytro XP7200 will arrive before the end of this year; pricing remains unknown for this model as well.