American storage solution provider Nimbus Data has launched a solid state drive with the largest storage capacity in the world – the 100 terabytes (TB) 3.5 inch ExaDrive DC100.
In doing so, the company broke the previous world record for the maximum storage capacity of an SSD, which was 60 TB. Apart from being the largest-sized SSD storage, ExaDrive DC100 also happens to be the most energy-efficient SSD in the world.
To put this in perspective, similar SSDs from Seagate and Samsung consume about 0.9 W per TB and 0.5 W per TB, respectively, while the ExaDrive DC100 consumes a mere 0.1 W per TB, an improvement of around 85 percent.
To the uninitiated, 100 TB equals 100,000 GB (1,02,400 to be precise), and assuming a standard high definition movie is about 5 GB in size, one would be able to store around 20,000 HD movies, or around 20 million songs, on the SSD.
The storage can be used not only by individuals (given one can afford it), but also by companies, who could use it for cloud storage, storage of Big Data, artificial intelligence (AI), or installations in tactical environments. The drive offers a read/write speed of about 500 MB/s.
Other features of the disk drive include unlimited DWPD over a period of five years. DWPD is the number of times a drive can write and rewrite data to its fullest capacity on a given day, which is also an indicator of the endurance level of a drive.
To compare, leading SSDs are rated between 1 and 3 DWPD. The drive is both SATA/SAS compatible, which is a plus compared to other SSDs that are either SATA compatible or SAS compatible.
Nimbus Data also said that the drive is plug and play-compatible, which allows a user to simply plug it into an SSD slot on any computer instead of worrying about complicated cables. The drive comes with a warranty of five years.
