Nimbus Data unveils the world's largest SSD: 100TB of flash storage

The world’s largest SSD comes in a surprisingly casual package – Nimbus Data’s ExaDrive DC100, a 100TB solid state drive, is packed up in a familiar 3.5” SATA drive form factor. The focus of this drive is efficiency, not speed.

It is power efficient (0.1W/TB) and space efficient too. Nimbus says that data centers can reduce their spending for electricity, cooling and rack space by 85%, compared to other large SSDs (like Samsung’s 30.72TB SSD). Nimbus estimates that the total cost (drive and all) over a 5-year period will be 42% less per terabyte compared to such drives.

Nimbus Data unveils the world's largest SSD: 100TB of flash storage

The drive isn’t terribly fast – it has symmetrical sequential read/write

performance of 500MB/s and random read/write of 100K IOPS. That’s better random write than the Samsung, but slower read (it does 400K/50K). The sequential read and write speeds are quite a bit behind though (Samsung’s drive promises 2,100MB/s and 1,700MB/s respectively).

The ExaDrive DC100 comes with a 5-year “unlimited endurance guarantee” and has a mean time between failures of 2.5 million hours. If it’s too pricey for your needs, Nimbus Data launched a 50TB version last year.