Tech company Seagate recently unveiled the world's highest capacity Solid State Drive (SSD) featuring a massive 60TB storage space. The 60TB SSD was unveiled by Seagate at the Flash Memory Summit in California.
The 60TB SSD from Seagate is intended to be used in enterprise data centers. Seagate is aiming to dethrone the current leader in the market, the Samsung PM1633a with 15.36TB of storage space and was released in March. Both the 60TB Seagate SSD and the Samsung PM1633a use the Serial Attacked SCSI interface making them compatible with servers, this also means that they will not work with regular personal computers that use PCI interface.
The Seagate 60TB SSD uses the 3.5-inch hard drive form factor, according to Ars Technica. As for its memory chips, Seagate uses the latest NAND flash technology from Micron.
In terms of storage space, the 60TB Seagate SSD can store up to 400 million social media sized photos, or 12,000 DVD movies. The SSD is still in development and the one presented at the Flash Memory Summit is just a prototype. However, Seagate plans to start the production of the SSD next year.
In terms of cost, SSDs are known for their quite hefty price tag. On the other hand, Seagate promises that its 60TB SSD will offer the lowest cost per gigabyte of any flash storage product that are currently out in the market. Seagate has yet to confirm how much the 60TB SSD will cost, though some analysts said that the price will depend on Seagate's contracts with its enterprise customers. As a point of comparison, the 4TB Samsung 850 EVO currently costs $1,500.
In a statement acquired by PC Mag, Seagate vice president of SSD products Brett Pemble said, "The explosion of data can translate into more value for enterprises, if they have the right means to accommodate that data."
