200TB Solid State Drives Could Arrive This Year To Mock Today's Puny Capacities
A massive 200TB capacity solid state drive (SSD) sure would give your growing games catalog room to breathe, especially when even patches and game updates are swelling in size. It's probably going to be a minute or two before we see that kind of capacity in the consumer realm, but 200TB SSDs could actually be coming soon. Perhaps even this year.
Nimbus Data, a provider of scalable and high performance flash memory solutions for data centers, is working feverishly to make it happen, or so the company recently hinted. The average consumer is not likely to have heard of Nimbus Data, but the Irvine, CA-based outfit laid claim to the world's largest capacity SSD four years ago with its 100TB ExaDrive DC100.
Now it sounds like the company is looking to double the capacity to retain its lead, and believes it's on track to do that in the coming months.
"We are working on a successor to the 100TB SSD that will deliver even more capacity, performance, and energy-efficiency than the groundbreaking 100TB, and expect to deliver this next-generation SSD in 2022," Nimus Data CEO Thomas Isakovich told TechRadar.
Granted, Isakovich didn't specifically mention 200TB as the next big capacity, and the render above has been altered by (by us). But there's little reason to believe Nimbus Data will go smaller than 200TB. The pieces are in place to double the capacity of its flagship 100TB SSD, or to even go bigger.
That 100TB drive released in 2018 uses 256Gb NAND flash memory dies. Fast forward to today and Nimbus Data has access to 1,024Gb dies. So not only could the company unveil a 200TB SSD, in theory it could go as high as 400TB.
It would only be for the enterprise market so big whoop, right? Well, it's not unusual for cutting edge technology to slice its way through data centers before moseying over to the consumer side. To put those capacities into perspective, the largest consumer HDD you can buy is 20TB. Toshiba's aiming to ship 30TB HDDs by 2023, and 40TB HDDs in 2027.
As for consumer SSDs, you can grab up to a 16TB 2.5-inch SATA SSD or 8TB M.2 NVMe SSD. A 200TB or 400TB SSD would blow all of these out of the water, in terms of capacity. And sure, we're comparing apples (data center) to oranges (consumer). But it's still interesting to see where storage technology is headed, even is pricing is bonkers (that 100TB SSD sell for $40,000!).
