It’s been nearly five years since Samsung unveiled what was then the world’s largest-capacity solid-state drive (SSD). The PM1643 was, for a very long time, the main storage device, but it came with a huge markup. Back in 2020, it retailed for under $8,400, and three years later, it’s still commanding a whopping $4,939.
A relative newcomer about to change all that, the Intel SSDPFWNV307TZ (soon to be Solidigm SSD D5-P5316) has dropped in price and now costs less than $2,699 at Walmart (and Newegg). At just over $87/TB, this is quite an achievement considering the 4TB PCIe Gen4 drives struggle to break the $100/TB floor.
At the time of this writing, a 4TB WD_Black SN850 drive sells for $399.89 — making it a terabyte for TB, and more expensive than Solidigm — though Kingston’s NV2 2TB SSD can be had for $110. Originating from Solidigm’s acquisition of Intel’s NAND business in 2021 and subsequent acquisition by SK Hynix, the D5-P5316 uses 144-layer QLC technology to reach write/read speeds of 3.6Gbps and 7Gbps, respectively. .
Since it is a 9.5mm EDSFF L drive it can be used in a compatible 1U server rack to reach 1PB capacity but does not fit in a laptop or desktop because it is a server product it comes with support for hardware encryption (256-bit AES) and temperature monitoring and logging as well Enhanced power data loss protection.
Solidigm states that the drive comes with a 5-year warranty plus a lifetime between 23PBW (64K random) and 104PBW (64K serial).
The emergence of super solid-state drives
High-capacity SSDs are gradually becoming mainstream; Nimbus Data’s Exadrive SSD has capacities up to 100TB but costs around $40,000, a 5x increase in price over Solidigm’s D5-P5316.
Kioxia, Seagate, Samsung, Micron and Solidigm, along with a host of smaller players (Nimbus Data, Dapustor Union Memory, Teamgroup, ScaleFlux, Memblaze) compete for the enterprise market as consumer demand for storage components wanes.
While still affordable, hard drives consume more electricity (and dissipate more heat), are more likely to fail (due to mechanical parts), are generally heavier, are much slower, and have increased capacity slowly. 30TB hard drives are expected to be released later this year, but for now, 26TB is the absolute maximum capacity available on the market.
The only two things that still make hard drives attractive to high-powered purists like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook are the price (as low as $17 per terabyte, which is five times less than the P5316) and bulky installation based on existing hard drives which makes It’s just easy to do. Replace HDD instead of copying, replacing or upgrading.
While some services like cloud storage or cloud backup will happily use hard drives, others like web hosting will gladly eliminate the bottleneck of spinning disks.
With Kioxia, Samsung, and Micron already ramping up production of NAND technology that uses 230 layers or more (50% more capacity and more), it’s only a matter of time before SSDs reach parity, on a per-terabyte basis, with hard drives. .
