Seagate Technology Plc (NASDAQ:STX) managed to pull off what no other external storage manufacturer has achieved with the newly revealed 60 TB SSD drive.
To put this into perspective, the highest and most common storage that is easily available in the market is 2TB SATA drives. Samsung is the closest rival with the PM1633a SSD whose capacity is 15.36TB. Solid State Drives (SSD) are faster than the regular SATA drives. To offer a disk drive with a solid-state capacity of 60 TB is, therefore, an impressive feat which definitely commands Seagate’s rivals’ attention. The company revealed the hard drive on Tuesday during the Flash Memory Summit which took place in Silicon Valley.
Seagate claims that its new drive will be available in the market as early as 2017. However, it described it as a “technology demonstration” during the unveiling at the Flash Memory event. This suggests that development is still ongoing or perhaps there are a few issues that are yet to be solved. The new drive targets flash arrays and servers and can be used to address the growing demand for storage from the fast growing IoT industry, online video, and mobile devices. The new drive can hold 400 million photos and up to 12,000 movies.
The huge size of the drive plus the fact that it is an SSD drive means it will be out of reach to most people due to a high price tag. It is thus expected to target businesses. Seagate considered quick accessibility when it created the device. It thus included a simple architecture that will make it easier for businesses to expand from 60TB to 100TB or higher in the future without having to change the dimensions of the device. It is possible that the casing in the drive used for demonstration might not be the one used for the end product. Nevertheless, it is expected to appeal to data centers and is conveniently timed as demand for storage increases.