At 100TB, the world’s biggest SSD gets an (eye-watering) price tag

The Exadrive from Nimbus has held the world record for the biggest solid state drive in the world for more than two years now but until recently, its price was only available on demand. 

The company has now put the prices of its 50TB and 100TB models (either SATA/SAS) online, with the 50TB edition (EDDCT020/EDDCS050) costing $12,500 ($250 per TB) while the 100TB version (EDDCT100/EDDCS100) retailing for $40,000 ($400 per TB). 

In comparison, Samsung’s 30.72TB monster, the MZILT30THMLA, retails for $8,860 ($288 per TB) while your cheapest SSD will retail for under $90, albeit with consumer grade QLC NAND.

100TB SSD

Both drives come in a 3.5-inch form factor rather than the more popular 2.5-inch one. They use enterprise-grade MLC 3D NAND rather than QLC, providing a sequential read/write speeds of up to 500/460MB/s and up to 114,000/105,000 IOps reads/writes.

The target audience for this drive are outfits looking for the highest storage density available on the market at any cost. The ExaDrive range has a five year warranty, is guaranteed for unlimited drive writes per day during that period and has a mean time between failures of 2.5 million hours.

The 100TB model has 5x more capacity than the largest hard disk drive on the market and 67% than the next largest solid state drive, a 60TB Seagate SSD that was launched back in 2016. Very large capacity solid state drives haven’t been flooding the market despite previous predictions.

Blame it on demand and supply as hyperscalers, web hosting companies and service providers are generally happy with hard disk drives and NAND manufacturers are just about keeping up with demand from other verticals (smartphones, laptops etc).

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