Forget consumer SSD, all the action (and excitement) seems to be happening in the enterprise market these days. Solidigm’s D5-P5336 range, launched last week, not only brings to market a new 61.44 TB version (the largest SSD available), but is also doing its best to drive prices to record lows.
At the time of writing, the 30.72 TB version sells for around $1,700 ($1,689 at TechAmerica) and even though it just launched and we’re still about four months away from 2024, I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes the first large-capacity drive to sell for under $1000 next year (or a little over $30 a year). TB).
That would be big news for three main reasons: first, there is no hard drive of this capacity for now (the current one has a top capacity of 26 TB from Western Digital), second, enterprise SSDs would be almost at the same level, price per TB base, with consumer SSDs (applicable to PCIe models, excluding, of course, now obsolete SATA models), third, marks the end of the consumer market as a capacity driver.
As with hard drives, SSD capacity (but not performance) will likely be the sole remit of enterprises and hyperscalers. In other words, if you want the largest drives, they will probably be available in formats that are unfriendly to consumers (think the “ruler” E1S format).
Earlier this year, another high-capacity Solidigm drive, the SSDPFWNV307TZ, made headlines when it crushed the $100/TB, the first large SSD PCIe drive to do so. This new Solidigm drive costs almost half the MSRP while being competitive when it comes to performance.
The 192-layer QLC 3D NAND technology (rather than 144-layer) that powers it was only unveiled last year at Flash Memory Summit and is therefore solid evidence of Solidigm’s desire to accelerate time-to-market between the launch of its advanced NAND components and the launch of halo products based on them.
We know that SK Hynix has a 238-layer NAND (approx. 24% more) in the wings and a 300-layer right behind (approx. 26% jump) with products based on the former expected next year and the latter in 2025 A switch from QLC (quad-level cell) to PLC (penta-level cell) is also expected to deliver a 25% increase in capacity. Expect big announcements at FMS 2023 next week.
The rise of super SSDs
High-capacity SSDs are becoming mainstream; Nimbus Data’s Exadrive SSD reaches capacities of up to 100 TB, but costs around $40,000, a 7x higher price compared to Solidigm’s D5-P5336.
Kioxia, Seagate, Samsung, Micron and Solidigm along with a host of smaller players (Nimbus Data, Dapustor Union Memory, Teamgroup, ScaleFlux and Memblaze) compete for the enterprise market as consumer demand for storage components declines.
While hard drives are still affordable, they consume more electricity (and give off more heat), break down faster (due to mechanical parts), are generally heavier, are much slower, and have grown in capacity slowly . Hard drives of 30 TB are expected later in 2023, but for now 26 TB is the absolute maximum available capacity on the market.
The only two things that still make hard drives attractive to hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, Facebook are the price (as low as $17 per TB, three times lower than the P5336) and the huge installed base of existing hard drives, making it becomes easier to just replace HDD instead of rip-and-replace or upgrade.
While some services, such as cloud storage or cloud backup, are happy to use hard drives, others, such as web hosting, will gladly remove the bottleneck that spinning disks are.
With Kioxia, Samsung and Micron already ramping up production of NAND technology that uses 230 or more layers (50% extra capacity and more), it’s only a matter of time before SSDs reach parity, per TB, with hard drives.