Exclusive: The world’s largest SSD finally goes on sale – 61.44TB Solidigm SSD costs much less than I expected, with a price per terabyte much cheaper than 8TB SSD
We previously wrote about Solidigm’s D5-P5336, a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD with a capacity of 61.44TB, but the drive – the world’s largest SSD to date – is finally available for pre-sale.
The D5-P5336 is the first quad-level cell (QLC) solid-state storage drive and is available in E1L and U.2 formats, popular in data centers. They’re generally not found in the end-user market, but someone added it to Valve’s Steam Deck, so don’t rule out the idea of building your own custom U.2-friendly workstation!
This drive provides up to six times more data storage in the same space compared to a hard disk drive (HDD). Many workstation motherboards have two U.2 ports, meaning professionals with deep pockets can have a pair of 61.44TB P5336s in their pedestal PCs as secondary storage drives.
Now available for pre-order
The D5-P5336 is designed to handle massive amounts of data from the core to the edge, outperforming many cost-optimized triple-level cell (TLC) SSDs. It is particularly suitable for read-intensive workloads such as AI, machine learning, content delivery networks, and object storage.
When the company first announced the drive, Greg Matson, VP of Strategic Planning and Marketing at Solidigm, said: “Modern workloads like AI and capabilities like 5G are rapidly changing the storage landscape. Enterprises need storage in more places that are cheap and massive amounts of storage stores data efficiently and accesses data quickly. The D5-P5336 delivers on all three counts: value, density and performance. With QLC, the economics are compelling: imagine storing 6x more data than HDDs and 2x more data than TLC SSDs, all in the same space at TLC speed.”
Assuming you’re in the market for one of these whopping 61.44TB drives, you’re no doubt curious to see how much they’ll set you back. While not currently available for purchase, they can now finally be pre-ordered for $3,975.16 at PCNationand $3,692.00 from Tech America. The exact ship date is unknown, but Solidigm says “later this year.”