Intel’s 31TB SSD sees huge price drop at Walmart but it won’t fit your PC
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It’s been almost five years since Samsung unveiled what was at the time the world’s largest solid-state drive (SSD) by capacity. The PM1643 was the top storage device for a very long time, but it came with a hefty price tag. In 2020 it sold for just under $8,400 and three years later it still has a hefty sticker price of $4,939.
A relative newcomer is about to change that, the Intel SSDPFWNV307TZ (soon to be Solidigm SSD D5-P5316) has come down in price and now costs less than $2,699 at Walmart (opens in new tab) (and Newegg (opens in new tab)). At just over $87/TB, it’s quite an achievement considering that 4TB PCIe Gen4 drives struggle to break the $100/TB floor.
At the time of writing, a 4TB WD_Black SN850 sold for $399.89 – making it TB for TB, more expensive than Solidigm’s – although Kingston’s NV2 2TB SSD was available for $110. Intel’s NAND business in 2021 and subsequent spin-off by SK Hynix, Solidigm’s D5-P5316 uses 144-layer QLC technology to achieve write/read speeds of 3.6 GBps and 7 GBps, respectively.
Because it is an EDSFF L 9.5mm drive, it can be used in a compatible 1U server rack to achieve a capacity of 1PB, but it will not fit your laptop or desktop as it is a server product, it comes with support for hardware encryption (256-bit AES), temperature monitoring and logging, as well as enhanced power data loss protection.
Solidigm states that the drive comes with a 5-year warranty and a lifespan between 23PBW (64K random) and 104PBW (64K sequential).
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 5x higher price compared to Solidigm’s D5-P5316.
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 this year, 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, five times lower than the P5316) and the huge installed base of existing hard drives, making it’s 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.