SSDs at 30TB and More

The last market for HDDs will be high-capacity nearline drives.

2.5-inch units are almost dead under the pressure of SSDs. There were not any new ones revealed since 2018 and all the manufacturers have stopped to invest in this technology, for laptop computers as well as in enterprise 10,000 and 15.000rpm drives. But laptop drives can be used for cheap backup, an application needing small performances.

SSDs are superior to HDDs for speed (access time and transfer rate), energy consumption, reliability and weight, and the differentiation in price is decreasing. For 1TB for example, it costs a little more, but consumers now prefer to pay the difference (around $10 to $20) to get all the benefits of flash drives.

Prices of SSDs are decreasing faster, thanks to the addition of more layers on NAND chips, now up to 128, and this figure will probably increases in the future. Gartner expects enterprise SSD prices to decline 10% to 15% between the 3Q20 and 4Q20 and continue to decrease through 1H21 with flash chip prices down by 23.7% in 2021 compared to 2020.

HDDs have only 2 possibilities to get higher capacities:

increasing areal densities on the magnetic media: but even with HAMR or MAMR , already adopted, it is not a big jump, and we are reaching ultimate limits.
adding more disks into the same 3.5-inch form factor: today it’s 18TB using on configuration with 9x2TB platters and the arrival of 10-disk 20-heads HDD is probable to reach 20TB in 4Q20, affirms WD and next December for Seagate, once more a limit then extremely difficult to increase in this volume.

Anyway, SSDs are now largely beating HDDs also in capacity. As these later culminate at 18TB, the first ones are reaching 30TB and more.

We have counted 15 of them. See below.

SSDs revealed at 30TB and more

Year	Company	Model	Form factor	From (GB)	To (GB)	Max. transfer rate MB/s (read)	Max transfer rate MB/s (write)	Interface	Comments
2020	Nimbus Data	Exadrive DC	3.5	50,000	100,000	500	460	6Gb SAS, 6Gb SATA	eMLC
2019	NGD Systems	Newport	U.2, M.2	16,000	64,000			PCIe Gen 3×4, NVMe 1.3
2020	Nimbus Data	ExaDrive NL	3.5	16,000	64,000			SAS, SATA	QLC
2017	Seagate				64,000	13,000		NVMe	Demo at FMS2017, never offered
2016	Seagate	60TB SAS SSD	3.5		60,000			SAS	Micron 3D NAND
2014	SMART Modular	Osmium Drive	3.5	25,000	50,000	472	325	6Gb SAS	MLC
2018	Viking Technology	UHC-Silo SSD	3.5	25,000	50,000	500	350	6Gb SAS	MLC
2019	Intel	Optane DC persistent memory			36,000				With DRAM
2018	Intel	DC P4500	12-inch ruler		32,000				3D NAND
2016	Samsung	32TB SAS SSD	2.5		32,000	2,100	1,700	12Gb SAS	64-layer V-NAND
2018	Shannon	G5i AIC	HH-HL, HL-FH PCIe	3,200	32,000	500	5,000	PCIe 30×8	3D TLC
2020	Kioxia	CM6	2.5	800	30,720	6,900	6,900	PCIe Gen 4, NVMe 1.4	96-layer BiCS Flash 3D TLC
2020	Kioxia	PM6	2.5	400	30,720	4,300		24Gb SAS	96-layer BiCS Flash 3D TLC
2019	Samsung	PM1733	2.5 U.2	960	30,720	3,800	8,000	MVMe

Their prices are generally not revealed by manufacturers because as are very expansive. Several of them are packed in 3.5-inch form factor – similar for nearline HDDs – with an incredible record of 100TB for Nimbus Exadrive DC, and 64TB QLC-based Exadrive NL at $10,900 or $0.17/GB. In 2.5-inch volume, Samsung reached 32TB for its 12Gb SAS unit.

Per comparison, the Seagate Exos X18 18TB 3.5-inch hard drive is now available for an MSRP of $561.75 or $0.03/GB. It’s $592.99 for WD 18TB Gold Enterprise Class SATA.

From 2018 to 2024, Trendfocus recently previewed for SSDs a CAGR of 11.6% for units, 25.6% in exabytes shipped and 7.8% in revenue, for HDDs -6.1%, 23.3% and 5.8%, respectively.