Solid State Drives (SSDs) have pretty much taken over almost the entire consumer tech sectorand for good reasons. SATA SSDs are much quicker than hard disk drives (HDDs), and with the new DirectStorage API coming to fruition, NVMe SSDs are finally starting to make a lot of sense for gaming.
Data centers, though, due to their need for really high capacity storage, have generally been stuck with enterprise grade CMR disks for the longest time. However, that could be set to change really soon as after 100TB and 200TB, 300TB flash storage solutions could be coming out in just a few years.
According to Pure Storage, a company which makes its own All Flash Array (AFA) SSDs based on DirectFlash Modules (DFM), it could become a reality by 2025-26. In an interview with Blocks & Files, Pure Storage CTO Alex McMullan, shared a chart showing the roadmap for the firm's plans for DFM capacity expansion over the next four years:
Alongside that, McMullan gave the following statement:
The plan for us over the next couple of years is to take our hard drive competitive posture into a whole new space. Today we’re shipping 24 and 48TB drives. You can expect … a number of announcements from us at our Accelerate conference around larger and larger drive sizes with our stated ambition here to have 300TB drive capabilities, by or before 2026.
A major benefit of the raw flash-based DFM, Pure Storage claims, is the "significantly lower" Annualized Return Rate compared to traditional SSDs which should make these excellent for enterprise grade usage.
As we had mentioned earlier in the article, besides 300TB flash drives, there are plans for releasing 100 and 200TB capacity SSDs too. The company working on such technology happens to be Nimbus Data. Although the 200TB SKU is not out yet, the firm's 100TB ExaDrive from the DC series is already available for ordering and is priced at around $40,000.
Source and image: Blocks & Files
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