Nimbus Data launches 100TB SSD, servers house 100PB easily

While this SSD is only really of interest to big cloud services or giant corporations managing data centers, it is undoubtedly a new benchmark for the future of storage with elements of the technology sure to be incorporated into general consumer-orientated outcomes very soon. Now Nimbus Data has quickly smashed Samsung's benchmark launching the ExaDrive DC100 - a 3.5 inch SSD drive unit with a massive 100 TB capacity.

To put its 100TB capacity in perspective, Nimbus says that it can hold 20 million songs, 20,000 HD movies, or 2,000 iPhones worth of data.

Nimbus is also touting superior power efficiency, which is a key metric for hyper-scale customers that the company is trying to court (think Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.).

Featuring over three-times the capacity of its closest competitor, the ExaDrive DC100 also draws 85% less power per terabyte.

The ExaDrive DC100, which is built around 3D NAND flash, packs the 100TB of storage into the standard 3.5-inch form factor of a regular hard drive, which means that it can act as a plug-and-play replacement for existing server and storage platforms. Assuming a data center were to use the drive, Nimbus brags that a singe rack can offer more than 100 petabytes of capacity while keeping the per-terabyte costs, power, and cooling requirements down by 85-percent. "Devices of this class will allow flash to cost-effectively penetrate a broader set of use cases outside of tier 0 and tier 1 applications".

The ExaDrive DC series will be available later this year in both 50TB and 100TB models. By doing away with confusing drive-writes-per-day restrictions, the DC100 offers peace of mind, reduces hardware refresh cycles, and eliminates costly support renewals.

Pricing and availability was not mentioned, but the company did state that it will be comparable to existing MLC SSDs.