Seagate Unveils 60TB Solid State Drive

Seagate unveiled a 60TB solid state hard drive this week, dethroning Samsung as maker of the world's highest-capacity SSD.

The drive, intended for use in enterprise data centers, is 45TB larger than Samsung's PM1633a, which began shipping in March. Both drives use the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface for compatibility with servers, which means they won't work in the average PCI-based home PC.

Seagate achieved the gargantuan storage capacity of its new SSD by making it twice as dense as the Samsung device. It can accommodate 400 million social media-sized photos, or 12,000 DVD movies. It's currently just a prototype, but Seagate plans to put it into production next year.

Seagate also boasts that its drive features the lowest cost per gigabyte of any flash storage product currently available. It won't say what that cost is, though it will likely vary depending on contracts Seagate has with its enterprise customers. The highest-capacity consumer SSD, a 4TB Samsung 850 EVO, costs a cool $1,500.

While packing 60TB into a single SSD might sound like overkill—plenty of cheaper servers run just fine on much cheaper conventional drives—Seagate is planning for a future when artificial intelligence and cloud storage will demand that data centers to be capable of quickly processing immense amounts of throughput.

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"The explosion of data can translate into more value for enterprises, if they have the right means to accommodate that data," Brett Pemble, Seagate's vice president of SSD products, said in a statement. "If anything is certain, it's the fact that across industries, the limits of data growth are boundless."