Seagate's new 60TB SSD can hold up to 12,000 movies or 400mn photos

At the Flash Memory Summit conference today, Seagate Technology announced two new flash innovations that extend the limits of storage computing performance in enterprise data centers to unprecedented levels. The new products include a 60 terabyte (TB) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid-state drive (SSD) — the largest SSD yet with that sort of capacity— and the 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD.

“The explosion of data can translate into more value for enterprises if they have the right means to accommodate that data,” said Brett Pemble, Seagate’s general manager and vice president of SSD products. “If anything is certain, it’s the fact that across industries, the limits of data growth are boundless. Seagate is committed to staying on top of this growth and, in turn, ever-changing customer needs, and providing new and varied technologies to help customers stay ahead of the data management curve. New products like the 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD and 60TB SAS SSD are a testament to that.”

The two innovations, released as an addition to Seagate's data center portfolio are designed to help enterprise IT leaders obtain more value from the rapidly expanding amount of data they must contend with, even under the most demanding application requirements. With four times the capacity of the next leading SSD, 60TB SAS SSD could hold up to 12,000 DVD movies or even a whopping 400 million photos. This single controller architecture also delivers the lowest cost per gigabyte for flash available today.

This massive hard drive also simplifies the configuration process of accommodating “hot” and “cold” data, enabling data centers to use the same enterprise HDD 3.5-inch storage form factor. The drive was created with quick accessibility in mind, and its flexible architecture means it'll be simple for data centers to grow from 60TB to accommodate 100TB or more of data in the future, all using the same form factor.

“Given the demands on today’s data centers, optimal technologies are those that can accommodate an immense amount of data as needed—and without taking up too much space. As such, we are constantly seeking new ways to provide the highest density possible in our all-flash data center configurations,” said Mike Vildibill, vice president, Advanced Technologies and Big Data, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. “Seagate’s new 60TB SAS SSD offers an exciting possibility for customers to achieve higher server storage performance and capacity configurations never seen before.”

Similarly, the 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD can accommodate the hyper-scale needs of today’s data centers seeking to easily grow with their data without losing the ability to quickly access and process it — a scenario commonly seen in applications involving high performance computing, scale-out databases and big data analytics, such as scientific research and weather modeling.

It features a single PCIe interface for high-speed data transfers and four separate controllers, providing processing power up to four times faster than comparable drives, but without the higher cost, power levels and latency required from a PCIe switch or bridge. Applications can process more transactions faster using the industry’s highest bandwidth through one PCIe slot, and without having to invest in more hardware. Additionally, the technology easily integrates into all-flash system arrays.

The 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD will be available through channel partners in calendar Q4, 2016. The 60TB SAS SSD is only available right now for demonstration, though it will officially make its debut sometime in 2017