Seagate has built a 60TB SSD and successfully demonstrated the device at the Flash Memory Summit in San Jose, California.

This is the largest storage drive ever seen by the industry, offering four times more capacity than the highest capacity SSD on the market today while still retaining the traditional 3.5-inch form-factor.

The company also announced the 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD, aimed at the most demanding enterprise and research environments.

Flash memory
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The big guns

Back in 2012, Seagate said it expected to produce a 60TB, 3.5-inch hard drive within 10 years by using heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. Just four years later, we have our first 60TB drive – sure, it’s not a hard drive, but then again it doesn’t require tiny lasers in order to work.

Seagate’s 60TB monster features SAS connectivity and a single controller. In addition to quadrupling capacity, it also doubles storage density over the current generation flash-based drives, helping drive down cost per GB.

The device is aimed at enterprise users who need low latency access to large datasets or are already using flash as a primary storage medium.

According to Seagate, a single 60TB drive can store 400 million photos in resolution typically used by social media platforms, or 12,000 DVD movies. The device is expected to be released sometime in 2017.

“If anything is certain, it’s the fact that across industries, the limits of data growth are boundless,” said Brett Pemble, Seagate’s general manager and vice president of SSD products. “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.”

Meanwhile the new 8TB Nytro XP7200 SSD plugs into a single PCIe slot but features four separate controllers for maximum bandwidth. It is intended primarily for high performance computing (HPC) environments and analytics. Seagate says the technology easily integrates into all-flash system arrays, and its partners agree.

“AccelStor’s core focus is on providing all-flash arrays that offer tremendous performance and reliability to meet the demands of the fast-growing cloud and enterprise markets. Critical to achieving this, though, is having the right building blocks — including exacting solid-state engineering and software innovation,” said Charles Tsai, president of AccelStor.

“AccelStor works with Seagate Technology to seamlessly integrate our state-of-the-art FlexiRemap software technology with Seagate Nytro NVMe SSDs. The result: we’re able to translate SSD performance into complete all-flash arrays that help data centers extract the most value from their data.”

Nytro XP7200 will be available through channel partners in the fourth quarter of 2016.