# Samsung announces mass production of 30.72TB SSD



## Talys (Feb 21, 2018)

Yup, you read right, over 30 terrabytes of SSD in a single unit  Finally, a drive large enough for even the greediest of us to fit a year of photography into one drive.

https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-begins-mass-production-of-industrys-largest-capacity-ssd-30-72tb-for-next-generation-enterprise-systems

Unfortunately, if you have to ask how much it will cost, you probably can't afford it. It's SAS (serial attached SCSI), SSD, and "enterprise". There are some killer features on it, like monster performance (3-4 times faster than a typical SSD) and write endurance being rated one full write per day (all 31TB), every day for 5 years.

Perhaps there will soon be a consumer photographer's version of this drive!


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## aceflibble (Feb 21, 2018)

No official pricing yet, but a 'standard' Samsung SSD at 4TB costs around £1,000/$1,400. So I'd expect somewhere between what, eight to ten grand for a single 30TB drive? The previous 15tb drive they put out was priced at around $10,000, IIRC. I doubt they'd go over that as consistently launching at the 10k mark will help retain customers.

The most important part, as far as I'm concerned, is definitely the durability. It's been the drawback to SSD all along—still is right now—but if both the write lifespan and the physical durability have been improved this much, we can finally start looking at SSDs for long-term storage. If they can take this _performance_ and scale it down to 2-4TB, that's it, mechanical drives are done.


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## Don Haines (Feb 21, 2018)

aceflibble said:


> No official pricing yet, but a 'standard' Samsung SSD at 4TB costs around £1,000/$1,400. So I'd expect somewhere between what, eight to ten grand for a single 30TB drive? The previous 15tb drive they put out was priced at around $10,000, IIRC. I doubt they'd go over that as consistently launching at the 10k mark will help retain customers.
> 
> The most important part, as far as I'm concerned, is definitely the durability. It's been the drawback to SSD all along—still is right now—but if both the write lifespan and the physical durability have been improved this much, we can finally start looking at SSDs for long-term storage. If they can take this _performance_ and scale it down to 2-4TB, that's it, mechanical drives are done.



The first hard drive that I bought for work cost $9,995.00......... and it was a huge 10Mbytes of capacity!

Times have certainly changed!


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## Talys (Feb 21, 2018)

aceflibble said:


> No official pricing yet, but a 'standard' Samsung SSD at 4TB costs around £1,000/$1,400. So I'd expect somewhere between what, eight to ten grand for a single 30TB drive? The previous 15tb drive they put out was priced at around $10,000, IIRC. I doubt they'd go over that as consistently launching at the 10k mark will help retain customers.
> 
> The most important part, as far as I'm concerned, is definitely the durability. It's been the drawback to SSD all along—still is right now—but if both the write lifespan and the physical durability have been improved this much, we can finally start looking at SSDs for long-term storage. If they can take this _performance_ and scale it down to 2-4TB, that's it, mechanical drives are done.



The write endurance is incredible; it's suitable for applications like database servers. The performance bump is pretty massive, too. I hope some of this tech dribbles down into consumer tech and becomes cheap enough to store photos  I would absolutely love 7TB - 15TB SSD storage drives for photography and other archiving.

For its target market, practically, the benefit of the drive will be that you can buy one 30TB drive (or the smaller 15TB variant coming in the future) instead of a whole stack of smaller drives. Two of them, gives you a simple, mirrored set that's big enough for a lot of medium sized companies. It's the difference between having drives right in the server's chassis versus a 2U - 4U sized enclosure (and power, and all that) just for hard drives.

Backups should be fun


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