Seagate announces 60TB SAS SSD

Today at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California Seagate Technology made two big announcements: they announced a 60TB Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid-state-drive (SSD) and a new 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD. The 60TB SSD is currently the largest SSD to be demonstrated. These latest announcements round out Seagate’s enterprise portfolio of drives with these new innovative options in SSDs.
 
Data continues to grow with no end in site. While data centers too are growing at a fast rate, and becoming larger and larger, most companies prefer a way to increase density versus building new data centers. The new 60TB SAS SSD from Seagate aims to address these issues with a capacity that is four times larger than the next highest-capacity SSD currently available. 60TB is enough capacity to store 400 million photos on a typical social media platform, or 12,000 DVD movies. The drive comes in 3.5” form factor, taking up the same space as a current HDD.
 
To help keep the cost per gigabyte lower, the new 60TB SAS SSD uses single controller architecture. The new drive also accommodates both hot and cold data helping simplify the setup of different types of storage for different types of data. In other words, hot and cold data can be stored on the same drive in the same server with no need to add additional management steps. Seagate goes on to state that the new drive’s flexible architecture provides a pathway for data centers to continue to grow from the current capacity of 60TB to 100TB or more in the future.
 
While storing massive data is an issue companies are struggling with, it is one of many. Another big issue is having storage that has the performance that is required by some applications. Seagate’s answer to this is its new 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD. The new drive is designed to tackle the requirements of high performance computing, scale-out databases and big data analytics, such as scientific research and weather modeling. First feature back in March as the world’s fastest SSD, The XP7200 uses a single PCIe interface for high-speed data transfers and four separate controllers. Seagate claims that this enables the drive to have four times the processing power of comparable drives without the higher cost, power levels, and latency required from a PCIe switch or bridge. They go on to state that this new technology can easily integrate into all-flash arrays.
 
The 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of this year. The 60TB SAS SSD is expected for release sometime next year.

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