It’s been almost five years since Samsung introduced what was then the world’s largest solid-state drive (SSD). The PM1643 has been a top-tier storage device for a long time, but it does come with a heavy label. Back in 2020, it retailed for just under $8,400, and three years later, it still has a whopping $4,939 sticker price.
A relatively new product is about to change all that, the Intel SSDPFWNV307TZ (soon to be the Solidigm SSD D5-P5316) has been cut in price and now costs less than $2,699 at Walmart (opens in a new tab) (and new egg (opens in a new tab)). Given that the 4TB PCIe Gen4 drive is struggling to break the $100/TB bottom line, it’s priced at just over $87/TB, which is a remarkable achievement.
As of this writing, the 4TB WD_Black SN850 retails for $399.89 — making it more expensive terabyte for tera than Solidigm’s — though Kingston’s NV2 2TB SSD is $110. Solidigm’s D5-P5316 was born from Intel’s acquisition of the NAND business in 2021 and the subsequent spin-off of SK Hynix. It uses 144-layer QLC technology and has write/read speeds of 3.6GBps and 7GBps respectively.
Since it’s an EDSFF L 9.5mm drive, it can be used in a compatible 1U server rack to reach a capacity of 1PB, but it won’t fit your laptop or desktop, since it’s a server product, it supports hardware encryption (256 bit AES), temperature monitoring and logging, and enhanced power data loss protection.
Solidigm says the drive comes with a 5-year warranty and a lifespan of between 23PBW (64K random) and 104PBW (64K sequential).
The Rise of Super SSDs
Large-capacity SSDs are becoming mainstream; Nimbus Data’s Exadrive SSD has a capacity of up to 100TB but costs about $40,000, a five-fold increase compared to Solidigm’s D5-P5316.
Kioxia, Seagate, Samsung, Micron, and Solidigm, along with many smaller players (Nimbus Data, Dapustor Union Memory, Teamgroup, ScaleFlux, and Memblaze) are vying for the enterprise market as consumer demand for storage components winds down.
While hard drives are still affordable, they consume more power (and emit more heat), are more prone to failure (due to mechanical parts), are generally heavier, are much slower and grow slower in capacity. 30TB hard drives are expected to arrive later this year, but right now 26TB is the absolute largest capacity available on the market.
The only two things that make HDDs still attractive to hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. are the price (as low as $17 per TB, five times less than the P5316) and the high volume of installations based on existing HDDs, which makes It’s easier to just replace the HDD rather than rip and replace or upgrade.
While some services, like cloud storage or cloud backup, will happily use a hard drive, others, like web hosting, will happily get out of the spinning disk bottleneck.
With Kioxia, Samsung, and Micron already ramping up production of NAND technology using 230 layers or more (50% extra capacity or more), it’s only a matter of time before SSDs reach parity with HDDs on a per terabyte basis.