Seagate has unveiled a solid state drive with a capacity of 60 TB, which dethrones the 16 TB SSD of Samsung as the biggest SSD in the world.
The 60 TB SSD was announced by Seagate at the Flash Memory Summit, which is being held in Santa Clara, California.
According to the press release accompanying the 60 TB SSD's unveiling, the groundbreaking drive has twice the density and four times the capacity of the next highest largest SSD in the market today, without naming Samsung's 16 TB SSD.
To illustrate how much storage the 60 TB SSD of Seagate provides, the company claims that it can hold 400 million pictures on typical social media platforms, or about 12,000 DVD movies.
However, before you start thinking of consolidating all your files inside your own 60 TB SSD, it should be noted that the drive is intended to be used in enterprise data centers. It is likely going to be too expensive for regular consumers once it launches, as Samsung's 4 TB 850 EVO SSD already comes with a price tag of $1,500.
"The explosion of data can translate into more value for enterprises, if they have the right means to accommodate that data," said Seagate general manager and VP for SSD products Brett Pemble, adding that the 60 TB SSD will allow the company's clients to solve their continuously growing data management needs.
The 3.5-inch form factor of the 60 TB SSD, according to Seagate, would be useful for storage management inside data centers as it eliminates the need to support different form factors covering hot and cold data.
Seagate has not yet revealed the price tag of the 60 TB SSD, but the company claims that it will be providing the lowest cost per gigabyte of storage among all available flash storage products once it enters the market.
The 60 TB SSD is currently only in its prototype stage, but Seagate expects to push the device into production starting next year, with the drive slated to also launch in 2017.
It should also be noted that with the new architecture that Seagate has incorporated into the 60 TB SSD, the path toward the development of a 100 TB SSD has been opened up. However, there is currently no information on when Seagate would be able to unveil such a product.
Seagate also released the world's largest consumer hard drive last month, the BarraCuda Pro, which features storage of 10 TB spins at 7,200 rpm, though with only a 220 Mbps transfer rate due to it being a hard drive and not an SSD.
