Been waiting for a 100TB solid state drive? Nimbus Data just launched one

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This is the kind of drive that will tempt you to remove the recycle bin from your desktop.

Nimbus Data, a company you probably never heard of, just launched what it claims is the world's largest capacity solid state drive, the 100TB ExaDrive DC100. We'll just let that sink in for a moment. Still waiting....

In case you're having trouble wrapping your head around that amount of solid state storage, Nimbus Data provides some reference points. You could, for example, store 20 million songs on this drive, or 20,000 HD movies. We'll add to it—let's say the average Steam game is 50GB (many games take up much less space, some have even bigger footprints, but we'll use 50GB to keep the math simple). Using that as our metrics, you could squeeze 2,000 games onto the ExaDrive DC1000.

Of course, this is not a solution for gaming, or even home consumers in general, but is intended for datacenters. Nevertheless, you could technically plop one of these drives into your gaming PC and be off and running. It ships in a 3.5-inch package rather than the more commonly found 2.5-inch form factor for SSDs, but uses a SATA 6Gbps interface.

For datacenters, the pitch from Nimbus Data is that the HDD form factor and SATA 6Gbps interface makes it plug-and-play compatible with hundreds of storage and server platforms. The company also plans to make a version available with a SAS interface at some point.

Underneath the hood are 3D NAND flash memory chips. The drive is rated to deliver up to 500MB/s of sequential read and performance, along with random reads and writes both checking in at up to 100,000 IOPS.

Nimbus Data didn't mention specific pricing, only saying that it will be similar to existing enterprise SSDs on a per terabyte basis. That would likely mean $100K or more for the drive. Not that it matters for home consumers—even though these things have a tendency to trickle down into the consumer space, we suspect it will be quite some time before 100TB SSDs are mainstream.

Paul Lilly
Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).