Viking crams a whopping 50TB of capacity into a single 3.5-inch SSD

If capacity is king, then all hail the new 50TB solid state drive from Viking Technology, the most capacious SSD on the planet.

Viking also launched a 25TB model. Both are part of the company's Ultra High-Capacity (UHC) Silo series and come housed in a standard 3.5-inch form factor casing for easy deployment. As you might imagine, these are intended for data centers, not general consumers, and are outfitted with a 6Gbps SAS interface. While not for home use, it is nice to see companies push the envelope like this in hopes of higher capacity SSDs trickling down into the consumer space.

These new drives use planar multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips and an undisclosed "next generation flash processor." They are rated to deliver up to 500MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 350MB/s of sequential writes, along with random read and write speeds of up to 60,000 IOPS and 10,000 IOPS, respectively.

Plenty of faster SSDs exist, though for clients wanting both speed and capacity, the UHC-Silo series is an interesting solution. With regards to endurance, Viking says you can fill an entire drive once per day for up to five years. Viking also makes the claim that enterprise clients can see cost savings in power, space, and cooling of up to 80 percent per terabyte with these drives.

"There is no higher capacity SSD solution available today than the UHC-Silo SSD," said Hamid Shokrgozar, President, Viking Technology. "These drives enable datacenter administrators to easily migrate to SSD performance, along with a tremendous increase in capacity. With space and cooling being critical drivers for todays datacenters, these advantages are a game changer."

Don't hold your breath waiting for a consumer 50TB SSD from any of the major players. While it would be possible to build one, the cost would price them out of contention with existing solutions. Depending on the model, a 1TB SSD typically costs around $300. Times that by 50 and you're looking at a $15,000 SSD.

As to the UHC-Silo drives, Viking did not mention a price.

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).