Seagate shares a prototype 64TB PCIe NVMe SSD that moves at 13GB/s

Regular spinning hard (disk) drives (or, HDD) will eventually find themselves replaced once SSDs can make a more affordable move on the market, mixed with a generous increase in capacity. We aren’t there yet, but we are getting closer each day, and Seagate has shared a tease of what would make every spinning disk drive about as obsolete as a 5.25″ floppy disk.

We still have yet to really put any Seagate NVMe options to the test as Seagate has been a little shy as of late, but no one will argue with the fact that this new generation of SSD will rule over them all, due to speeds that are simply untouchable by SATA solutions. Where spinning HDD options will get you an average high of around 120-160MB/s (read), a SATA SSD approach will yield as high as 550MB/s. This has been the talk of the custom-build community the last so many years as SSD puts HDD to shame. However, PCIe NVMe SSD solutions takes the read speed into the thousands, thus burying original HDDs in the back of a museum somewhere, soon to be forgotten by most.

The latest prototype by Seagate, features a PCIe NVMe card that sports eight 8TB M.2 SSD cards, organized in two layers of four. You can imagine based on today’s pricing, how much something like that would cost you. Obviously, this is targeted towards the enterprise market for data centers, but with everything else, the technology will trickle down into consumer solutions in the near future. For example, I am sure you’d be perfectly happy (or more like ecstatic) with a single 4TB card as a starting point.

Seagate’s card can process data as fast as 13GB per second, allowing any company to crunch information faster than ever before, which helps to move technology everywhere else along the progressional path that much quicker.

It has already been an exciting year for NVMe as companies like Western Digital and Samsung have already brought the price of NVMe cards a little closer to the price of a SATA SSD, as the price of SATA comes down as well. Now, if they can just work on the capacity issue on the consumer level as well, that will be all what’s left to drive HDD out of the market.