SK Hynix is looking to gobble up some of the spotlight as it releases a massive 61.44TB SSD (solid state drive). Making for a huge capacity in such a tiny bit of physical space. Not only that, but the company has more to come as it progresses further into 2025 and beyond.
The company has been working with its subsidiary, Solidigm, to achieve the new model. A model focused on delivering next-generation performance for data centers, providing a strong accessory for AI and enterprise users. It will offer data transfer speeds of up to 32GT/s and will likely be widely available for enterprise customers in early 2025. For now, it will just be shipping samples to data centers for testing.
Solidigm has already launched a 61.44TB PCIe 4.0 drive earlier this year. Although it features slower transfer speeds, it still provides plenty for modern data center needs while likely motivating the consumer market, proving that higher capacities are right around the corner for everyone.
Of course, consumers won’t be affording enterprise-level drives like this any time soon. The going price for Solidigm’s current PCIe 4.0 version is around $7k+, making for quite the price tag. It is also only available via a limited number of sellers that are commonly visited by professionals and via bulk through the company itself.
This is just the start of the collaboration between these two companies. They plan to push further towards the release of a 122TB model by the third quarter of 2025, and then further once more toward 244TB. No pricing information is available just yet for the new PCIe 5.0 drives coming from these two companies, but you can get it will be up there beyond $7k.
Hopefully, as we excel further into the enterprise SSD (or eSSD) market, this will also influence consumer development all the same. Sadly, the average user doesn’t need 61.44TB or larger drives. So there isn’t a lot of motivation there compared to enterprise. But as technology continues to push ahead, the demand for capacity is only going to grow larger.
