This 100TB SSD has more storage capacity than 20,000 DVDs

After Samsung announced last month that it had created the world’s largest SSD – a 30TB beast – a flash memory company from California, Nimbus Data, has now blown it out of the water with its 100TB ExaDrive DC100 SSD.

To give you some context about quite how big that is, it’s enough storage for more than 20 million songs, or the equivalent to around 20,000 DVDs – all on something that uses the same 3.5” form and SATA interface of a regular hard drive.

Like Samsung’s PM1643, the ExaDrive is designed for use in storage systems for businesses, but its optimised for efficiency and capacity (duh!), rather than speed. In fact, its creators claim it draws 85% less power per terabyte compared to its closest rivals, which can result in significant savings for customers.

“These innovations reduce total cost of ownership per terabyte by 42% compared to competing enterprise SSDs, helping accelerate flash memory adoption in both cloud infrastructure and edge computing,” explains Nimbus Data.

In terms of performance, the DC100 can achieve 100,000 input/output operations per second (read or write) and transfer speeds of up to 500MBps.

Nimbus Data claims the ExaDrive’s pricing is “similar” to existing business SSDs “on a per-terabyte basis”, but offers significantly lower running costs in terms of both cooling and rack space as well as power consumption.

“As flash memory prices decline, capacity, energy efficiency, and density will become the critical drivers of cost reduction and competitive advantage,” says Thomas Isakovich, the company’s CEO and founder. “The ExaDrive DC100 meets these challenges for both data center and edge applications, offering unmatched capacity in an ultra-low power design.”

It’s worth noting that, although the ExaDrive is more than three times larger than its closest competitor in terms of capacity, the Samsung PM1643 uses the smaller 2.5” form factor, so you can’t directly compare the two.

In January the world’s highest capacity microSD card was announced with a staggering 512GB. Built by UK firm Integral Memory, the card is designed to increase the storage of Android phones and tablets, as well as devices like DSLR cameras and drones.