A 16TB SSD: OMG

It was reported today by Ars Technica UK, Slash Gear, and others, that Samsung is introducing a 16TB SSD. The world’s largest hard drive was unveiled at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California. What’s even more amazing is the 2.5″ form factor—it would fit in your laptop.

Before you run out (OK, log in to Amazon) to buy one, you need to know the price is expected to be between $5,000 and $7,000 each, at least initially. That price isn’t that crazy. If you were to buy eight 2TB SSD drives today at $800 each it would be $6,400 and they would not all fit in your laptop.

Could Backblaze use these SSDs to create a 720TB Storage Pod? Sure, it would cost about $220,000 for the drives and take a bit of modification to fit 2.5″ drives versus 3.5″ drives in a Storage Pod. We’ll leave the modifications up to Backblaze Labs to figure out. The real question is “would” we build a 720TB Storage Pod made from 16TB SSD drives? Let’s do the math…

• $5,000 divided by 16TB of storage is $312.50 per TB of storage.
• $312.50 per TB divided by 1,000 is $0.3125 per GB of storage.

Currently, we pay about $0.032 per GB for traditional hard drives, a Seagate 4TB drive for example. The 16TB SSD is nearly 10 times the cost per GB. That said, each 16TB SSD Storage Podhttps://www.backblaze.com/b2/storage-pod.html would save three Storage Pod chassis using 4TB drives—that’s roughly $12,000 ($4,000 per chassis in rough numbers). That would still make a 16TB SSD Storage Pod about nine times more expensive. Even after we put all the numbers into our spreadsheets that factor in electricity, rack space, drive failure, maintenance, etc. the 16TB solid state drives would still be six to seven times more expensive.

I guess we’ll have to wait a little longer for prices to drop before we jump on creating an SSD Storage Pod. Too bad, it would have been fun to write about a 720TB Storage Pod, or better yet, a 14.4PB Backblaze Vault. Still, a 16TB SSD is pretty cool, I wonder what’s next?