Which is the best large-capacity SSDs with a capacity of 10TB or more?
Jean Jacques Maleval, editor of the storagenewsletter website, made a very meaningful summary of the current global product status for SSD hard drives with storage capacity of 10TB and above.
This statistic retains the list of all SSDs published since 1991, including 1,252 hard drives and their main specifications. However, the tables in the article only focus on the devices with storage capacity of 10TB and above.
The following are all devices with a capacity of 10TB and above, but not all devices are available.
The first two SSDs come from Seagate Technology. The 64TB one is just a demo presented at the US Flash Memory Summit in 2017. The 60TB SAS SSD is also only a demo stage technology. It has never been mass produced or sold to users. At present, the largest capacity enterprise-class SSD present on Seagate Technology's official website is the 15TB Nytro 3000 with SAS interface, the transfer speed is 12Gb/s.
The capacity of SSD hard drives listed in this table are larger than the capacity of HDD hard drive we can see on the market, which is 16TB, 3.5 inches. However, in a product roadmap of its own, Seagate is looking forward to a single 100TB HDD mechanical hard drive made with HAMR technology in 2025. However, by 2025, SSD may have already broken the limit of 100TB storage space in a single set.
Although some hard drive manufacturers introduced SSDs in 3.5-inch sizes for a while, no one continue to produce such size on a large scale. Most of them now use a 2.5-inch shell or PCIe card to design and launch SSD products.
Therefore, from the design of space utilization, SSD has generally surpassed HDD.
In terms of interfaces, we can now find 12GB SAS, 6GB SATA, PCIe NVMe with significantly improved performance, and more NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) products will be available. For example, at the American Flash Summit in 2018, some manufacturers introduced the NVMe-oF all-flash series, which achieved 16 million in IOPS performance. Driven by more system storage vendors, it may accelerate the richness of NVMe-oF related storage products.
In terms of flash manufacturing technology, 64-layer stacked QLC (4 bits/cell) and TLC (3 bits/cell) NAND flash have been unveiled in 2018. At the same time, in 2018, Samsung, Intel, Micron and other companies planned to introduce 96-layer stacked 3D NAND flash, which will inevitably promote the substantial increase in the capacity of SSD solid state drives.
Currently, according to the storage mode, NAND flash memory has been developed to the fourth generations, which is SLC, MLC, TLC, and QLC.
The first-generation SLC can store 1 bit of data per cell (1bits/cell). It has good performance and long life. It can withstand 100,000 programming/erasing cycles, but its capacity is low and its cost is high. So, it is very rare now.
The second-generation MLC can store 2 bits of data per cell (2bits/cell). The performance, life, and capacity are balanced. It can withstand 10,000 programming/erasing cycles. Now it can only be seen in a few high-end SSDs.
The third-generation TLC can store 3 bits of data per cell (3 bits/cell), and its performance and lifetime are deteriorated. It can only withstand 3,000 programming/erasing cycles, but the capacity can be made larger and the cost can be lower. It is the most popular kind today.
The fourth-generation QLC can store 4 bits of data per cell (4 bits/cell), and its performance and lifetime are further deteriorated. It can only withstand 1000 programming / erasing cycles, but the capacity is easier to increase and the cost continues to decrease. At present, storage system vendors are better at developing QLC in the future.
In 2018, the price of 3D NAND flash and SSDs has dropped, and this trend may continue until 2019. But for the hard disk market of more than 10TB storage space, SSD solid state drives are still expanding rapidly, and the traditional HDD hard drives are unable to catch on in the future. At present, the mainstream SSD products in the market are still below 10TB. Perhaps the individual price of SSD hard drives is even lower, and when the of all-flash systems is applied to a more extensive area, large-capacity SSDs with 10TB and above capacity are expected to become the mainstream of the market, and is expected to gradually replace a large part of the HDD large capacity disk.
Of course, in the field of large-capacity SSD, who is at the top? Everyone wants to be! Any flash manufacturer has its own historical mission and pressure. How to turn the mission into a revolution to replace HDD and turn pressure into the driving force for SSD, I am afraid this is the most important.
Therefore, when will the SSD completely replaces the HDD is mainly affected by two factors: one is the price, and the other is the specific application of the storage system. Let's take a look, the development trend of flash memory is still clear, but it takes a long time to completely replace HDD.
However, looking from the HDD industry development trend, there were used to be 221 HDD hard disk manufacturers, of which only three are left, Seagate Technology, Toshiba, Western Digital.
