Storage Technology update

Samsung 16TB proof of concept

The last week gave us a couple of interesting news items that have to do with storage technology.

The first is as shown in the photo above – a prototype Samsung shown of a 2.5″ SSD drive that holds a massive 16TB of storage. Nowadays, even 2TB in SSD drives are not common (to say the least), and 16TB seems like something from a sci-fi future (not that far in the future, but still) – when even good old magneto-mechanical drives have not achieved this feat as yet. The prototype uses stacked v-nand memory chips in a large die, which means they’re two sided chips with 3 bits per cell. This allowed Samsung to cram that much storage into a 2.5″ drive. No pricing is available as yet, but it will be made commercial in the future. Presumable, the price will run in the high thousands and is not for the average joe just yet.

Western Digital Red Pro & Black 6TB

6TB is not new to us. HGST (Hitachi) and Seagate have both introduced such high capacity models over the last year or so. Western digital has been slower to join the party, especially with it’s faster, higher end selection. But not anymore. With a model from the Black series (7200rpm, and a massive 128MB cache) that offers upto 29% performance increase over it’s previous, 4TB model, WD is showing it’s prowess and reminds that it is still the biggest lion in the storage drives jungle. The company also shown (other than a slightly smaller black 5TB drive) 5TB and 6TB red pro models. The red series is targeted at NAS devices – file servers that requires work horses that can perform continuously and reliably in a server enterprise environment.

The MSRP prices stand between 264$-299$ for the 5TB and 6 TB models.

It’s definitely not too expensive, but in light of the coming SSD (and maybe SSHD?) giants, 6TB doesn’t look as good as it used to.

Would you buy it?

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