Solidigm, a provider of NAND flash solid-state drives, and memory giant Micron have each introduced very high-capacity SSD drives meant for enterprise data centers, particularly in AI use cases.
Traditional hard disk drives have maintained their viability because of capacity advantages over SSDs. Hard drives offer over 20 TB capacity, while most SSDs are under 10 TB and are considerably more expensive than their HDD counterparts. But the gap is closing in drive capacity.
Solidigm intros 122TB PCIe SSD
Solidigm unveiled its highest capacity PCIe drive yet, the 122TB Solidigm D5-P5336 data center SSD. The D5-P5336 doubles the storage space of Solidigm’s earlier 61.44TB version of the drive, and the company claims it is the world’s first SSD with unlimited Random Write endurance for five years.
Solidigm is a pioneer of QLC (quad-level cell), which means four bits per cell, the highest density of SSD storage available. SSD technology started out with one bit per cell and has gradually increased to four bits per cell. In doing so, density has gone up, but the lifespan of the drive has gone down. The more bits per cell, the more often that the cell is written to, and writing to the drive eventually wears it out.
NAND endurance is measured in program/erase (P/E) cycles, and the greater the density (bits per cell), the shorter the lifespan. SLC SSDs are believed to be capable of 100,000 P/E cycles before they start to become unreliable, while QLC flash has around 1,000 P/E cycles.
But Solidigm, which has been shipping QLC drives since 2018, says that it has increased the lifespan of his drives to the point that they can be written to for five years nonstop and still work. “Day and night, you still cannot wear out the drive after five years of random writes,” said Roger Corell, senior director of leadership marketing at Solidigm, during a conference call with the media.
The specs are impressive. The SSD has a max power draw of 25 watts, the same as a regular low density PCIe SSD. It can reach 7.4 GB per second of sequential reads, pretty much saturating the PCIe 4.0 interface.
With 122TB in a 3.5-inch form factor, the D5-P5336 consumes up to 84% less storage power in network-attached storage (NAS) deployments versus a legacy hybrid hard-disk drive triple level cell (TLC) solutions. That also means a 4-to-1 footprint reduction over the old hybrid solution.
Solidigm plans to start sampling the drive in January next year, and it is due to become available for purchase by midyear.
Micron unveils 60TB PCIe 5 SSD
Micron Technology announced it has begun qualification of the 60TB 6550 ION NVMe SSD with customers. Micron claims the 6550 ION is the world’s fastest 60TB data center SSD and the industry’s first E3.S and PCIe Gen5 60TB SSD.
The 6550 ION is designed for high-capacity NVMe workloads such as networked AI data lakes, ingest, data preparation and checkpointing, file and object storage, public cloud storage, analytic databases, and content delivery. It achieves 12GB/s of throughput while using just 20 watts of power and idols at just 4 watts of power.
Micron’s emphasis with the 6550 ION is power efficiency, claiming the drive delivers up to 179% faster sequential reads and 179% higher read bandwidth per watt, 150% faster sequential writes and 213% higher write bandwidth per watt, and 80% faster random reads and 99% higher read IOPS per watt than the competition.
It also offers faster AI training workloads, such as 147% higher performance for Nvidia Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage (GDS) and 104% better energy efficiency and 151% improvement in completion times for AI model checkpointing.
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