From exactly a year ago… “16TB M.2 SSDs will soon grace the market”:
Where are these storage devices? Or is a full calendar year not “soon” in the moribund computer components industry?
Where are the 16 TB M.2 SSDs?
Philip Greenspun’s Weblog
A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
SSD would be nice, but I just bought a couple of 24TB HDD’s for $250 each. When I was a child, I saw a 20MB drive pack for an IBM360 that was in use, not a museum piece. When I was a teenager I saved up my beans to buy a 40MB hard drive for my 386, I think it was just around $400. Then in the mid-90’s I bought one of the first desktop 1GB hard drives, I think again for $400. So, being able to get 24TB today for less than the cost of a nice dinner for two blows my mind.
The hard drive folks still seem to keep moving forward.
How do you fill 24TB?
Anon, are you familiar with Pornography?
You can use up 24TB if you are a moderately active photographer and you want to archive all your pictures in raw format.
Daniel: I agree that the hard drive folks are actually advancing in price/performance faster than the chip nerds.
Doubters: I think 24 TB is a good size drive for someone who captures a reasonable amount of video on his/her/zit/their phone. Tough to fill up even with RAW still images, but video is a disk space hog.
That’s the thing, Dr. Greenspun. In order to justify buying a 24 TB S/HDD, I will have to buy a camera and take photos. In order to save the photos from the camera I buy, I will have to get a 24 TB HDD, this gets me all confused.
Guess we need thank Apple for creating nominally Taiwan but really China – based computer component monopolist, per your recent post. Apple’s high margins and super-profits come first, you know. “think different, act lame”
https://www.kingston.com/en/ssd/server?sortby=nameatz&capacity%20range=15.36tb%20-%2016tb&use=servers%20and%20datacenters
that took all of three minutes to find. U want ssd that size u gotta be in server market. Yeah there’s density but its all in the RAM nowadays.
You want 16 TB storage must more cost effective to do a NAS with 4X4TB. Not sure what the RAID would look like.
Thanks for the link to the U.2 drives. It looks like they were announced in April 2025 (see https://www.kingston.com/en/company/press/article/76295 ). Will that server SSD actually fit into a regular PC case ? The Google says that a U.2 is a regular 2.5-inch drive with a connector on it, not a memory stick-style M.2 device. Also, the U.2 and M.2 connectors aren’t compatible: “U.2 uses a connector that is distinct from M.2, and often requires a cable connection, while M.2 slots are directly mounted on the motherboard.”
One company did announce a 16 TB M.2 drive back in February: https://www.storagenewsletter.com/2025/02/24/embedded-world-2025-exascend-schowcasing-up-to-16tb-m-2-ssd-and-other-storage-technology-innovations/
But, as with the announcement from a year ago, this seems to be fictitious. No retailer offers a 16 TB M.2 drive from this company or any other company, as far as I can tell.
There’s the 30TB Micron 9400, for only a month of rent. Important reminder to back up our porn.
Why “moribund computer components industry”?
Why moribund? The largest M.2 drive you can buy today is the same as the largest one you could buy a year ago. The fastest CPU you can buy today is 8% faster multithreaded than its predecessor of two years ago: https://www.notebookcheck.net/64-core-AMD-Ryzen-Threadripper-9980X-becomes-fastest-desktop-CPU-on-PassMark.1048912.0.html
I wonder: if we could tap into every storage device ever created since the age of computer storage, how much of the stored data would turn out to be redundant duplicates, corrupted and unusable, or simply obsolete and no longer valuable (like outdated application logs)? I wouldn’t be surprised if half or even more of it could be safely discarded.
I know, I am guilty of this too. I have backups of backups, plus data stored on old 5 1/4-inch floppy disks that I cannot even access anymore. I even have a stack of Zip disks — anyone else remember those?
I am easy fill up 2 TB with different development tools, IDEs and codebases that I develop and support, so I have to clean up my SSD frequently. I can easily tripple disk size used my tools/codebase that I want or need. I know how to use 16Tb without archiving a single movie or photo file.