At current enterprise NVMe prices, the drives alone for this must easily push past the $500k to $1M mark. It's fascinating to see this level of density, but it’s strictly going to be hyperscaler or high-end defense/research budget territory for a long time.
The very first sentence of this article mistakes Terabytes and Petabytes. I used to dismiss the entire article as poor quality on seeing a mistake like this. But these days it also feels like an indicator the article was written by a human and might actually have something interesting to say.
Sadly not in this case though - the Kioxia drives are interesting, but the fact that Dell has put some in a box is much less so.
There's been a lot of talk about orbital DCs lately, but with these levels of density, orbital CDNs might be a more obvious usecase. It would be interesting to see if something like Starlink can use something like this to cache media content and reduce their overall data moving through the constellation. It could even be worth it to have some satellites in higher orbits (even GEO if the ground hw can reach it) dedicated to streaming media content. You can tolerate higher RTT for content that doesn't need to be real time.
Some wealthy techbro from /r/datahoarders is going to purchase this to store all episodes of Doctor Who in uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2 FFV1 Matroska remuxes with redundant PAR2 recovery archives.
NVME SSDs are consumable items more so than HDDs are.
These drives will arrive in the secondary market to be snapped up by businesses lower in the food chain. By the time you can find them they will be ridden hard and put away wet that you probably wont want them.
Does it go, or does it glow?
Sadly not in this case though - the Kioxia drives are interesting, but the fact that Dell has put some in a box is much less so.
Satan’s NAS!
The interesting thing here is ~256TB in a single drive, but it's in E3.L form factor.
I have about 160TB on hard drives that I'm waiting to offload onto a single SSD.
But that needs to come with a connector that has adapters to USB-C, so I can attach it to my Macbook Neo.
Hopefully they get it a bit more dense soon and into the 2.5" NVMe form.
I feel like we’re in that season.
These drives will arrive in the secondary market to be snapped up by businesses lower in the food chain. By the time you can find them they will be ridden hard and put away wet that you probably wont want them.
There’s probably bulk pricing, but if you bought 40 drives separately thats 2,000,000USD in storage alone.
So a petabyte will be $600-800k alone, plus a server with enough high-speed PCIe lanes to serve the 40+ drives, definitely $1m+
Could you ever buy it?