2 years worth of movies in your pocket

A cigarette size package storing 30TB using Solid State Drive technology, SSD. Credit: Samsung

Roughly two years after having developed SSD (Solid State Drive) storage in a size format that is similar to a cigarette box (a bit thinner, actually) with a capacity of 15.36TB, Samsung is now delivering in the same size 30.72TB, a huge storage capacity that would let you store 2 years worth of movies (or 60 years of music or 9 million hi-resolution photos). Seagate revealed last year a 60TB SSD but in the larger 3.5″ format.

The price has not been published so far, but it is not going to be on the cheap side. The 15TB was priced at 10,000$ when it was first placed on the market in 2016. I guess we might expect a price in that range to day for the 30TB. That means 30 cent per GB (current consumer price for 1GB on SSD is around 25 cent).

The performances are also pretty good: 2.1 GB per second read speed and 1.7 GB per second write speed. Basically you can write a HD movie in about 3 seconds (using the compression adopted by Netflix). Reliability? Average time between failure: over 200 years!

It is by no means the end of the line in terms of storage density and performances. In 2016 for the first time silicon based storage has exceeded the density of magnetico storage (that is around 1.3Tbpsi -most magnetic hard drive use 850Gbpsi density) reaching almost 3Tbpsi in 2018.
There are technologies in the lab that can push the density limit much further, like atomic storage that might reach 500TBpsi, over 150 times today’s highest density.

The question of course is: what can I do with that monster storage? I have no answer to that but if experience is worth something we can rest assured that by the time we will have such storage capacity we will also have found a way to fill it up.

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.