The primary 16TB M.2 SSD on Amazon prices as a lot as a automotive

Do you want numerous storage? Nicely, then, you’re going to should pay for it—and also you’ll be paying much more than you’d have a 12 months in the past, as “AI” information facilities gobble up a much bigger and greater share of the business’s output of reminiscence and storage. However even probably the most lavish amongst us would most likely wince at dropping practically $16,000 USD on an M.2 drive, even when it does have a capability of 16 terabytes.

The Exascend Enterprise-Grade PE4 Gen 4 SSD now is available in a 16TB capability, and so far as I can inform, it’s the primary one to hit that mark for a single M.2 drive bought to the general public at an ordinary retailer. Most of the drives obtainable to us mere mortals prime out at 8TB, which is already overkill for many customers. However this drive’s worth is much more stunning than its capability: $15,935. That’s a couple of grand per terabyte, and greater than double the price of the identical drive’s 8TB variant.

SSDs are getting dearer than ever after years of affordability, however that is nonetheless an insane worth. For comparability, a top-of-the-line PCIe 5.0 drive from Samsung with 8TB is $1,595, which continues to be expensive however roughly ONE-TENTH the price of this “Enterprise-Grade” instance. Oh, and it’s greater than 3 times quicker, too—the Exascend drive is PCIe 4.0, which is quick however removed from the quickest. The Amazon description calls it “blazing,” which is open to interpretation.

In response to the itemizing, the drive is “constructed to function reliably from 0°C to 70°C with a formidable 2,000,000-hour MTBF” (imply time between failures, a measure of prolonged operation). And to again it up, the drive advertises a 5-year restricted guarantee, although the precise phrases of that guarantee aren’t spelled out on Amazon. On the corporate’s web site, it says that the PE4 sequence is 5 years… or to the top of the “marketed DWPD or TBW ranking.” (These phrases are Drive Writes Per Day and Whole Bytes Written, respectively.) The spec sheet lists these at 0.6 drive writes per day for 5 years, or 16,640 terabytes.

This itemizing, noticed by VideoCardz, is fascinating as a result of it’s being bought straight to customers, assuming stated customers can afford to drop a couple of quarter of the typical US wage on a single M.2 drive directly. (By the way, Amazon can be providing to let me pay $1,327.92 per thirty days for twelve months. How beneficiant.)