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Published: August 28, 2020 | Source: Nimbus Data | Author: Mark Campbell

Nimbus Data releases the world’s largest QLC SSD, offering users 64TB of storage

Nimbus Data releases the world's largest QLC SSD, offering users 64TB of storage

Nimbus Data releases the world’s largest QLC SSD, offering users 64TB of storage

Most of us haven’t heard of Nimbus Data, but they are one of the only companies that can offer SSDs large enough for your entire games library. With their latest Exadrive NL series of SSDs, Nimbus Data offers its buyers up to 64TB of SSD storage. THat’s right, SSDs that are up to 64x larger than today’s already large 1TB SSD storage drives.   

Nimbus has already released 50TB and 100TB drives with their ExaDrive DC series, but thanks to the capabilities of QLC NAND, Nimbus has been able to offer 64TB storage levels at much more affordable prices than before. The ExaDrive NL 64TB will cost $10.900, whereas an ExaDrive DC 50TB will cost $12,500. The Nimbus Data ExaDrive NL is larger and cheaper than its closest ExaDrive DC equivalent. These drives will ship in both SATA and SAS models and occupy the 3.5-inch storage form factor. 

Why are these drives so expensive? The simple answer is that they ship an incredible amount of storage potential into a compact space. This drive is designed to be deployed in areas which are traditionally catered to by mechanical hard drives, offering users the same 3.5-inch drive form factor and SATA compatibility. This drive’s use of the SATA interface will limit the speed of the Nimbus Data ExaDrive, but when this much storage is on offer, that sacrifice may be worth it. 

Nimbus Data also backs up its drives with an endurance rating of 0.2-0.6 DWPD through its 5-year limited warranty. For the 64TB model, users would need to rewrite over 12.8 TB of data per day to risk passing this drive’s endurance rating. 

  

Nimbus Data releases the world's largest QLC SSD, offering users 64TB of storage

While this kind of SSD is far from the mainstream market, Nimbus’ creation of their ExaDrive proves that SSDs of this size are possible, and its only a matter of time before larger SSDs trickle down to the mainstream market. While new consumer-grade drives are unlikely to reach Nimbus’ capacities anytime soon, it is clear that the storage requirements of consumers have started to increase, especially for gamers.

If more titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Red Dead Redemption 2 or Microsoft Flight Simulator release, multi-TB SSDs will start to become a lot more common amongst gamers. 

You can join the discussion on Nimbus Data’s new 64TB QLC SSD on the OC3D Forums. 

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