'Mammoth' 50TB SSD launched by Viking Technology

Viking claims that, despite its high cost, the 50TB SSD can reduce data centre cooling costs 'by 80 per cent'

Viking Technology has introduced what it describes as the 'world's largest' 50 terabyte solid state drive (SSD) - but that kind of capacity doesn't come cheap.

The mammoth SSD, which the company claims is the highest-capacity drive of its kind shipping today, is part of Viking's Ultra High-Capacity (UHC) Silo series. Not surprisingly, it's not aimed at the consumer market and, instead, comes housed in a standard 3.5in form factor and a 6Gbps SAS interface for deployment in data centres.

Viking has also launched a 25TB SSD, for those with less extreme data-storage needs.

Both of these Silo SSDs are built with power-efficiency in mind, and each has an idle power consumption level of less than 10W, and active power consumption of 16W. According to the firm, the drives can help data centres to reduce their power, space, and cooling costs by up to 80 per cent per terabyte.

The SSD duo also use Planar MLC NAND flash memory and offer claimed sustained read and write speeds of 500MB/s and 350MB/s, respectively, and sustained random read and write performance of up to 60,000 IOPS and 10,000 IOPS.

Viking claims that SSDs can endure one drive write per day, every day, for five years.

"There is no higher capacity SSD solution available today than the UHC-Silo SSD" said Hamid Shokrgozar, president of Viking Technology.

"These drives enable data centre administrators to easily migrate to SSD performance, along with a tremendous increase in capacity. With space and cooling being critical drivers for today's data centres, these advantages are a game changer."

No pricing details have been made available yet, but when you consider than a 1TB SSD costs around 300 quid, Viking's 50TB offering ain't going to be cheap.

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