Exclusive: World's largest SSD finally goes on sale — 61.44TB Solidigm SSD costs far less than I expected, with a per-terabyte price that's much cheaper than 8TB SSD

We’ve written previously about Solidigm’s D5-P5336, a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD with a capacity of 61.44TB, but the drive - the world’s largest SSD to date – is finally up for pre-sale.

The D5-P5336 is the first quad-level cell (QLC) solid-state storage drive and comes available in the E1L and U.2 formats, popular in data centers. They aren't generally found in the end user market, but someone added it to Valve's Steam Deck so don't rule the idea out of building your own custom U.2-friendly workstation! 

This drive allows for up to six times more data storage in the same space compared to a hard disk drive (HDD) array. Many workstation motherboards have two U.2 ports, which means that professionals with deep pockets could have a pair of 61.44TB P5336 running in their pedestal PCs as secondary storage drives.

Now available to preorder

The D5-P5336 is designed to handle massive amounts of data from the core to the edge, outperforming many cost-optimized triple-level cell (TLC) SSDs. It's particularly suited to read-intensive workloads like AI, machine learning, content delivery networks, and object storage.

When the company first announced the drive, Greg Matson, VP of Strategic Planning and Marketing at Solidigm said "Modern workloads like AI and capabilities like 5G are rapidly reshaping the storage landscape. Businesses need storage in more places that is inexpensive, able to store massive data sets efficiently and access the data at speed. The D5-P5336 delivers on all three -- value, density and performance. With QLC, the economics are compelling -- imagine storing 6X more data than HDDs and 2X more data than TLC SSDs, all in the same space at TLC speed.”

Assuming you’re in the market for one of these whopping 61.44TB drives, you’re no doubt interested in knowing how much they’ll set you back. Well, while they aren’t currently available to buy they can now finally be pre-ordered for $3,975.16 from PCNation, and $3,692.00 from Tech-America. The exact shipping date is unknown, but Solidigm says "later this year".

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