Samsung has forecast that we can expect single SSD capacity to be as high as 1PB within the next decade, a prediction which came off the back of the company exhibiting a prototype 128TB SSD at the Flash memory Summit in San Jose in 2022, calling it a “petabyte scale product”.
While Samsung has since launched a 128TB SSD with a proprietary controller, and Silicon Motion has an SSD controller that can support up to 128TB, SSDs of that size remain disappointingly rare.
At CES 2024, Phison demonstrated a range of SSDs and portable SSD controllers, including its X2 enterprise SSD platform. On the company’s site, this is listed as “world’s best-in-class Enterprise SSD” available in capacities of 1.92TB to 61.44TB. However, something that very few people noticed was the version on show at CES was listed as having up to 128TB capacity.
Not shouting about it… yet!
Although details are very scarce beyond the information found on Phison’s media deck released prior to the show, we know that highlights of the X2 controller (beyond the massive capacity) include:
- PCIe Gen5x4 Dual-Port
- TSMC 12nm Process
- 16-Channels,
- 3D NAND
- Computational Storage Devices (CSD)
We also know that it will come in U.2, E3.S form factors.
Phision additionally revealed that its device delivers the best performance-per-watt, and boasts sequential read speeds of over 14GB/s, sequential write speeds of 12GB/s, random read speeds of 3000K IOPS, and random write speeds of 800K IOPS.
It’s clear by the lack of fuss that Phison isn’t ready to shout about the updated X2 just yet, but it’s a positive sign that 128TB SSDs are slowly making their way to the market, and it will surely only be a matter of time before they start to become more commonplace, even if 1PB drives remain a distant dream for now.
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