Viking UHC Silo SSD Packs Enormous 50 Terabyte Storage Volume For Enterprise Customers
It goes without saying that we love solid state drives here at HotHardware. Their ultra-fast speeds and favorable price/GB ratio is make them a must-have for enthusiasts, attractive upgrades for regular consumers, and desirable performance upgrades for enterprise customers. Viking Technology has that last segment of customers in mind with its new Ultra-High-Capacity (UHC) Silo SSD series, which will be available in capacities up to an astonishing 50TB.
Given that the UHC Silo SSD series is aimed at the enterprise market, it features a 3.5-inch form-factor and a 6Gbps SAS interface. Viking is confident that these SSDs will help put a few nails in the coffin for traditional hard disk drive thanks to their undeniable advantages in speed, cooling and power efficiency. The SSDs have idle power consumption of fewer than 10 watts and active power that measures just 16 watts.
Viking says that its UHC Silo SSD series can reduce power, space and cooling costs by up to 80 percent per terabyte compared to HDDs. "There is no higher capacity SSD solution available today than the UHC-Silo SSD" said Hamid Shokrgozar, President, Viking Technology. "These drives enable datacenter administrators to easily migrate to SSD performance, along with a tremendous increase in capacity. With space and cooling being critical drivers for today’s datacenters, these advantages are a game changer."
In addition to the jaw-dropping 50TB capacity SSD, there will also be a 25TB SKU. No matter which SKU you select, you’ll receive an SSD that features Planar MLC NAND, and is capable of sequential reads and writes of 500MB/sec and 350MB/sec respectively. Those speeds are not exactly impressive to enthusiasts that have been spoiled by M.2 SSDs that dance in the 2+ GB/sec range for sequential reads and writes, but are still admirable for a device that stores up to 50TB of data. Random (4K) reads/writes come in at 60,000 IOPS and 10,000 IOPS, respectively. On the endurance front, Viking says that the UHC Silo SSD series is rated for up to one full drive write per day for up to five years.
As you might expect for a brand-new piece of hardware that will no doubt cost an obscene amount of money and likely only has limited applications (for now), Viking isn’t revealing pricing details just yet. However, take into consideration that 2TB SATA SSDs are hovering around the $550 mark right now. Scaling that up to 50TB level would put the SSD’s price tag close to $14,000 — perhaps even higher to thanks to the exclusive nature of the hardware.
That a lot of money for any business to swallow for a single piece of hardware, and definitely out of the realm of your average consumer. However, maybe within the next 10 years, we’ll all be looking at 50TB SSDs the say way we look at 64GB SSDs today.
