Massive 16TB M.2 SSD Lands On Amazon And It's Only $16,000

How much storage do you need? It's a fair bet you could be satisfied with 2TB or less, which is the typical capacity of M.2 SSDs. If you need more, it's likely warm or cold data that could be stuffed onto relatively inexpensive spinning rust. Some folks truly need storage that's high-density, high-speed, and high-capacity, though, and for those use cases, we present the Exascend PE4 M.2 SSD in 16TB capacity (15.36 usable).

To be honest, this isn't even close to the densest SSD out there; Kioxia, Samsung, and Sandisk have all showcased 256TB SSDs for enterprise clients. Those drives use the E1.L ("ruler") or E3.L form factors that have rapidly become standard in datacenters; the bottom drive in the top photo is an E1.S SSD. That form factor is similar to M.2; it's just a bit wider, and critically, hot pluggable (where M.2 isn't).


Still, home PC users don't have E3 or E1 sockets in their systems—at least, not yet, anyway. If you're a gamer and tired of having to uninstall or move games around, or if you've simply got more money than you know what to do with, here's your 16TB SSD that'll slot into any standard PC motherboard.


Although, you might not be satisfied with it; despite being a PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD, the performance is below the level of high-end PCIe 3.0 SSDs. Only the "Standard (Streaming)" version of the PE4 SSD comes in the 15.36 TB capacity, and that drive is rated for a max read throughput of 3,270 MB/sec, while writes lag at 2,980 MB/sec.

It does feel odd to talk about "over 2.5 GB/second" as slow, but in a world where drives like the Samsung SSD 9100 PRO can hit transfer rates upwards of 13GB/second, it's all down to context. Still, it's faster than a SATA SSD, and even those are plenty fast enough for the vast majority of tasks. As a high-durability scratch drive, you could do worse than a 16TB PE4.


Get ready for the shocker, though—Exascend asks some $15,935 for the SSD. That's "decent used car" money for a single 16TB SSD. While it's an easy solution if you have an M.2 slot and need upwards of 15TB of storage, to be frank, you could do a lot better for the money:


If you need NVMe performance, for the price of this 16TB Exascend drive, you can buy a trio of 16TB Solidigm D5-P5336 drives, giving you 48TB of storage. These SSDs offer much better performance, and even after buying three of them, you'll still have $2,300 left over. Those are U.2 instead of M.2, but you can simply buy adapter cards for PCIe slots or M.2 sockets like I did; the GLOTRENDS adapter that I used above only works for one SSD, but there are models that plug into wider PCI Express slots and support more drives.


Alternatively, if you just want massive capacity and don't overly need NVMe speed, you can pick up twice as much storage by going SATA. These 8TB Samsung 870 QVO drives are $1,396 each, and you can pick up a PCIe 3.0 controller card that will connect all eight of them for just $39.78. That gets you fully 96TB of storage for about the same money as this one 16TB M.2 SSD.

Of course, neither of these solutions has exactly the plug-and-play simplicity of just sliding in an M.2 drive, and if you're looking to upgrade something without PCIe slots (like, say, a PlayStation 5—not that this drive is verified to work in the game console), then you might be stuck. Still, it's a hell of a premium to pay for the convenience.

_{Thanks to FanlessTech for spotting the monster SSD.}