Nimbus Data today announced the ExaDrive DC100, the largest capacity (100 terabytes) solid state drive (SSD) ever produced.

According to the company, the ExaDrive DC100 draws 85% less power per terabyte (TB) than the closest competitive enterprise SSDs, resulting
to a 42% reduction of the total cost of ownership per terabyte.

The DC100 is not optimized for speed; its main focus is capacity and efficiency. Featuring a patent-pending multiprocessor architecture, the DC100 supports much greater capacity than monolithic flash controllers. Using SK Hynix 3D MLC NAND, a single rack of DC100 SSDs can achieve over 100 petabytes of raw capacity in a data center environment.

Featuring the same 3.5" form factor and SATA interface used by hard drives, the ExaDrive DC100 is plug-and-play compatible with storage and server platforms. The DC100's low-power (0.1 watts/TB) and portability also make it well-suited for edge and IoT applications. The DC100 achieves up to 100,000 IOps (read or write) and up to 500 MBps throughput.

The ExaDrive DC100 is protected by an unlimited endurance guarantee for 5 years, moving away from the typical drive-writes-per-day restrictions. Embedded capacitors ensure that buffered data is protected if there is a sudden power loss. Encryption, multiple ECC processors, and a secure-erase feature ensure data security. The DC100 offers a mean time between failures (MTBF) of 2.5 million hours.

The ExaDrive DC series includes both 100 TB and 50 TB models. It is currently sampling and will be generally available in summer 2018. Nimbus Data has qualified the DC series in storage and server enclosures from major vendors. The company said that pricing will be similar to existing enterprise SSDs on a per terabyte basis. "Overall, the ExaDrive DC series will cost 42% less per terabyte over a 5-year period compared to existing enterprise SSDs," Nimbus Data said.