Gadgetory

huge shout out to AMD for sponsoring this video from CES 2017 learn more about their rise and processors at the link in the video description so we rolled into the Seagate booth where they were showing off all kinds of stuff including their 12 big from Lisi which supports up to a hundred and twenty terabytes of storage over thunderbolt free with knock to a fans cooling it man those guys have good taste then we kind of went come on you guys show us the really cool stuff so we rolled into the big room where they're demoing all kinds of stuff and I went straight for this this my friends is the as-yet-unnamed to my knowledge sixty terabyte SSD it's in a three-and-a-half inch form factor and exists sort of as mostly a technology showcase to show how Seagate has been investing in the r d-- to address this many flash dies using some bridge chip technology that they borrowed from SAS pretty freakin cool so naturally of course the first thing i wanted to do was open it up and have a look inside where i found that it's actually a dummy unit I have told Seagate that I intend to be the first media outlet to preview this thing once I can get my hands on a working one but unfortunately this is not this is not that day so you might ask yourself what's the anticipated use case of a 60 terabyte SSD and I actually got some pretty interesting answers because it's still by the look of things not going to be PCI Express based and so they clearly don't expect it to be really any faster than what you might get from existing SATA or SAS technology and the answer is well look because there's no flash controller on the market that has enough data paths to address each of those NAND dies individually or even you know a handful of them at a time this Drive is going to deal with more latency and less speed than one of their high performance drives like say for example this nitro 10 gigabyte per second drive that reaches a capacity of 8 terabytes at the moment that one's going to be a real product pretty soon no the use case here is going to be somewhere in between massive massive arrays of data and high-speed PCI Express base SSD caches what this will allow a company like oh say Facebook for example to do is store grandma's pictures that haven't been accessed for over a year on facebook on a storage medium that is fast enough for people to be hitting them you know randomly pulling up a few photos at a time and high-capacity enough that it's actually feasible to keep things like grandma's photos on it so you don't have to sit around and wait for a page to load while a hard drive spins up but Facebook doesn't have to be spending you know four or five dollars per gig on the storage that they're using to store it I heard pricing numbers thrown around of like fifty thousand dollars a drive but what I'll say is this if you're the kind of customer who wants one of these you're the kind of customer who's not just ordering one so if you bulk at that price point then you're probably not the intended market and pricing could be highly variable depending on what kind of NAND flash they're putting in the drive which would basically be down to the individual customer so at this point in the video a fair question might be Linus do we really need a 60 terabyte SSD and the answer is while I think they are planning to productize this this year maybe not necessarily immediately but the need is definitely coming so Seagate projects that in 2019 one zettabyte of data will be shipped in that calendar year with 1.3 zettabytes the following year I mean to put that number in perspective if we take it back down to gigabytes that's more gigabytes than there are grains of sand on the entire earth and this issue of more content creation and needing more and more storage is actually going to get worse so in that same year in the 2019 2020 time frame they're expecting six hundred zettabytes of data to be created to go with that 1.3 zettabytes of storage that will be shipped so the answer is yes we do need it and much sooner than you might probably think so a huge shout out again to AMD for sponsoring our coverage of CES 2017 check out the new Vega GPU architecture which supports a high bandwidth cache at the link in the video description but we're going to make that easy for you it's Vega ve dot G a and also be sure to check out after the uprising on YouTube which we're going to have linked in the top right corner right there