By - Solidigm has launched a 122.88TB SSD that targets hyperscalers
- It is the fourth SSD with this capacity announced in 2024
- Pricing hasn’t been confirmed but it is likely to be around $14,000
Solidigm has added a brand new 122.88TB SSD to its product range (although it does introduce it as a 122TB model) as it tries to convince partners to shun hard disk drives for AI, machine learning and big data analytics scenarios.
The new SKU is part of the D5-P5336 family and will be available in U.2 15mm (Q1 2025) and E1.L (Q2 2025); no pricing details have emerged but given that the 61.44TB SSD version costs around $7,000 at the time of writing, I wouldn’t expect the 122.88TB to cost less than $14,000.
This new 122.88TB SSD is essentially an evolution of the D5-P5336 as it uses the same 192L QLC NAND chip as its smaller siblings. This is still a PCIe 4.0 SSD with a published idle power consumption of 5W and a five-year warranty.
The race to bigger SSDs
The larger capacity means that endurance, both in terms of Drive Written Per Day and Petabyte Written, is greatly improved, reaching a whopping 134.3 PBW on the latter benchmark.
Solidigm claims that it will be able to reach up to 930,000 IOPS (4K random read, QD256) or 7.4GBps (128K sequential read, QD128).
The new D5-P5336 joins the Phison Pascari D200V, the Samsung BM1743 and Western Digital’s unnamed enterprise SSD as the largest SSDs announced in 2024.
Of the four, Phison is the only one to sport PCIe 5.0 technology, helping it reach speeds of up to 14GBps, on par with the best SSDs on the market. It will also have a lower endurance compared to the D5-P5336 (0.6 vs 0.3 DWPD) making it less of an ideal fit for AI-type use cases.
Solidigm is essentially Intel’s SSD business and is the US subsidiary of SK Hynix, the South Korean archrival to Samsung Semiconductor (which produces the likes of the Samsung 990 Pro). As such, it does have access to some pretty cutting-edge technology and will be first in line to receive a rumored 400-layer NAND chip, double the capacity of the 192-layer model used in the 122.88TB and likely to appear sometime in 2026.
This means that 245TB SSDs could be a reality in a couple of years unless, of course, Solidigm decides to use existing NAND flash (238-layer or 321-layer) from its parent company to boost the top capacity of its flagship enterprise range.
There’s also another possibility: depending on market conditions, SK Hynix could also introduce a wild card, PLC (Penta-Level Cell) which will give a 25% boost to each NAND cell to enable more storage capacity per unit volume. After all, Solidigm did introduce a working prototype, featuring PLC technology, back in August 2022.
