The SSD and hard drive titans of the storage world brought together
If you're looking for something striking to supplement your SSD or hard drive collection, you've come to the right place. As of March 2023, the largest storage component you can buy is a 5-year old 100TB solid state drive (opens in new tab) from Nerdcore and it will cost you a cool $40,000 (opens in new tab) but currently listed under special order.
The trend for this decade is likely to be the quest for exotic data storage (DNA, glass), rolling out next generation tape technology (beyond LTO-10), sunsetting hard disk drive technology and accelerating the drive towards the first Petabyte drive. When deliberating about what product will make it to the list, there’s a number of assumptions we need to make.
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We will only consider SSDs (opens in new tab) and hard disk drives (opens in new tab) that are either internal or external: Network attached storage (NAS (opens in new tab)) won’t be considered but Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) will. You should be able to buy them online or directly. A lot of high capacity storage products can only be sourced from specialist outlets. All products in our list are available for purchase at the time of writing and all of the comparisons are as of March 2023.
Backup large drives online with cloud storage
IDrive, the cloud backup veteran, delivers tons of storage online for an incredibly small outlay. 10TB for $3.98 for the first year is unmatched till now and so is the support for unlimited devices and the extensive file versioning system available. Even the biggest SSD or HDD need a cloud storage to secure data.
Check out our list of the best secure drives (opens in new tab)
These are the best portable SSD (opens in new tab) on the market right now
Have a look at some of the best external hard drives
ExaDrive EDDCT100/EDDCS100 (opens in new tab)
ExaDrive specializes in extra high capacity 3.5-inch solid state drives. The biggest model it currently has is the EDDCT100 which retails for a staggering $40,000 or $400 per TB, about ten times the price of the cheapest SSD on a per TB basis.
Available with a SATA or SAS interface, it offers an unlimited drive write per day for five years (the length of the warranty) thanks partly to the use of SLC technology (which explains the price as well). A cheaper version of the Exadrive, the EDNLT064, is also available and is the second largest solid state drive on the market with a capacity of 64TB.
At $10,900 it offers a relatively more palatable price point and a per TB price of only $170. In comparison, 18TB hard drives have a per TB starting from as little as $15 but they are bigger, heavier, consume more power, statistically more likely to fail, noisier and slower.
Western Digital 22TB hard disk drives (opens in new tab)
Biggest hard disk drives you can buy right now
The two biggest hard disk drive vendors have released 22TB hard drives with Western Digital unveiling a 26TB model in 2022 (although you won't be able to buy it as it is a data center only product. Toshiba has a 20TB CMR Hard disk drive but no plans for a 22TB one yet.
That said, the Seagate Exos X22 is not even listed on Seagate's website and is not on sale anywhere. Only Western Digital has successfully seeded 22TB models in the wider retail market. The data center version (HC570) (opens in new tab) ($449), the purple surveillance hard drive (opens in new tab) ($530), the NAS Red version (opens in new tab) ($500) and the enterprise model (opens in new tab) ($499) all have 512MB cache and target the prosumer up to enterprise level looking for the largest internal HDDs. Note that these drives tend to use CMR rather than the controversial SMR technology.
External hard disk drives (opens in new tab) of similar capacities sell for a bit more, a far cry from a few years ago when they were selling for much less, which is paradoxical given that they cost more to build. The basic Elements/Easystore desktop HDD (opens in new tab) retails for $550 while the souped up My Book (opens in new tab) costs $600.
This price difference, then, gave rise to a popular technique known as shucking. This is essentially disassembling the external HDD and reusing the hard drive inside either in an array or in a desktop computer.
WD Elements Portable 5TB portable drives (opens in new tab)
Biggest portable HDD
Hard disk drives are cheap and offer plenty of capacity but they are bound to disappear in a not-so-distant future. Right now, the biggest portable hard disk drive (opens in new tab) has a capacity of 5TB; it uses a special drive that is slightly bigger than a standard laptop HDD which has a width of 2.5-inch and a height of 7mm. This one is 12.5mm thick which makes it incompatible with laptops having a 2.5-inch spare bay. Both Seagate and Western Digital have multiple models of that capacity starting from under $100 (WD Elements Portable (opens in new tab)).
Sadly, given the lack of new products, it seems that hard drive manufacturers have given up on portable and laptop hard disk drives altogether. Given that the sweet spot for external HDD capacity is 4TB and with no 6TB 2.5-inch HDDs planned, portable HDDs are likely to disappear rapidly when cheap large capacity external SSD hit this capacity point and come down in price later this decade.
Samsung PM1643a 30.72TB SSD (opens in new tab)
Biggest laptop SSD
Laptop SSDs take the shape of 2.5-inch slabs or M.2 (opens in new tab) bars. There are three SSD that compete for the crown of biggest SSD ever at 30.72TB.
Samsung’s PM1643a, a three-year old enterprise solid state drive with a SAS interface was the first 2.5-inch SSD with a capacity of 30.72TB. It is an expensive part at $4,375 (opens in new tab) (or around $140 per TB) even if it comes with a five year warranty and a 1-drive-written per day capacity.
Intel (now Solidigm) has an SSD - the D5-P5316 - in the same form factor (U.2) but with a faster read/write speed and a much lower price tag (as low as $3,088 (opens in new tab)) which is less than $100 per TB. The third player with a large capacity SSD is Micron. Its 9400 Pro matches both Intel and Samsung for capacity and warranty and comes in at a cool $3,645 (opens in new tab).
Note that this is a SAS drive which means that it will be difficult to shove one of these in a NAS drive or in an external enclosure to turn it into a portable SSD (or indeed the largest portable SSD ever).
Enter the Teamgroup QX (opens in new tab), a 15.36TB SSD with a SATA interface that makes it compatible with almost all desktops and laptops that have a free 2.5-inch bay. It is, according to its manufacturer, the largest SATA SSD with a three year warranty and a 2.56PBW warranty. Despite its target audience, it remains expensive at just over $2,800 or around $190 per TB.
Samsung’s 8TB 870 QVO (opens in new tab) remains the absolute sweet spot and the benchmark for large capacity SSD at less than half the price of the Teamgroup QX ($799 at Nerdcore Computers (opens in new tab)). Sandwiched between the two is the Sabrent Rocket Q (SB-RKTQ-8TB), an 8TB NVMe M.2 high performance SSD that carries a $1,300 price tag, one that’s justified by its speed (an order of magnitude higher than either of the aforementioned SATA SSD) and its form factor, the smaller M.2 2280
Fujitsu/HP LTO-8 12TB tape (opens in new tab)
Biggest removable media
SSDs tends to get the limelight when it comes to storage technology but the sobering reality is that a lot of data worldwide is archived and lives in cold storage, media that requires hours, if not days before it is accessible. Enter tape or more specifically LTO (opens in new tab) (Linear Tape-Open), a tape technology currently in its 8th iteration that offers up to 12TB capacity on a data cartridge that costs as little as $80. It offers native transfer speed rates of 360MBps and supports 256-bit AES encryption by default.
Tape though comes with a number of caveats; the price of the drives are exorbitant - in the thousands of dollars. It is a linear storage technology which means that it can take time to retrieve the data stored but it works great for backup and is popular with cloud storage (opens in new tab) providers. However if your data requirements are in the petabytes and you care more about archival than immediate access, then tape can be a pretty compelling alternative.
A quick back-of-the-napkin calculation shows that you are likely to break even at around 240TB. 20 tapes and a Thunderbolt 3 drive will cost you around $5400 roughly the same as 16 external 18TB HDD.
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