In a nutshell: If you're looking for the highest density SSD drive out there and money is no object to you, Nimbus Data has a 100TB monster retailing for $40,000. And if that's not enough, the company is already working on more ample drives with capacities of up to 500TB.
Two years ago, Nimbus Data took the crown away from Samsung to claim the title of the world's largest capacity SSD. But while the ExaDrive DC 100 looked impressive on paper thanks to its ability to store 100TB in a 3.5-inch SATA form factor, its price has remained a mystery until now – unless you happened to be an enterprise looking to build out storage capacity in your data center.
TechRadar noticed recently that the company has started to list prices for the ExaDrive lineup. If you want to get your hands on a 100TB SSD, the privilege will cost you no less than $40,000 for the SATA3 version – or $400 per terabyte.
For reference, Samsung's 30.72TB PM1643 drive retails for a more modest $8,860 (or a little over $288 per terabyte). Nimbus Data also offers a 50 TB version called the ExaDrive DC 50, which will set you back $12,500, or $250 per terabyte.
There's a logical explanation for the drives' high cost, one being that both the ExaDrive DC 50 and the ExaDrive DC 100 use enterprise-grade 3D MLC NAND. They're also able to deliver 100,000 IOPS of random read/write throughput while sipping power and are guaranteed for unlimited drive writes per day for five years.
If you're an enthusiast looking for a monster SSD drive, you're more likely to want Samsung's 8TB QVO drive that is expected to retail at $900, or $112.5 per terabyte. And those of you looking for a speedier, NVMe drive with the same capacity will likely find Sabrent's Rocket Q drive to have a relatively palatable price of $1,500.