How does having the ability to hold up to 400 million photos or 12,000 movies sound? This week at the Flash Memory Summit (yes there is such a thing) in Santa Clara, California, things got as exciting as they could possibly get for a convention exhibiting storage systems. That's because Seagate unveiled a "demonstrative" version of a 60 TB SSD that quite simply blows all other SSD's storage capabilities out of the water.
The largest unit currently available is Samsung's PM1633a drive which has holds "only" 15.36TB of data. This is the best that money can buy on today's market, and it costs around $10,000 per unit. While it isn't slated to hit the market for at least another year, Seagate claims that their 60TB Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSD has twice the density and four times the capacity of Samsung's flagship storage unit. Pricing isn't available yet, but Seagate promises the drive will provide the lowest cost per gigabyte for flash memory today.
Seagate's new SSD.
What does this mean for filmmakers then? With 4K footage quickly becoming the norm, and 8K not far behind, we need more digital storage for editing and backups than ever. One hour of ProRes 4K footage takes up over 300GB of space, or roughly 15 times the amount of space used by one hour of 1080p footage shot by, say, the Canon 7D. Of course, this type of product is not really made for the consumer market, more so for data centers etc., but the sheer power of the machine is enough to get anyone who deals with large files, like video, excited for what the future may hold.
Both Seagate and Samsung have claimed that, thanks to advancements in flash storage, we could be seeing storage drives tipping the scales at 100TB by 2020. It's only a matter of time before these technologies are translated into smaller spaces and consumer devices.
Source: ZD Net
