The world's largest PCIe SSD is immediately beaten by a faster and bigger PCIe SSD

It's an old story: something big gets surpassed by something even bigger. Billy Big Boots, over there, whaps his five-piece Exodia. These tales are also not uncommon in the hardware world. A recent spate of SSDs with unusually large capacities is a good example.

Yesterday, I reported that Micron had introduced the world's fastest data center SSD (60TB) - a PCIe 5 SSD. Solidgm, the SSD arm of ex-Intel, introduced today what was just hours ago the world's largest capacity (122TB) PCIe SSD. Phison then introduced a 128 TB PCIe drive that was even faster.

The image of the Phison drive shows 122.88TB. This is the actual capacity of the drive, as opposed to its 128TB of physical NAND memory. This makes me wonder if the Solidigm drive is the same size as a Phison and the companies are simply referring to things differently.

It's like calling a drive with 2 TB a drive with 1.86 TB just because 1.86 TB of it is usable. Solidigm, in this case, would have been wrong to label it as 122 TB. I can't believe they made a mistake. I'll assume that the Phison has a higher capacity. It's faster anyway.

I did some quick calculations yesterday to see how many games Micron’s 60 TB beast could hold. So, why not do the same for the new king, the Phison Pascari, D205V? Based on the current 160GB system requirements for Stalker 2, 122.88TB of storage would allow 768 Stalker 2 installations or 71.028 Crab Champion installs based on my game files. Now, if we look down the middle road, it could hold about 4,388 Valorant installations at approximately 28 GB each.

The Phison is a 5.0-inch drive as well, but it has a pretty low write speed compared to some other SSDs that are designed for datacenter use. The read speeds are rated at up to 14,600MB/s. If you remove other variables that are relevant but can be a party pooper, it means the drive could transfer 160 GB of Stalker 2, to another drive similar to its own, in just under 11 seconds.

It also comes in a dashing bumblebee-yellow, which makes me want to go into debt and buy a server rack to set up an overkill home server. (I could backup my entre system up to 80 times with just one of these hard drives.

I feel bad for Micron and Solidigm. They were beaten at the last moment by a faster, bigger, yellower competitor. You run this risk when you race to take advantage of the rapidly expanding AI datacentres market. This market, by the way shows no signs of slowing down. I suppose that could mean we can expect to see even bigger "worlds biggest" drives coming up in the future.