A new SSD form factor can house a staggering 1,000,000 GB of storage – E2 drives could store 11,000 4K movies with 80W power draw

A new type of SSD developed to cover the middle ground between high-capacity HDDs and the performance of the best SSDs has birthed a new E2 flash form factor with capacity potential of up to 1 petabyte, or 1 million GB, reports StorageReview.

Seeking to address the aforementioned middle ground, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and the Open Compute Project (OCP) have collaborated to design and prototype a new SSD form factor that accommodates 'warm' data, which sits between cold and hot tiers, making high density and low cost paramount.

The device has reportedly been built from the ground up for high-capacity deployments in 2U servers, and will feature a staggering one petabyte of QLC storage per device.

The E2 form factor adheres to the common 'Ruler' Enterprise and Data Center Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) specification and reuses the industry standard EDSFF connector already in use on E1 and E3 devices.

The E2 drives are 200 millimeters (7.9 inches) in length, measuring 76 mm (3 inches) in height, and just 9.5 mm thick (0.4 inches). The E2's height and connector alignment are reportedly derived from E3, with LED placement taken from E1 SSDs.

Given the use case, E2's ideal application would be in dense storage servers housing up to 40 such drives in a 2U node, bringing a single server's capacity up to 40 PB. The drives communicate using NVMe and a PCIe 6.0 x4 or better connection, drawing an eye-watering 80 watts of power per-SSD. Mercifully, most would likely run at around 20-30 watts, which would still present a significant thermal challenge and could preclude the use of air cooling.

Targeted speeds of the E2 SSD are purported to be 8-10 MB/s per terabyte, much more than your average HDD. However, the report notes that capacity, not performance, is the end game of E2.

As per the report, Micron is one of the significant manufacturing contributors to E2, and Open Compute Project engineers and designers are looking to bridge the gap between speedy, expensive SSDs and slower, lumbering HDDs.

Not quite reaching the heady heights of the petabyte just yet, Pure Storage showcased a 300TB E2 prototype recently. The report notes E2 is a "practical, flash-based answer to the growing need for high-capacity 'warm' storage," but notes there are still challenges to overcome before E2 can be implemented in server platforms, notably the thermal and power demands previously mentioned.

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