World’s First Half Petabyte RAID Array Is the Size of a Shoebox and Costs $79,000

It wasn’t too long ago that a terabyte of storage was considered more than enough but as new technology requires more and more data, storage requirements have ramped up. HighPoint Technologies announced the world’s first near-half petabyte RAID array and while small, it’s expensive.

Eight-bay RAID enclosures for SSDs aren’t new, but HighPoint Technologies is the first to produce one that can hold a Solidigm D5-P5336 61.4TB NVMe SSD per slot, which adds up to a whopping 491.52TB of total storage — just shy of half a petabyte. SSDs with that much capacity per drive are extremely uncommon and this is the first time that any company has managed to combine eight into one array.

This much storage is, perhaps obviously, designed for enterprise clients but what makes HighPoint’s RAID array special is that despite the end use case, the enclosure is quite small. Typically RAID arrays for enterprise are housed on large racks that live in specially designed storage closets but this design measures a scant 4.84 by 9.25 by 8.27 inches: about the size of a shoebox and no bigger than at-home arrays from the likes of Synology.

“The compact external storage chassis’ integrated power supply and powerful cooling system enable the NVMe media to be completely isolated from the host hardware platform. Not only does this free up interior space for the host server or workstation, it can significantly improve reliability and efficiency by offsetting power consumption and ensuring that waste heat generated by the SSDs never enters the computing environment,” HighPoint says.

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The company claims it uses industry-leading PCIe switching technology and 400Gbps CDFP connectivity to enable the RocketAIC 6542AAW to maximize data transfer throughput by fully utilizing all x16 lanes of PCIe bandwidth, making it ideal for handling data-intensive applications for both active access as well as fast backup and recovery.

While the array defaults to RAID 0 from Highpoint, the company says it can be customized into any RAID configuration or allow for JBOD — or just a set of individual SSDs.

The enclosure alone is not particularly expensive either: it costs just $1,800 (or $1,299 for a smaller four-bay option). The real expense comes in the form of the SSDs which cost $9,650 for each 61.4TB SSD for a combined $78,999 for the entire eight-bay enclosure filled with maximum storage.

While this option is still far above what consumers would be able to afford, the asking price for the cutting-edge SSD technology isn’t absurd and the enclosure itself is priced right around “normal.” It might not be long before the price for this level of technology falls into the realm of reasonable for the average consumer.

Image credits: HighPoint