The new E2 SSDs pack as many flash cells as possible onto a 20 cm long board. This would not be possible with conventional HDDs.
SSDs with a capacity of more than eight terabytes are rather rare on the current market. However, the manufacturer Micron is already working on drives with a capacity of up to one petabyte - 1,000 TByte. The company presented a prototype to Storage Review magazine. These are not classic SATA or M.2 SSDs. Instead, the company is experimenting with a new form factor.
The E2 (PDF) format is to be used primarily in the server sector. The EDSFF standard, which is widely used in the enterprise sector, is being expanded. Micron's E2 SSD on display is a maximum of 20 cm long and 7.6 cm wide. It is designed to fit into 1U or 2U storage racks. The system is connected with the SFF-TA1002 connector commonly used by EDSFF, which in turn is a modification of PCIe. The widespread NVMe protocol is also to be used. An interface with 256 gigatransfers per second is available via PCIe 6.0.
80 watts of power for an SSD
More than 64 NAND packages and several DRAM modules can be mounted as intermediate storage on the large board compared to M.2 and SATA SSDs. With a capacity of up to 1 PByte, the energy requirement is correspondingly high. Micron specifies a maximum of 80 watts. The average requirement should be around 20 to 30 watts.
The E2 standard is said to have a throughput rate of 8 to 10 MByte/s per terabyte of capacity, which is far faster than a conventional HDD. This is certainly the main reason why customers might invest in the new standard, which has not been widely used to date. It is not currently possible to achieve such high capacities in a small space with magnetic hard disks.
