Intel's New 3D NAND Ruler-Shaped 12-inch SSD Offers Up to 32TB Storage

In a breakthrough development, Intel has launched a new ruler-shaped SSD - a drive that can store up to 32TB of storage. For such mammoth storage, old drives that are available in the market are way too large, heat up way too often, hum or buzz, and often need expensive special temperature units for storage, the company claims. Intel's new ruler SSD offering is the size of a 12-inch ruler, and requires half the airflow to keep cool than traditional SSDs out there, invariably reducing management costs.

Called the Intel DC P4500, the SSD offers 32TB of storage, and to just give you an idea of how much storage that is, Intel notes that it is equivalent to triple the entire printed collection of the US Library of Congress. This dense drive is built on Intel's 3D NAND technology, which stacks memory cells atop each other in multiple extremely thin layers, instead of just one. Memory cells in the P4500 are stacked 64 layers deep.

Intel informs that the new ruler SSD requires half the airflow than traditional SSDs, and is already being used by companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Tencent to support their cloud and data center operations. This is because the new Intel DC P4500 greatly reduces air-conditioning costs.

Intel notes that another big USP of the DC P4500 ruler SSD is that it requires only one-tenth the power and just one-twentieth the space, as compared to traditional hard disk storage. "In data centres, the no-moving-parts ruler-shaped SSDs can be lined up 32 side-by-side, to hold up to a petabyte in a single server slot," the company notes. This breakthrough product will really ease cloud storage and data centres companies woes of big server management costs.