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takyon writes:

A company founded in 2013 has announced its first SSD product, and it has a capacity of up to 24 TB:

NGD Systems this week announced its first SSD that also happens to be one of the highest capacity drives in the industry. The NGD Catalina uses a proprietary controller as well as up to 24 TB of Micron's 3D TLC NAND memory and apart from capacity, its key feature is a relatively low power consumption.

Before we jump to the Catalina SSD, it makes sense to talk about NGD Systems (formerly known as NxGn Data) itself. The company was founded in June 2013 by a group of people who previously developed SSDs at companies like Western Digital, STEC and Memtech, with the corporate aim to develop drives for enterprise and hyperscale applications. Back in 2014, the company disclosed that its primary areas of interest were LDPC, advanced signal processing, software-defined media channel architecture and in-storage computation capability. NGD has been developing various proprietary technologies behind the Catalina since its inception and the SSD is a culmination of their work.

The NGD Catalina is a large add-in-card with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface that also supports a Mezzanine connector. Rather than have the NAND on the main card, instead the card uses multiple M.2 modules with Micron's 3D TLC NAND. The 24 TB version of Catalina carries 12 [such] modules, whereas lower capacity SKUs will use [fewer] modules. According to NGD, the Catalina consumes only 0.65 W of power per Terabyte (which means ~15.6 W for the 24 TB SSD), but the card still has a 4-pin auxiliary power connector.

Keeping in mind that the SSD has a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, the peak read/write performance of the drive is limited to 3.9 GB/s. Meanwhile, NGD does not disclose official performance or endurance numbers for the Catalina SSD, but only says that the drive is optimized for read-intensive applications.

Press release.

Original Submission