Intel Corp. has introduced a ruler-shaped solid state drive capable of holding up to 32 terabytes and can be lined up side-by-side with other ruler-sized storage units in data centers.
The SSD DC P4500 is built on Intel’s 3D NAND technology, which stacks memory cells atop each other in multiple thin layers, instead of just one. The memory cells of the device are stacked 64 layers deep.
Intel said one reason that data companies are moving to ruler SSDs is to support cloud and data center operations and to reduce costs. One of the biggest cost to a data center today is air conditioning to keep the servers cool.
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 and the shape requires half the airflow to keep cool. Compared to traditional hard disk storage, the 3D NAND SSDs use one-tenth the power and requires just one-twentieth the space.
