Larger capacity SSDs for the consumer market are coming, and not surprisingly, Sabrent is the driving force behind one of them—a 16TB model in the 2.5-inch form factor, with a SATA interface.
That essentially means the focus is more on capacity than it is speed. I suppose it's just not feasible (yet) to cram 16TB of NAND flash memory onto an M.2 drive with an NVMe interface (as pictured above, because Sabrent does not yet offer any 2.5-inch models). Nevertheless, compared to a mechanical HDD, even SATA SSDs offer a tangible and noticeable performance boost, from faster boot up times to even just smoother navigation in Windows. It's really a night and day difference going from an HDD to an SSD, SATA or otherwise.
Sabrent told our friends at TechRadar that it is currently testing engineering samples of both enterprise and client (read: home consumer) versions of the 16TB drive, and expects to have finalized products ready for purchase in the very near future.
I anticipate performance being roughly in line with most modern SATA SSDs. There is also a good chance the SSD will be built around Phison's E12S controller, featuring four Micron 96-layer quad-level cell (QLC) NAND flash memory packages on both sides of the PCB.
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Phison demoed the controller in a prototype 16TB SSD at CES, as Tom's Hardware wrote about in January. At the time, it cranked out sequential reads in the neighborhood of 550MB/s and sequential writes of around 530MB/s. As a point of reference, Crucial's MX500 1TB (as found in our roundup of the best SSDs for gaming and a great option for a secondary SSD) is rated to deliver 560MB/s and 510MB/s of sequential read and write performance, respectively.
This will end up being another 'first' for Sabrent, after having been the first to launch a 4TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD and the first to launch an 8TB M.2 SSD. And for a brief time earlier this year, it also boasted having the fastest M.2 SSD around.
Along those lines, the 16TB model is undoubtedly going to end up being the most expensive consumer SSD. Pricing has not been announced, but expect it be around two grand.
