Samsung reportedly developing hard drive big enough to download GTA 6 8,000 times
Storage has made significant progress in the last decade thanks to the near-universal adoption of solid state drives (SSDs) in both consumer and professional environments, and Samsung is reportedly testing a new product that has more space than you could ever possible need.
While prices have shot up recently thanks to increased AI demand, it's never been cheaper to buy storage as the price-per-gigabyte of high speed drives is simply shocking if you've been keeping track of the markets for decades.
Anyone can go out and buy several terabytes of NVMe storage with speeds in the thousands of Megabytes per second, and this makes storing and moving around large files a breeze.
This is especially relevant for the world of gaming, as not only have games grown in size significantly over the last few years – with most titles exceeding 100 GB on release – but many require the fast read and write speeds of an SSD to run.
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One of the biggest frustrations is running out of space when you simply want to have all of your games downloaded though, but Samsung might be cooking up the perfect solution to this.
As reported by Blocks & Files, Samsung is developing a new form of nearline storage – which represents an intermediate form between online and offline storage – with sizes indicated between 250 TB and 1 PB at the largest.
Revealing more information about the development, Scality's chief product officer Erwan Girard explained: "It's a next generation of flash that both Solidgm and Samsung are currently developing.
"We have them in lab. We are testing them. So Samsung and Solidigm have two different visions around it. Samsung's vision is to kill hard drives with these ultra-density drives."
Girard also indicated that they will take a form factor of E3L or E2, meaning that nearly 50 will be able to be combined in 'a four (rack) unit basis' — giving up to 500 PB (or 50,000 TB) or storage in a full rack.
As indicated by VideoCardz.com, just one of these 1 PB drives will be enough to store Grand Theft Auto V up to 8,000 times, meaning that anyone who is able to get their hands on one should have absolutely no issue when it comes to downloading GTA 6.
Of course, we don't know exactly how big Rockstar's hotly anticipated game will be when it finally releases in November – providing there's no further delays – but it's expected not just to be the biggest game ever size wise, but potentially also the most expensive single release in gaming history.
Don't expect to get your hands on even the 'smaller' 250 TB version of this drive if you're a regular consumer though, as Samsung is likely only making these available to professional environments at an extremely prohibitive cost.
It does suggest that drives of this size could become a possibility for regular people in the future, however, as many people would have told you that having 1 TB in microSD format would have been impossible a while ago — yet it's something you can pick up on Amazon for just a few hundred dollars.