Solidigm's D5-P5336 SSD offers a unique capacity of 61.44TB and is aimed at read-intensive applications that require a lot of storage space and density (such as datacenters used for AI training). But without any rivals currently available, these drives have gotten substantially more expensive than they were earlier this year, as noticed by our colleagues from TechRadar. There is a big catch here: we are talking about retail price.
When Solidigm’s D5-P5336 61.44TB SSD became available for pre-order in early 2024, it cost from $3,692 to $3,975, depending on the retailer. These prices were considered relatively low, especially given the SSD's vast storage capacity and unique positioning. However, once the drive became readily available, its price rose. ShopBLT offers Solidigm’s D5-P5336 61.44TB drive in an U.2 form-factor for $7,035. Other retailers charge $7,132 or $7,124. Prices of the drive did not skyrocket overnight. Even back in August, the drive cost $6,900 at ShopBLT.
We do not know exactly why Solidigm’s D5-P5336 61.44TB drive became considerably more expensive in retail in less than a year, but we have some ideas.
First, we are talking about a drive designed for very particular applications, and companies that need these drives hardly get them in retail but usually have direct supply contracts (and therefore pre-negotiated prices). If large cloud service providers get all the volume that Solidigm can provide (and they need plenty of them to train their latest AI models), then retailers may not get enough drives, and therefore, prices rise (especially if they have to buy from distributors).
Secondly, remember that Solidigm’s D5-P5336 is based on 192-layer 3D TLC NAND, and this is an outgoing production node. While we can certainly expect SK hynix to have enough components to build Solidigm’s enterprise-grade drives, we do not expect the company to produce such memory in high volumes as it does not make much financial sense for mass-market SSDs.
Should one actually worry that 61.44TB drives are getting more expensive in retail? We do not know. Solidigm claims that its D5-P5336 SSD offers sequential read speeds reaching up to 7,000 MB/s and sequential write speeds up to 3,300 MB/s, which is not exactly enthusiast-grade performance but could be good enough for a workstation. Additionally, the drive delivers random read speeds of up to 1.005 million IOPS and random write speeds of up to 38,000 IOPS for 4K data, which barely makes much sense even for a workstation. Perhaps using multiple PCIe 5.0 x4 SSDs in a RAID mode makes more sense for desktops both from cost and from a performance point of view.
