A marketing slide has revealed that Intel will be releasing ruler-shaped SSDs for the enterprise market: these long and skinny drives should allow for even denser storage racks, such as 1PB in a 1U server. If you wanted to do the same with 10TB hard drives, a fully loaded, 100-bay 4U server would be required. There is no word yet on whether this form factor will show up in consumer products.



As part of Intel’s Optane roll-out, new ways of handling data storage at the enterprise level is cropping up. The shift to solid state storage is still ongoing, but it brings with it an opportunity to experiment with new ways of handling that storage. Classic hard drives have defined the form factor for SSDs up until fairly recently, with 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch drives being the norm. Since SSDs don’t have motors, and are simply a collection of chips, new form factors were made available, such as using PCIe add-in cards and the M.2 slot.

Discussion

Source: [H]ardOCP – Intel Teases New “Ruler” SSD Form Factor