The first 16TB M.2 SSD on Amazon costs as much as a car

Do you need a lot of storage? Well, then, you’re going to have to pay for it—and you’ll be paying a lot more than you would have a year ago, as “AI” data centers gobble up a bigger and bigger share of the industry’s output of memory and storage. But even the most lavish among us would probably wince at dropping nearly $16,000 USD on an M.2 drive, even if it does have a capacity of 16 terabytes.

The Exascend Enterprise-Grade PE4 Gen 4 SSD now comes in a 16TB capacity, and as far as I can tell, it’s the first one to hit that mark for a single M.2 drive sold to the public at a standard retailer. Many of the drives available to us mere mortals top out at 8TB, which is already overkill for most users. But this drive’s price is a lot more shocking than its capacity: $15,935. That’s about a grand per terabyte, and more than double the cost of the same drive’s 8TB variant.

SSDs are getting more expensive than ever after years of affordability, but this is still an insane price. For comparison, a top-of-the-line PCIe 5.0 drive from Samsung with 8TB is $1,595, which is still pricey but approximately ONE-TENTH the cost of this “Enterprise-Grade” example. Oh, and it’s more than three times faster, too—the Exascend drive is PCIe 4.0, which is fast but far from the fastest. The Amazon description calls it “blazing,” which is open to interpretation.

According to the listing, the drive is “built to operate reliably from 0°C to 70°C with an impressive 2,000,000-hour MTBF” (mean time between failures, a measure of extended operation). And to back it up, the drive advertises a 5-year limited warranty, though the exact terms of that warranty aren’t spelled out on Amazon. On the company’s website, it says that the PE4 series is five years… or to the end of the “advertised DWPD or TBW rating.” (Those terms are Drive Writes Per Day and Total Bytes Written, respectively.) The spec sheet lists these at 0.6 drive writes per day for five years, or 16,640 terabytes.

This listing, spotted by VideoCardz, is interesting because it’s being sold straight to consumers, assuming said consumers can afford to drop about a quarter of the average US salary on a single M.2 drive at once. (Incidentally, Amazon is also offering to let me pay $1,327.92 per month for twelve months. How generous.)