How Solidigm Addresses Network Limitations with Large Capacity Drives

Looking at the semiconductor market, there’s always a lot of buzz about the latest win or the newest first. However, much like some professional sports, there are occasions where the big win is not what puts a player on top. Looking at the course of a season, where you rank, what wins you have—they all play into where you are headed. Some sports have season leaders and winners that don’t always come in first place or win the championship game.  Like many racing competitions, from bicycle races to car races, it’s consistency over the course of the entire season, with high placing finishes in many contests, that leads to them taking the title. 

Solidigm is an example of this in the semiconductor storage market. There is a winning spirit, a desire to excel, and consistency over many years across multiple storage solutions. Solidigm did not have to come in first in every solution to come out on top. 

Solidigm, as the "youngest" semiconductor storage brand, has been able to achieve first place in several large-capacity data storage solutions. With, first, the release of an SSD that broke the 60TB barrier, and more recently, our release of a massive 122TB SSD, Solidigm has taken a unique position on these solutions. Being first has great advantages, for sure, but being able to sustain that overall leadership is what is most important. 

Evolution of storage solutions

Today’s storage system designs are continuing to evolve, develop, and even leapfrog in technology, as can be seen by the ever-changing storage pyramid. Where there were once only a few HDD solutions, the advent of the enterprise SSD added a new layer, then more SSD layers, then so on and so on. Cut to today, we have more unique storage layers available to the user than has been seen before. 

As this evolution continues, there are choices, options, and needs that create challenges and call for increased commitment to the race. Because of the customer-centric approach Solidigm takes, as opposed to just trying to always be first or best, we have designed options that satisfy the needs of many storage system solutions today. This customer-focused approach enables us to best understand the total solution needs of our customers.  

Networking is a key component in every DAS, NAS, converged, disaggregated, edge or hyperscale solution. Where storage was and can still be a bottleneck, networking is not immune either. However, avoiding a bottleneck as part of your solution is key. This is where Solidigm storage products come into play. With an evolutionary PCIe 4.0 interface on much of our current portfolio, we have no trouble supporting most current, and even some future, networking requirements. In this case, being the fastest is not a reason to buy or implement, but being reliable, sustainable, and long-lived is becoming ever more important. 

A few years ago, circa 1998, the enterprise SSD solutions were FAST as well as extremely unique. In many instances, you implemented one, two, or maybe four total drives in a rack-level solution. Fast forward to 2025, and we are seeing solutions that have 6, 8, 12, 24, even up to 108 SSDs installed in a single server. This change in the market has had an impact on all the pieces in a given system. From the number of cores in the ever-faster CPU, to the addition of cores with the use of GPU, DPU, xPU, and given faster networking, where storage was once the known bottleneck of a system, this is no longer the case. 

Storage, using modern NVMe PCIe-attached SSDs, have achieved single drive speeds that sound amazing, and in some cases come in first. For a single drive solution, that's great. However, more and more modern systems have more than a single drive, so it no longer matters how fast that one drive is. Sticking with our sports theme, picture a superfast race car, but picture it on the busiest, multi-lane roadway you can on a Friday night. Can you imagine the feeling? Sitting behind the wheel of this ultra-fast, high-tech vehicle, while you’re being overtaken by much more common and more widely purchased, deployed, and consumed solutions like the average commuter car.  That is what is happening today in modern storage SSD designs by many companies. Without the focus on all having the same car, with the same features and ability to travel at the same rate, you can create unplanned bottlenecks and not realize the value of expense. 

Putting specs and features to win a race in a system that is designed for something else just becomes a pointless challenge. That's where the Solidigm product portfolio differentiates itself. Our focus is to help our customers use and fully appreciate the value of our products, from the fastest drives to the largest drives. You can prevent your storage solution from becoming the gating factor in your system design. Let’s look at the numbers. 

Network bandwidth—the freeway, not the racetrack—has finite limitations to today’s system designs. With modern PCIe Gen5 and even Gen6 networking hardware, the ability to utilize bandwidth from the storage solutions can be saturated with as few as 10 drives, even if those drives are Gen4 NVMe drives.  

In most cases where large capacity SSDs like 61.44TB and 122.88TB drives from Solidigm are being considered, they will be displacing slower, lower-performing HDDs. So, when your customers come looking for a drive, the speed is not the first, maybe even not the last, feature they look for. Lifetime (endurance), capacity, power efficiency, reliability and quality, and sustainability are more important than just being faster than others. 

Looking at the features of merit, we can also talk about the TB/Watt, or even TB/idle Watt. With Solidigm SSDs replacing the always-on-but-forever-to-spin-up HDD, the capacity solutions, resilience of design, and ability to recover instantly are key. A traditional 3.5” HDD can take up to 30 seconds to recover, and in an archive-only situation, this may be fine. However, in the new ecosystem of storage, and the tier above archive, Solidigm large capacity SSDs from our D5-P5336 family have near-instant recover, low average power in most cases under 15W, and idle power even lower than that. If we take this and do the math even with max power, the Solidigm SSD solutions are the clear winner (122TB/15W = 8.13TB/W, compared to 30/10W = 3TB/W) with 60% improvement over the most advanced HDD on the market. 

For a more in-depth look, read our article: The Incredible Power of Power Efficient Storage: How Modern SSDs Are Transforming the Data Center.

We can get into a flurry of specs, speeds, feeds, and more for sure, and if you are interested, you know where to find your local Solidigm resources. But for now, look at your solution needs, determine the best capacity requirements, the endurance needs, and then the speed of a single drive, if you need to.  

Need more information? Visit our FAQ page.  

Waving the checkered flag

Before we cross the finish line, one last thing. Solidigm, the youngest semiconductor company, continues to secure its place as a leader in the market. Do you know how we secured this spot? By finishing in the top few spots, rather than first, in every race. Being first is great, and Solidigm has a lot of firsts, but being a world leader and even "Storage Champion” does not require being the first at every next big thing. What matters is the long-term consistency; being diligent, effective, customer focused, and delivering focused value over and over again. 

Our portfolio has a lot of firsts. But what it also has is the most robust and customer-focused solution coverage for the benefit of the solutions you need, where they are required. It’s not just a single race—or a single drive—numbers game.