Seagate has unveiled the world's largest SSD: a 60-terabyte monster. Pricing isn't available, but the company says the drive will provide "the lowest cost per gigabyte for flash" memory today.

The 60TB SSD was unveiled at the Flash Memory Summit in California—the same location that Samsung chose to reveal its 15.36TB SSD last year, which at the time was the world's largest hard drive.

The two drives aren't directly comparable, though, as the Samsung unit is a standard-size 2.5-inch SSD and the new Seagate drive uses the 3.5-inch hard drive form factor. Despite that, Seagate still claims that its drive has "twice the density" of Samsung's. I don't think the maths quite work out, considering a 3.5-inch drive has a far greater volume than a 2.5-inch drive, but Seagate is probably referring to the density of the memory chips themselves. Moore's law is still alive and kicking for NAND, apparently.

Speaking of memory chips, the Seagate drive uses Micron's latest NAND flash. We've asked Seagate for more details on what chips are actually being used—but to be honest, given the extreme storage density of the drive, there aren't many feasible options. We are almost certainly looking at one of Micron's 3D NAND packages, which range in capacity from 256Gb to 6Tb. If Seagate is using the 1Tbit (~125 gigabytes) package, which is currently the highest-capacity chip in mass production at Micron, then there would be about 480 discrete memory chips inside that 3.5-inch enclosure. Seagate may have got its hands on some early samples of the 3Tb or 6Tb chips, though.

We don't have any details on performance or longevity either, but generally drives of this size eschew the former in favour of the latter. We do have a figure on power consumption: 1W per terabyte. Other enterprise SSDs tend to sit at around 2W-per-TB at idle.

When the Samsung drive finally started to trickle out this year there were reports that it cost upwards of £8,000 or $10,000. Likewise, Seagate isn't planning to release the 60TB drive immediately, but may release it early next year. Pricing is anyone's guess, but you probably won't get much change from £30,000 or $40,000—about £0.50 per gig, which is actually fairly reasonable... if you have 30 grand to blow, anyway.