Image: Seagate/Twitter

Seagate has been showing off its monster 60TB solid-state drive (SSD) this week, which breezes past the 15TB SSD that Samsung launched in March.

But don't expect to see Seagate's SSD in a consumer device any time soon, with the new drive set to join the high-performance end of its datacenter portfolio.

Samsung's PM1633a has a 2.5-inch form factor and holds 15.36TB of data. For now, it remains the largest commercially available SSD and reportedly costs $10,000 per unit.

Seagate's 60TB Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSD on the other hand opts for the familiar HDD 3.5-inch form factor. The company says that its drive has "twice the density and four times the capacity" of Samsung's PM1633a, and is capable of holding up to 400 million photos or 12,000 movies.

Seagate thinks the 3.5-inch form factor will be useful for managing changing storage requirements in datacenters since it removes the need to support separate form factors for hot and cold data. The company says it could also scale up capacity to 100TB in the same form factor.

Seagate says the 60TB SSD is currently only a "demonstration technology" though it could release the product commercially as early as next year. It hasn't revealed the price of the unit but says it will offer "the lowest cost per gigabyte for flash available today".

Seagate also launched the 8TB Nytro XP7200 NVMe SSD, aimed at so-called hyperscale datacenters and catering for applications involving high-performance computing and big-data analytics. This device will be available through Seagate partners in the fourth quarter.

The company earlier this year unveiled a 10Gbps SSD under the Nytro brand that met the Open Compute Project's specs.

While it remains to be seen when Seagate will put the 60TB SSD into production, it may have already found one partner in Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

"Seagate's new 60TB SAS SSD offers an exciting possibility for customers to achieve higher server storage performance and capacity configurations never seen before," said Mike Vildibill, vice president of HPE's advanced technologies and big data.

Read more on storage