Dell’s PowerEdge R7725xd packs 40x Kioxia LC9 245.76 TB QLC NVMe SSDs into a 2RU chassis for ~9.8 PB usable capacity.
Key Takeaways
The LC9 uses E3.L form factor; 40 drives in a single 2RU AMD EPYC 9005-powered box yields 9.8 PB raw all-flash storage.
Network headroom tops out at 5x 400 Gbps NICs (2 Tbps total), constrained by PCIe bandwidth shared with the drives.
A full rack of 20 units could theoretically hold 196 PB; Samsung is rumored to be targeting a 1 PB single drive.
Competing 256 TB-class SSDs in development include Micron 6600 ION, Sandisk UltraQLC SN670, SK Hynix AIN D, and Solidigm.
Scality is actively working to support a Samsung nearline SSD positioned as an HDD killer with a roadmap to 1 PB per drive.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters flagged that 2 Tbps of NIC bandwidth takes roughly 11 hours to fill the box fully, making ingestion rate the practical bottleneck, not capacity.
Price is the immediate blocker for most buyers: list price estimates from Dell’s HK storefront suggest ~$40M per unit, putting this firmly in hyperscaler or defense/research territory.
PCIe 5.0 lane contention between storage and networking is seen as the core architectural constraint; PCIe 7.0 and 8.0 specs are cited as the path to relaxing this at even higher densities.
Notable Comments
@ksec: Notes PCIe lane sharing limits NIC count, and flags the Samsung nearline 1 PB drive roadmap as the most forward-looking detail in the article.
@bombcar: “Full NICs takes about 666 minutes to fill this thing. Satan’s NAS!”
