We've lamented about Call of Duty's endless hunger for disk, but the cold, hard truth of the matter is that games (collectively) are not getting smaller. Fortunately, storage solutions are getting bigger. There are none more capacious in the consumer sector than Team Group's new QX, which checks in at a whopping 15.3 terabytes.
Team Group says it's hoping to "revolutionize the consumer-grade 2.5-inch SATA SSD market" with the "dominating specification" of 15.3TB. It amounts to flexing, and understandably so—head over to Newegg and you'll find that 8TB is the largest capacity SSD you can buy (Sabrent's Rocket Q and Samsung's 870 Evo).
Incidentally, this is not the largest-capacity SSD on the planet. Not even close—in July, Nimbus announced a 100TB SSD, though it ships in the 3.5-inch form factor and is intended for the data center.
Being a 2.5-inch SATA SSD, the focus here is on capacity for home consumers rather than raw speed. The QX is built around 3D quad-level cell (QLC) NAND flash memory and is rated to deliver up to 560MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 480MB/s of sequential write performance.
Those figures are a far cry from faster NVMe models, particularly those that leverage the PCIe 4.0 bus. For the time being, Sabrent leads the way with its also-new Rocket 4 Plus, which delivers sequential reads and writes of up to 7,000MB/s and 6,850MB/s, respectively.
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Nevertheless, for general purpose computing and even gaming, the gap in actual performance between a 2.5-inch SATA SSD and a fancy NVMe SSD is currently only a couple of seconds in loading screens, if that. That might change once game developers focus their efforts on faster SSDs (both next-gen game consoles will finally make the leap to SSD storage, and Nvidia is introducing DirectStorage acceleration with Ampere), but that's a 'wait-and-see' sort of thing.
As for durability, the QX is rated for 2,560 terabytes written (TBW). Team Group also makes a point of noting that it supports Windows TRIM optimization, a standard feature of SSDs.
The caveat is the price—$3,990, which is around $0.26 per gigabyte. For reference, the cheapest 1TB SATA SSD on Newegg right now happens to be another Team Group model, the GX2. It's priced at $79.99, which works out to around $0.08 per gigabyte.
