A gargantuan 16TB M.2 SSD has been discovered, and its price tag is bigger than my house deposit
And you thought current SSD prices were bad
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If you thought the current rising SSD prices, thanks to the ongoing RAM-pocalypse were scary, the price of the brand-new Exascend Enterprise-Grade PE4 PCIe Gen4 SSD might put you in an early grave.
The drive is currently $15,935.00 at Amazon, and no, you're not reading that wrong. It's almost 16K for a single Gen 4 SSD, but it also happens to be the first M.2 SSD of its kind to feature up to 16TB worth of storage. That's more than the total sum my fiancé and I dropped on the deposit for our house, so paying that much for storage is something I can't quite fathom. However, obtaining this amount of storage through SSDs alone would normally require a mix-match of various different drives, so it's pretty unheard of to get it all in one compact M.2 2280 form factor.
The Exascend Enterprise-Grade PE4 PCIe Gen4 SSD features up to 16TB worth of storage in a small, compact M.2 form factor. You will need your own heatsink to add this to your rig, which will make things even more costly. However, the drive is designed to run from 0°C up to 70°C. As an enterprise-grade drive, its 3,270 MB/s and 2980 MB/s read and write speeds aren't what most Gen 4 drives can muster, but it does have a ridiculously high endurance rate and that might storage capacity to make up for it.
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Originally spotted online by Fanless Tech, the Amazon product listing states that the TLC 3D NAND Flash storage-powered SSD is equipped with "blazing-fast" sequential read speeds up to 3,270 MB/s and write speeds up to 2,980 MB/s, which is actually pretty abysmal where Gen 4 drives are concerned. That's because it's not a typical consumer-based SSD where speeds are a priority, but an enterprise-grade drive with a focus on storage space and endurance.
If you take the Samsung 990 Pro, one of the best SSDs for gaming and top-performing M.2 SSDs available today, the 2TB model has quoted sequential read speeds up to 7,450 MB/S and write speeds up to 6,900 MB/s. In our Samsung 990 Pro review, we were able to each 7,462MB/s and 6,877MB/s, which is pretty much what you'd actually expect for a fast Gen 4 drive.
It's not the speeds anyone with a spare up to $16K would be after however, but rather the whopping endurance (TBW) up to 16,640, as shown by the official Exascend product page for its PE4 Series drives. Consumer-based storage, like the Samsung 990 Pro I mentioned above, has a 600 TBW, to put that into perspective. That's a drive that should last you quite a while, which is important if you're running a business and have a lot of data to store and transfer over time.
Of course, to get access to that high endurance rate, you'll need to be able to cough up $15,935.00 for the privilege. But while it's that price now, a quick look through our handy CamelCamelCamel shows it hasn't always been that way. According to the price checker, the massive drive dropped on Amazon on November 3, 2025 where it was available for $4,299.99.
Up to 5 grand is still a lot to fork out over storage, but it's considerably less than what Amazon is expecting for it today. Less house deposit, more brand new bathroom, price-coded. It's not all too surprising, as it's likely even this already pricey 16TB drive was pushed to its price limit due to the current RAM Storage Crisis, which is affecting nearly all storage options out there. I just thought I'd seen the worst of the SSD price hikes when I first noticed the 4TB WD Black SN850P went from around $550 to $1,300 on Amazon in February.
I don't quite imagine anyone reading this will be at a place in their lives where they can easily part with $15,935.00 like it's nothing. However, if you can and you want 16TB of space for your horrendous Steam gaming backlog, it's there, and there's only 9 left of them in stock. Do with what you will - I'm gonna go look at my pitiful savings and weep.
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Ever since I first held a NES controller in my hand I've been obsessed with gaming, and the hardware it runs on. I could hook up a NES and SNES to a telly, without instructions, before I could walk. Even now, nothing is more exciting then taking a console, or handheld, out the box for the first time and setting it up. This obsession transformed into a love of games and game music, which lead to my music degree and dream of becoming the Scottish Nobuo Uematsu. After sharing my love of games through music, I began to share my love through words on sites like TechRadar and iMore. This lead to becoming a Hardware staff writer for PCGamesN, and later the Senior Tech Writer for Dexerto, covering all things Steam Deck, PlayStation and Nintendo. With that experience, I was able to level up as Hardware Editor for GamesRadar+, where I'm still just as Nintendo, PlayStation and gaming tech obsessed as ever.
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