- TeamGroup’s 64TB SSD aims for enterprise dominance with AI-ready specs and Gen5 speed
- PCIe Gen5 promises speed, but real-world benchmarks will tell the true performance story
- Massive storage meets modern AI demands, but price remains the elephant in the room
In a market where storage capacities and speeds are constantly evolving to meet the needs of AI and cloud infrastructure, another player has stepped forward with a bold offering.
TeamGroup has announced its entry into the 64TB SSD space with the T-CREATE MASTER Ai I5U U.2 PCIe 5.0 SSD, a high-capacity solid-state drive built with enterprise workloads in mind.
This launch comes about a year after Western Digital teased a similar PCIe Gen5 model for AI applications, and five years after Nimbus Data introduced the first 64TB SSD, the ExaDrive NL series.
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Enterprise-first design with next-gen performance specs
Unlike consumer SSDs competing for a spot among the best portable drives, TeamGroup’s latest entry is aimed squarely at enterprise environments.
With support for the U.2 PCIe 5.0 interface and storage capacity maxing out at 64TB, the I5U is positioned as a tool for cloud-based databases and edge computing.
According to TeamGroup, it is “designed specifically for cloud infrastructure and database applications” and optimized for the demands of “large language models” and intensive AI-driven workloads.
PCIe Gen5 has become the benchmark for future-proof performance in both consumer and enterprise sectors, but claims such as “ultra-fast PCIe Gen5 speeds with enterprise-grade endurance” should be treated with caution.
Until third-party benchmarks emerge, it’s difficult to evaluate the drive’s real-world reliability and performance.
Past efforts to identify the best SSDs based purely on theoretical throughput have often ignored key factors like thermal performance, latency under load, and sustained write consistency, all of which are critical in large-scale deployments.
TeamGroup’s entry also arrives amid a broader trend of high-capacity SSDs hitting the market. From Solidigm’s 61.44TB D5-P5336 to Micron’s 6.144TB 6550 Ion SSD, competition in the ultra-high-capacity segment is heating up.
One element that remains unclear for TeamGroup’s I5U is pricing. Enterprise-grade drives at this scale rarely come cheap, but TeamGroup is known for value-oriented options.
This raises speculation that its 64TB SSD might come closer to affordability than previous alternatives.
While it’s unlikely to ever replace the best external HDDs in terms of raw cost per gigabyte, it signals that ultra-high-capacity SSDs are edging closer to broader adoption.