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I’ve always felt there’s a gap in the flash storage industry. We do a great job serving consumer and client segments, and then suddenly jump straight to server and data center solutions. Media professionals are often lumped in with enthusiast-level consumer storage and it feels like there is a segment missing in flash storage. When was the last time you even saw an enterprise level AIC (Add-In Card) release or review? Don’t get me wrong. My media work is pretty extensive and the high-end SSDs available today are genuinely impressive. Still, that gap has always seemed to exist.
We have on our bench something totally unexpected. It is going to turn a few heads. It’s so new that you won’t even find it listed on the manufacturer’s website yet, and at the time of publishing, there are likely only two sources of information about it online: The SSD Review and Tweaktown. And it’s massive. This AIC SSD is more than any media professional could have ever dreamed of. Don’t get me wrong. My media dreams of the R6301 are only a small portion of what this SSD is capable of. It’s truly unexpected and its listed specs identify 30GB/s read data transfer…in a Gen 5 SSD. Meet the Dapustor Roealsen R6301 Series 12.8TB Gen 5 SSD.
The Dapustor Roealsen R6301 is a PCIe 5.0 (Gen5) x8 SSD that uses an eight-lane interface to push beyond typical storage limits. Its dual-lane architecture is designed to theoretically double current SSD speeds, reaching a listed 30GB/s compared to today’s ~14GB/s Gen 5 ceiling. This SSD will be available in 6.4 and 12.8TB capacities, is a three drive write per day (3-DWPD) SSD and uses the NVMe 2.0 SSD operating protocol.
Its listed specifications claim an astonishing 30GB/s read and 12GB/s write throughput, along with up to 4,550K read and 1,080K write IOPS for low 4K random data access. The R6301 carries a 5W idle and 28W active power rating which may sound high at first, but in context, it’s quite reasonable given that many SSDs exceed 20W while using only four lanes rather than eight. While this SSD is designed for “critical business operations, cloud infrastructure, and AI workloads,” it would also fit perfectly into an 8- or 16-lane PCIe slot in a high-performance media PC or workstation.
The Dapustor R6301 contains their proprietary DP800 Gen 5 SSD controller along with 16 pieces of YMTC 3D eTLC NAND flash memory. This is a SK hynix DRAM-based device (ten pieces) that also contains power-failure protection, end-to-end data protection, Secure Boot, firmware integrity verification, Format, Sanitize and will come with a 5-year limited warranty. This spec sheet provides further metrics and shows the difference between the R6101 (1DPWD) and R6301 (3DPWD):
CRYSTAL DISK INFO VER. 9.6.0 X64
Crystal Disk Info is an excellent utility for monitoring the characteristics and overall health of storage devices. It provides detailed information such as temperature, total power-on hours, and even the device’s current firmware version.
We wanted to upload this Crystal DiskInfo report to validate first hand that this SSD runs in PCIe 5.0 x8 mode, something very few have ever seen before. It also gives us a chance to depict the amount of data testing it goes through, this specific SSD having been through our test regimen and one other. The total host writes for this SSD are 1.29 petabytes, which is quite the jump from typical consumer SSD testing. Lastly, the temperature of 44°C is what we determined to be the ambient temperature of this SSD when not in use within the system. For top performance, the DapuStor Roealsen6 R6301 Gen55 AIC Enterprise SSD definitely needs some form of active cooling.
Next up… performance metrics.