Geek tech: the scarily fast 6TB PC with 24 solid state drives

Aaron Birch

Meet the PC that we'd quite like to be playing FEAR 2 on right now...

Published on Mar 10, 2009

Okay, time for a bit of technical geekery, courtesy of Samsung. In what is clearly a blatant bit of viral advertising, a video has been released onto the Net showing some marketing and technical gurus building a PC with 24 Samsung SSDs (Solid State Drives) totalling an enormous 6TB. That's six-thousand gigabytes, folks! This alone is impressive, but the main focus of the video is not the size of storage, but the amount of effective output muscle the team achieved.

Weighing in at a mighty 2GB throughput, the system was apparently able to move two thousand megabytes of data per second, which means you'd theoretically be able to copy roughly 500 MP3s a second, or copy the contents of an entire DVD in a little under two seconds. Speedy stuff indeed, and the video shows a few other undeniably impressive feats, including opening every program contained in the computer's start menu in 53 seconds (although no games can be seen opening), and copying a 700MB movie file in the same time it takes the original disc to fall from a first floor window.

It's all elaborate and interesting stuff, but you also have to take into account the rest of the PC, which the video clearly shows as being a total monster, with high-end dual Intel Extreme QX9775 Quad Core CPUs (3.2Ghz), 4GB Kingston custom RAM (800Mhz) and two Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics cards using Crossfire, to name but a few, expensive components. So, it's not exactly a surprise that the machine runs like a bat out of hell.

A few caveats were apparently made, which you can see by furiously hitting play and pause at the end of the video. Such alterations included removing one of the graphics cards as it was sucking up too much power from the motherboard, and disconnecting the optical drives to free up extra SATA ports.

Whether the video is 100% true or not, it's still worth a look, and while 24 SSD drives is a little extreme, it's certainly a good indication of the kind of data shifting power we'll see in desktop systems when the medium becomes more affordable. I know I'd certainly like to get my hands on that PC for a bit of high-end gaming.

Have a look here...