- AIC SB407-VA high-density 4U storage server has 60 HDD bays and 8 SSD bays
- Supports Xeon CPUs, DDR5, PCIe Gen5, and NVMe, SAS, SATA connectivity
- Redundant cooling and power management keep the 80kg server reliable under heavy workloads
The SB407-VA from AIC is a new 4U high-density storage server built to cram in drives. It supports 60 hot-swappable 3.5-inch bays, 8 2.5-inch bays, and 2 M.2 slots, aiming for almost 3PB of raw storage.
It uses dual 4th and 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and modern features such as DDR5 and PCIe Gen5.
Built for AI tasks, data analytics, and large-scale data lakes, the server offers multiple PCIe Gen5 slots, M.2 support, and a mix of NVMe, SAS, and SATA connectivity.
Why no 3.5-inch SSDs?
To keep hardware running under pressure, it uses front-to-back airflow, hot-swap redundant fans, and 800W redundant power supplies.
The server includes built-in management tools to provide power, cooling, and system health, even if the machine itself is down.
At 434 x 853 x 176mm and weighing about 80kg (around the same weight as a washing machine), the SB407-VA packs power and storage into a compact unit that fits neatly into a standard data center rack.
The system has been built to balance scale and resilience, giving enterprises a way to combine massive storage with modern compute, but with all those bays dedicated to 3.5-inch drives, it got me thinking something I’ve never considered before – why aren’t there any 3.5-inch SSDs?
The answer (which I suspect I already knew) is straightforward. SSDs just don’t need the space.
Flash chips and controllers occupy so little space that they fit easily within a 2.5-inch -or smaller – form factor. Larger enclosures would be mostly empty.
To fill a 3.5-incher, you’d need to add more chips, and that would simply drive costs up without delivering real performance benefits.
Data centers also prefer 2.5-inch drives because they allow greater capacity in limited rack space, making them more practical than larger formats.
So while the SB407-VA shows why 3.5-inch bays remain essential, SSDs will stay small, leaving those bays to spinning rust.
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