ComputerBase spotted Goeckeler's teasing during a recent investor chinwag. He said combining Stargate with the firm's BiCS8 Quad Level Cell NAND would unlock giant SSDs, scaling up to 512TB by 2027. If true, this could make current data centre drives look like children's toys.

Goeckeler said, “We have a new architecture coming out in the next couple of quarters that we call Stargate, new ASIC, clean sheet design and then, with BiCS 8 QLC… we just think that’s going to be a dynamite project.”

Based on past roadmaps, Sandisk is probably eyeing 128TB DC SN670 drives for later this year, doubling to 256TB next year, and again to 512TB by 2027.

Earlier leaks flagged the SN670 series as PCIe 5.0, but there is chatter that Stargate might drag it up to PCIe 6.0 instead.

Stacking enough BiCS8 NAND to hit those figures would need 64 dies per channel. That would mean 32 channels to hit the magic 512TB number, compared to the eight poxy channels typical in today’s client SSDs.

With Computex around the corner, Sandisk has a golden chance to actually show something tangible rather than just waffle. It would be nice if the promised performance leap trickled down to consumer drives, too, instead of only inflating the wallets of cloud operators.