By Heather Hamilton, contributing writer
Samsung can now lay claim to the world’s largest solid-state drive, which offers 30.72 terabytes of storage in a 2.5-inch form factor and is designed for enterprise customers who want to leave the hard drive behind. The drive isn’t only large; it is fast, too.
The gigantic SSD, called the PM1643 , consists of 32 sticks of 1-TB NAND flash packages that contain 16 layers of 512-Gb V-NAND chips. As The Verge points out, that’s 5,700 HD movies, or 500 days of video — twice the capacity of the SSD that previously occupied the “world’s largest” spot.
“With our launch of the 30.72-TB SSD, we are once again shattering the enterprise storage capacity barrier and, in the process, opening up new horizons for ultra-high-capacity storage systems worldwide,” says Jaesoo Han, who serves as the executive vice president of memory sales and marketing.
The new drive boasts higher performance levels, with random read and write speeds of up to 400,000 and 50,000 IOPS and, at three times the speed of a typical SATA SSD, the PM1643 reads and writes up to 2,100 MB/s and 1,700 MB/s. Samsung is also offering a five-year warranty for one full drive write per day.
The new product was developed by enhancing the design of Samsung’s controller, DRAM packaging, and software, including a new controller architecture that integrates previous controllers in their high-capacity SSD lineup in a single package, which allows more room dedicated to storage.
Finally, the press release points out that “the drive utilizes Through Silicon Via technology to interconnect 8-Gb DDR4 chips, creating 10 4-GB TSV DRAM packages, totaling 40 GB of DRAM.” As they mention, this is the first time that TSV-applied DRAM has appeared in an SSD.
The drive isn’t currently for sale, and there’s no official word on when it will be available and at what price, though Samsung has announced plans to expand the range of SAS SSDs available. As of now, they’ve begun production as of January and have shipped an initial batch to an undisclosed customer. AnandTech predicts that, even at bulk rates, the PM1643 will cost thousands of dollars per unit.
“Samsung will continue to move aggressively in meeting the shifting demand toward SSDs over 10 TB and, at the same time, accelerating adoption of our trail-blazing storage solutions in a new age of enterprise systems,” said Han in a statement to the press.
Sources: Samsung, The Verge, AnandTech, Business Wire
Image Source: Samsung
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