You probably don’t need 30.72TB of fast SSD data at home, but plenty of companies around the world will be excited to hear that Samsung is now ready to manufacture the industry’s largest capacity SSD ever, which also happens to be insanely fast.
Announced on Tuesday, the drive targets enterprise systems, and it’s built on Samsung’s 512Gb V-NAND tech. The company says it offers the “industry-first 1TB NAND flash package, 40GB of DRAM, new controller,” and new software, which will allow it to store some 5,700 5GB movies and only fail every two million hours.
The PM1643 is a dull, unassuming name for this SAS SSD, but it’s one to remember. The device doubles the capacity of the previous 15.36TB high-capacity SSD that Samsung introduced nearly two years ago.
“This breakthrough was made possible by combining 32 of the new 1TB NAND flash packages, each comprised of 16 stacked layers of 512Gb V-NAND chips,” Samsung explains. “These super-dense 1TB packages allow for approximately 5,700 5-gigabyte (GB), full HD movie files to be stored within a mere 2.5-inch storage device.”
The PM1643 features new tech innovations, including a “highly efficient controller architecture,” that makes room for more storage space by combining nine controllers, and Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology that interconnects 8GB DDR4 chips to create 10 4GB TSV DRAM packages. Samsung says this is the first time TSC-applied DRAM was used in an SSD.
Software features, meanwhile, include metadata protection, data retention, and recovery from sudden power failures. The drive can deliver one full drive write per day over a period of five years without failure. The mean time between failures is of two million hours, Samsung says.
The drive offers sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,100MB/s and 1,700MB/s, respectively, which is three times faster than a typical 2.5-inch SSD. Random read and write speeds are at 400,000 IOPS and 50,000 IOPS, or four times the performance of a regular SSD drive.
The price for the 30.72TB SSD was not announced, but the 15.36TB cost more than $10,000 two years ago. Samsung plans to launch other capacities using the same technology, including 15.36TB, 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB and 800GB versions.
