Samsung introduces world’s largest capacity SSD

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, has introduced the world’s largest ‘PM1633a’ 15.36 terabyte (TB) solid state drive (SSD) for use in enterprise storage systems.

Samsung claims the product is “the industry’s largest solid state drive (SSD)”. The 15.36TB SSD is based on a 12Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface. The PM1633a comes in a 2.5-inch form factor so that you can fit twice as many of the drives in a standard 19-inch, 2U rack, compared to an equivalent 3.5-inch storage drive, says Samsung.

The 15.36TB of data storage on a single SSD is enabled by combining 512 of Samsung’s 256GB V-NAND memory chips, stacked in 16 layers to form a single 512GB package, with a total of 32 NAND flash packages in the 15.36TB drive.

The PM1633a line-up is an upgrade, which stacks cell-arrays in 48 layers using Samsung’s 3rd generation, 256-gigabit (GB) V-NAND technology. Its predecessor, the PM1633 used Samsung’s 2nd generation, 32-layer, and 128 GB V-NAND memory.

The PM1633a SSD sports random read and write speeds of up to 200,000 and 32,000 IOPS respectively, and delivers sequential read and write speeds of up to 1,200Mbps. The random read IOPS performance is approximately 1,000 times that of SAS-type hard disks, while the sequential read and write speeds are over twice those of a typical SATA SSD. Inside the new SSD lie Samsung’s advanced controller units that support the 12Gbps SAS interface, along with a total of 16GB of DRAM. Samsung also uses specially designed firmware that can access large amounts of high-density NAND flash simultaneously.

The 15.36TB PM1633a drive supports 1 DWPD (drive writes per day). In addition to featuring a data protection and restoration software tool in case of a temporary blackout, the drive also includes a metadata protection mechanism.

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