A new solid-state drive (SSD) now boasts the industry’s highest capacity, but in the same form factor as for a laptop computer. Samsung said this week that it is shipping the PM1633a, a SSD that crams 15.36 TB into a tiny 2.5-inch form factor.
With that size enterprise IT managers can fit twice as many of the drives into standard racks as they could with equivalent 3.5-inch storage drives, according to the company. Samsung said the drive supports one full drive write per day, which means 15.36 TB of data can be written every day on a single drive without failure.
Samsung first said it was working on the new drive last summer. It’s based on a 12 Gbps Serial Attached SCSI interface, and is designed primarily for enterprise storage systems. The drive has random read and write speeds of up to 200,000 I/Os and 32,000 I/Os per second, respectively. It also has sequential read and write speeds of up to 1200 Mbps — as compared to 550 Mbps for a regular SATA SSD. That means it can write between two and 10 times as much data.
For Smaller Businesses?
Samsung is counting on SSD to become the standard in enterprise storage systems, replacing hard disks. In fact, when we asked Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, about the potential for products such as the PM1633a, he said they have possibilities beyond large enterprises.
“These new drives are impressive and focused primarily in the data center, but over time could find their way into smaller storage arrays for small businesses, and even the highest-end gaming and video editing rigs,” said Moorhead. “They would have to be moved to a different interface, but that’s doable.”
Moorhead added that over time, spinning media such as hard disks will make less and less sense for primary tier 1 storage, but could still have a place somewhere in the storage tier.
Faster and Better
Samsung is able to fit 15.36 TB of data storage capacity in a single drive by combining 512 of its 256 Gbit V-NAND memory chips. Stacking NAND cells on top of each other this way doubles the density of standard planar NAND chips, from 128 Gbits to 256 Gbits, and also improves performance.
Each of the 48-layer V-NAND chips contain more than 85.3 billion cells, and can each contain 3 bits of data, resulting in 256 billion bits of data, or 256 Gb on a chip.
SanDisk and Toshiba are also working on 256 Gbit, 48-layer 3D NAND flash chips that offer twice the capacity of their previous products. Intel and Micron have also announced 3D NAND products.
Along with the 15.36 TB model, Samsung will offer the new SSD in 7.68 TB, 3.84 TB, 1.92 TB, 960 GB and 480 GB sizes later this year. No prices have been announced.
“Storage is becoming one of the most interesting categories for the next five years, and Samsung’s announcement just adds to the allure,” said Moorhead.
Image Credit: New 15.36 TB SSD image via Samsung.
