Samsung has announced a new solid-state drive powered by its new 3D vertical-NAND flash memory chips, which it says is the world’s highest capacity computer storage device. The PM1663a drive, which has an actual formatted capacity of 15.36TB, will be targeted exclusively at data centres and other enterprise-grade markets with massive speed and capacity requirements.
The drive has a standard 2.5-inch enclosure but is twice as thick as the 2.5-inch drives commonly used in consumer products such as laptops. Samsung has employed 480 of its recently unveiled 256Gb third-generation V-NAND flash chips, each of which has 48 layers of NAND cells, to achieve this data capacity.
Samsung claims to be the leader in terms of storage density and the number of layers possible on a V-NAND chip. Its third-generation chips are stated to be up to 2.2x faster and up to 63 percent more power efficient than their second-generation predecessors.
Up to 48 such 2.5-inch drives can fit into a standard 2U server chassis, for up to 768TB of storage. Enterprise-grade magnetic hard drives, by comparison, have reached capacities of up to 10TB but still have an advantage in terms of cost per unit of storage.