Samsung is at it again. Last year at the Flash Memory Summit in California, Samsung turned heads and raised eyebrows when it showed off a 16 TB SSD - the first of its kind boasting an unprecedented amount of storage. Any storage company claiming a "world first" is hardly unprecedented and is frequently done to show up competitiors. With that in mind, the Korean manufacturer's boasts weren't taken entirely seriously and written off as simple braggadocio
As it turns out however, Samsung's newest SSD was hardly a publicity stunt and as of today, Samnsung is shipping the drives to wealthy customers.
With a confirmed "largest in the industry" as far as capacity is concerned, its breathtaking to think about how all that power is packed into a "simple" 2.5-inch piece of tech. Due to this size, Samsung notes in its announcement post that businesses can fit more drives in their server racks than if they use 3.5-inch drives.
Revelling in it's latest feat, Samsung notes that this unprecedented accomplishment was made possible by stacking 512 pieces of its 256Gb vertical NAND memory chips on top of one another.
"The 256Gb dies are stacked in 16 layers to form a single 512GB package, with a total of 32 NAND flash packages in the 15.36TB drive," the press release says.
It's noted that the NAND memory chips used in this process are twice the the capacity of 128Gbit NAND dies that were utilized by various chip makers last year.
"We will continue to lead the industry with next-generation SSDs, using our advanced 3D V-NAND memory technology, in order to accelerate the growth of the premium memory market while delivering greater performance and efficiency to our customers," says Jung-bae Lee, senior VP of the Memory Product Planning and Application Engineering group at Samsung.
A whopping 16 TB capacity isn't likely to come cheap, and while Samsung has made no mention of the price, its safe to assume that the SSD will have a price tag within the $5000 range.
For all intents and purposes, such as a price range is fine because even if they were willing to shell out the $5000 to buy one, a 16 TB SSD has little benefit to regular customers. Samsung is keenly aware of this fact and for the time being, is marketing the SSD as an enterprise product or something along those lines. Don't fret however, if you're really in the market for high capcity SSDs the tech giant is rolling out 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB and 480GB variants later this year, all of which will be more available than the titanic 16TB drive.
So while the Samsung's newest device won't appear in the latest standard desktops or laptops, it still provides a good look at where technology will be headed given a few year's time.
