The Samsung PM1633a. (Image source: Samsung)
Samsung has just announced its new PM1633a SSD, which also happens to be the world's largest capacity SSD, offering a whopping 15TB of storage.
The PM1633a comes in a 2.5-inch form factor drive, but measures 15mm thick. Most 2.5-inch form factor SSDs are only 7mm thick.
In addition, since it was designed for enterprise use, it uses the SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) interface. What this means is that, nope, you won't be able to fit one of these drives into your notebooks without extensive modifications.
According to Samsung, the 15TB capacity was achieved using 512 of Samsung's 256Gb V-NAND memory chips. These 256Gb dies were stacked in layers of 16 to form a single 512GB package. A total of 32 packages were then used to achieve the 15TB capacity.
In terms of performance, the PM1633a delivers sequential read and write speeds of about 1200MB/s. Random read and write performance is rated at 200,000 and 32,000 IOPs respectively.
These numbers mean that the PM1633a handily thrashes spinning HDDs. In addition, they also take up less space, consume less power, and because they don't contain moving parts, there's no need to worry about vibrations affecting adjacent drives. The only foreseeable problem is the high price of these drives.
There's no mention of price but older drives with similar specifications from Samsung used to cost about US$1000 per TB, so don't expect this new drive to come cheap.
Source: Samsung
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.