The 16TB Samsung PM1633a SSD (credit: Golem.de)
Samsung has announced that it is now shipping its PM1633a SSD. That's a boringly mundane name for a drive that's anything but: the PM1633a isn't just the biggest SSD around, it's straight up the biggest drive around. At 15.36TB, it dwarfs other SSDs and surpasses the capacity even of the very latest magnetic spinning disks. Remarkably, it packs all this storage into a conventional 2.5-inch package.
The company explained how this was done in August last year. While traditional integrated circuits (whether processors or flash memory or RAM or anything else) have a flat, essentially 2D structure, this drive uses Samsung's 3D V-NAND technology, which vertically stacks 48 layers of NAND cells to greatly increase the storage density. The highest performance flash memory stores a single bit in each flash cell; Samsung's trades a bit of performance for density, storing three bits per cell. Each die using this technology stores 256Gb (32GB) of data.
The company then adds a second level of layering: 16 of the 256Gb dies themselves are stacked up, creating a package with a 512GB capacity. 32 of these packages are used in the PM1633a to give it its total 15.36TB capacity. Samsung plans future versions with 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB, and 480GB capacities. The 15.36TB unit also has 16GB of RAM embedded.
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