Raising the storage ceiling
I didn't attend the 2015 Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California, but in my head, Samsung trotted out to the show floor and announced to attendees, "Ladies and gentlemen, we present you the PM1633a, a 16 terabyte solid state drive in a 2.5-inch form factor." What I imagine happened next is that the representative who announced the drive turned the mic sideways, dropped it, and walked away.
I'm sure it didn't go down that way, though Samsung would have been justified in taking that approach. After all, the PM1633a is the world's highest capacity drive of any kind, not just in the realm of SSDs. Suddenly my 960GB SSD array feels pedestrian by comparison.
According to Golem.de, the drive actually boasts 15.36TB of storage, which Samsung elected to round up to 16TB. Whatever, it's still the most capacious single drive around.
Getting to that capacity in a single 2.5-inch drive was made possible by using Samsung's new 256Gbit TLC flash memory. This is the third generation of 3D V-NAND and it consists of 48 layers of 3-bits per cell on a single die.
Not only is this more capacious than solutions based on second generation V-NAND consisting of 32 layers of 3-bits per cell, but according to Samsung, it sports improved read and write performance, along with better power efficiency.
As for the price? Samsung didn't say, though I suspect it's in the neighborhood of an arm and a leg.
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From maximumpc
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