Samsung has just unveiled its largest 2.5-inch SSD, offering at least 30.72 terabytes (TB), enough to store 5,700 HD movies, the company says.
Called the PM1643, the new Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSD is primarily aimed at businesses, so it's not expected to be used in home computers anytime soon. Samsung, however, says this is just the first product in an all-new line of SSDs in the 2.5-inch form factor, with 5.36TB, 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB, and 800GB capacities also planned for later this year.
In a press release (embedded below), Samsung explains that the creation of the world's largest SSD was possible thanks to a combination of 32 flash , which in turn are made of 16 stacked layers of 512Gb V-NAND chips.
The performance of the new SSD is impressive. It can achieve random read and write speeds of up to 400,000 IOPS and 50,000 IOPS, and sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,100MB/s and 1,700MB/s, respectively, according to official figures.
It goes without saying that Samsung is extremely excited about the new SSD. “With the launch of the 30.72TB SSD, we are once again breaking the commercial storage capacity barrier and thereby opening up new horizons for ultra-high capacity storage systems worldwide,” said Jaesoo Han, executive vice president, Memory Sales & Marketing, Samsung Electronics.
“Samsung will continue to aggressively mobilize to meet the changing demand for SSDs above 10TB while accelerating the adoption of storage solutions that are poised to usher in a new era of enterprise systems.”
Previously, the world's largest SSD was announced by Seagate at 60TB, but it used a 3.5-inch form factor and never entered mass production.
