Samsung Launches 15.36TB Largest Storage Drive for Enterprise Storage System

SEOUL, SK: Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., a provider of advanced memory technology, unveils the industry’s largest solid state drive (SSD) – the “PM1633a,” a 15.36 terabyte (TB) drive.

The 15.36TB SSD is based on a 12Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface for use in enterprise storage systems. It comes in a 2.5-inch form factor which can fit twice as many of the drives in a standard 19-inch, 2U rack, compared to an equivalent 3.5-inch storage drive. For the SSD, 32 packages of 512GB and about 550 memory chips, including 16GB DRAM, are mounted on both sides of two printed circuit boards (PCB). As the memory chips for seven high-performance laptops (2TB SSD and 8GB DRAM) are used on a 2.5-inch storage device.

“To satisfy an increasing market need for ultra-high-capacity SAS SSDs from leading enterprise storage system manufacturers, we are directing our best efforts toward meeting our customers' SSD requests,” says Jung Bae Lee, Senior Vice President, Memory Product Planning and Application Engineering Team, Samsung Electronics. “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.”

The 15.36TB of data storage on a single SSD is enabled by combining 512 of Samsung’s 256GB V- NAND memory chips, stacked in 16 layers to form a single 512GB package, with a total of 32 NAND flash packages in the 15.36TB drive.

The PM1633a Storage Drive line-up is an upgrade, which stacks cell-arrays in 48 layers using Samsung’s 3rd generation, 256-gigabit (GB) V-NAND technology, over its predecessor, the PM1633 used Samsung’s 2nd generation, 32-layer, and 128 GB V-NAND memory.

The latest SSD is based on a SAS interface, which is used for server and storage, and can create two times faster SSD than a Serial ATA (SATA) interface, which is used in personal computers. Moreover, the SSD sports random read and write speeds of up to 200,000 and 32,000 Input-Output operations (IOPS) respectively, and delivers sequential read and write speeds of up to 1,200MB/s, which is more than twice the speed of a typical SATA SSD, through Samsung’s advanced controller units and specially designed firmware that can access large amounts of high-density NAND flash concurrently.

Further, the drive boasts a highly dependable metadata protection mechanism in addition to featuring a data protection and restoration software tool in case of a momentary blackout, providing software solutions that improves the convenience and safety of customers’ system maintenance.