Samsung Electronics revealed the world’s largest solid state drive

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology and also the world’s largest memory chips manufacture, has now revealed the world’s largest solid state drive. Samsung Electronics made an announcement that it has begun mass producing the industry’s largest capacity Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drive (SSD). It has 30.72 terabytes of storage, the most storage ever crammed into the 2.5-inch form factor. This breakthrough was made possible by combining 32 sticks of 1TB NAND flash packages, each of which contains 16 layers of 512Gb V-NAND chips. That’s enough space to hold 5,700 HD movies and delivers twice the capacity and performance of the previous 15.36TB high-capacity lineup introduced in March 2016.

The new PM1643 drive features random read and writes speeds of up to 400,000 IOPS and 50,000 IOPS, and impressive sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,100MB/s and 1,700 MB/s, respectively and the drive is robust too, with Samsung offering a five-year warranty. So the performance levels have risen significantly and are nearly twice that of Samsung’s previous generation high-capacity SAS SSD.

Samsung has reached the new capacity and performance hikes through several technological advancements in the design of its controller, DRAM packaging, and associated software. These progressions include a highly efficient controller architecture that integrates nine controllers from the previous high-capacity SSD lineup into a single package, enabling a greater amount of space within the SSD to be used for storage. The PM1643 drive applies Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology to interconnect 8Gb DDR4 chips, creating ten 4GB TSV DRAM packages, 40GB of DRAM. This marks the first time that TSV applied DRAM has been used in an SSD.

It has enhanced software that supports metadata protection and data retention with recovery from sudden power failures, and an error correction code (ECC) algorithm to keep high reliability and minimal storage maintenance. When will exactly the PM1643 go up for sale and for how much isn’t yet known, but it will expand its range of SAS SSDs later this year, with 16.36TB, 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB, and 800GB versions to come.