At a recent Flash Memory Summit 2015 in California, Samsung announced the World’s Largest Hard Drive – the Samsung PM1633a with 16TB SSD. There is no word on pricing yet but the drive could cost over £5000 but is majorly targeted at Enterprise and Data Center customers.
The Samsung PM1633a which is fitted into a 2.5-inch (6.35cm) body, is made possible by the company’s 256 gigabit (32 gigabyte) NAND flash chips which is said to offer twice the capacity of 128Gbit NAND flash chips and is a bit taller than most of the offering around.
To achieve 16TB, Samsung stacked up to 500 256 gigabit (32Gigabyte) NAND flash chips in 48 layers inside the SSD. While being advertised as a 16TB SSD, 15.36TB is the actual capacity available and the closest competitors to the PM1633a are the 8TB and 10TB Drives from HGST and Seagate.
The company tried out the 16GB SSD in a server with 48 of them installed, it reached a total of 768TB. According to research, the Samsung PM1633a can store up to 3.8 millions songs all in the average of 4MB and is said to be over 120 times the storage of an entry-level Apple Macbook Air and Macbook Pro.
Source: Arstechnica.co.uk
