Samsung: New 30.72 TB SSD is coming
Of course, the new Samsung PMI1643 will have a storage capacity of over 30TB, which is obviously aimed at companies that need to grind a huge amount of data at high speeds.
The biggest weakness of solid-state storage (SSD) systems has always been storage capacity. In the last few years, the 500GB or 1TB solutions have become more affordable, but the prices of the corresponding models with mechanical disks are still much lower, which makes the old technology preferable when large storage capacities are needed. This is why many private individuals, and many companies still rely on expensive old hard disks (HDD), especially when large backups or huge databases need to be run.
But SSDs are much faster in data transfer and generally offer higher performance than older HDDs, and there are extremely niche (and extremely expensive) solutions on the market that help you get the best out of both worlds.
Samsung PM1643 is one of these, a storage unit based on solid-state memories but with a total capacity of 30.72 TB, thanks to its 32 NAND flash 1 TB chips. The performances are also stratospheric: 2,100 MB/s in sequential read, 1,700 MB/s in sequential writing.
In the note released to the press, Samsung explained some of the implemented technologies, with the advantages of PM1643 that have been obtained both from the hardware technologies, and from the refinements carried out on the software side. For example, the unit uses Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology to connect 8 Gb DDR4 chips, creating 10 packages of 4GB TSV for a total of 40 GB of DRAM for managing the controller architecture. It is the first time, according to Samsung, that this technology is used within a solid state storage unit.
The unit uses the 12 Gb/s SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) interface, with random write and read speeds of 5,000 and 40,000 IOPS. Samsung has announced that the new Samsung PM1643 has entered mass production these days. We do not know when it will debut on the market, nor what will be its price of access. Not being a product targeted for the mass commercial, it is likely that the price will be very, very high and will vary depending on the units required, and it is also likely that it will never arrive in traditional retail channels.
