Samsung Introduces World’s Largest Capacity SSD for Enterprise Storage Systems

Samsung has today announced that it is now shipping the industry’s largest solid state drive (SSD) – the “PM1633a,” a 15.36 terabyte (TB) drive.

First revealed at the 2015 Flash Memory Summit in August, the 15.36TB SSD is based on a 12Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface, for use in enterprise storage systems. Because the PM1633a comes in a 2.5-inch form factor, enterprise storage managers can fit twice as many of the drives in a standard 19-inch, 2U rack, compared to an equivalent 3.5-inch storage drive.

Samsung’s new PM1633a SSD provides the opportunity for significant improvements in the efficiency of IT system investments through its high storage capacity and exceptional performance. The PM1633a SSD sports random read and write speeds of up to 200,000 and 32,000 IOPS respectively, and delivers sequential read and write speeds of up to 1,200MB/s.

The random read IOPS performance is approximately 1,000 times that of SAS-type hard disks, while the sequential read and write speeds are over twice those of a typical SATA SSD. Inside the new SSD lie Samsung’s advanced controller units that support the 12Gb/s SAS interface, along with a total of 16GB of DRAM. Samsung also uses specially designed firmware that can access large amounts of high-density NAND flash concurrently.

Starting with the 15.36TB density, Samsung will provide a wide range of capacity options in its PM1633a SSD line-up– 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960-gigabyte (GB) and 480GB later this year. With more choices in storage capacity, Samsung is reinforcing the competitiveness in its SAS SSD line-up. The Samsung PM1633a SSD line-up is expected to rapidly become the overwhelming favorite over hard disks for enterprise storage systems.