The world-leading solid state drive (SSD) was announced by Samsung over six months ago but is only just available for purchase. Samsung hasn’t stated the retail price for the drive but it’s safe to assume it will be rather out of the reach of typical PC hardware enthusiasts.
Samsung has crammed 15.36TB worth of storage chips into a 2.5-inch device, the same size as a standard laptop hard drive. It can produce sequential read and write speeds of up to 1,200 MB/s and can process 200,000 read operations and 32,000 write operations each second.
The drive has been designed to be resilient to failure and a durable workhorse for enterprise use. It can sustain a full write every day, allowing the user to wipe the SSD and then write a full 15.36TB load each day with the same expected failure rate as a more conventional SSD. Samsung says it can write two to 10 times as much data per day without failing.
These impressive statistics have been obtained through the use of Samsung’s own 3rd generation V-NAND memory chips. The chips are stacked in arrays of 48 layers, creating a very dense memory arrangement that has facilitated the huge 15TB capacity of the top-of-the-line SSD.
“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,” said Jung-bae Lee, Senior Vice President of Samsung’s Memory Product Planning and Application Engineering Team. “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.”
Innovations like Samsung’s 3D V-NAND have led to SSDs finally surmounting the last remaining advantage of mechanical hard drives. Over the past year, SSDs have caught up with hard drive capacities and gradually overtaken, leaving the spinning disks without a key selling point.
Until recently, SSDs have only been available in comparatively small capacities, up to around 2 terabytes. Enterprise-level hard drives from market leaders Seagate and Western Digital are only available up to 10 terabytes though, a third less capacity than Samsung’s new SSD.
SSDs have a huge performance boost over mechanical drives due to their lack of moving parts. They also use less power, take up less space, aren’t as susceptible to sudden catastrophic failure and don’t vibrate against each other in a datacentre environment. With large capacities now ready for commercialisation, the traditional hard drive’s time appears to be increasingly limited.
Samsung’s new range of enterprise-level SSDs will be expanded to include additional, more affordable capacities later this year. It will offer 480GB, 960GB, 1.92TB, 3.84TB and 7.68TB versions of its 15.36TB goliath and expects the drives to become the “overwhelming favorite” for new enterprise storage systems.
