Samsung starts delivery of SSD with a capacity of 15.36 terabytes

Samsung has started supplying a 2.5″ SSD with a storage capacity of 15.36TB. The SSD uses the SAS interface and is made up of 512 v-nand chips of 256Gbit, of which 16 are stacked up to packages of 512GB.

Samsung first showed the PM1633a SSD in August 2015 and now reports that it has delivered the first copies to companies. The South Korean manufacturer uses its third-generation 256Gbit v-nand chips that consist of 48 layers. According to Samsung, these chips are faster and more reliable than the second-generation 128Gbit v-nand chips, which the manufacturer uses in the PM1633 SSD. That model has a maximum capacity of 3.84TB.

By combining 32 packages of 512GB, the new Samsung PM1633a SSD has a total capacity of 16,384TB. However, Samsung lists a capacity of 15.36TB and the remaining space will probably be used as a spare in case memory cells become worn out. According to Samsung, the PM1633a delivers 200,000 iops when it comes to random read speed and 32,000 iops when writing. The sequential read and write speed would be up to 1200MB/s. The controller in the SSD is equipped with 16GB of DRAM memory.

According to Samsung, the PM1633a supports one drive writes per day, which means that the full capacity can be written every day without causing problems. Samsung does not report how often the SSD can be described in total, but according to the manufacturer that is two to ten times as much as with regular SATA SSDs based on MLC or TLC memory.

Samsung will first supply the PM1633a with a capacity of 15.36TB. Later variants of 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB and 480GB will follow. The SSDs are intended for servers and enterprise storage systems. Prices are unknown.