Samsung Unveils 'World's Largest' Hard Drive

The Korean tech giant this week introduced the PM1633a, what it calls the world's largest hard drive, according to Ars Technica UK and Golem.de.

The 2.5-inch solid state drive, targeted at the enterprise market, packs an impressive 15.36TB of storage. To put that in perspective, the largest hard drives made by Seagate and Western Digital top out at 8 to 10TB, Ars noted.

"The secret sauce behind Samsung's 16TB SSD is the company's new 256Gbit (32GB) NAND flash die; twice the capacity of 128Gbit NAND dies that were commercialized by various chip makers last year," Ars' Sebastian Anthony wrote. "To reach such an astonishing density, Samsung has managed to cram 48 layers of 3-bits-per-cell (TLC) 3D V-NAND into a single die. This is up from 24 layers in 2013, and then 36 layers in 2014."

And the PM1633a? It uses between 480 and 500 of the new NAND flash chips. Samsung this week at the Flash Memory Summit in California showed off a server with 48 of the new SSDs installed for a total of 768TB.

At this point, there's no word on pricing or availability details for the PM1633a, but don't expect this thing to come cheap, as the folks at Ars reckon it will be north of $7,000.

:story: PC Magazine