Samsung has figured out how to significantly increase the amount of storage on a solid state drive to an amazing 16 TB SSD. At this size, Samsung has easily claimed the title for the world’s largest storage drive. Last year, Western Digital and Seagate released 10 TB and 10 TB HDD’s, respectively. Fixstar also announced a 6 TB SSD just a few months ago. Samsung’s newest drive, however, fits within a 2.5-inch enclosure, so it can technically find its way into laptops and desktop PC’s.
THE WORLD’S LARGEST STORAGE DRIVE: SAMSUNG IS TARGETS THE SERVER MARKET FIRST
As per usual, with large amounts of storage on a drive, Samsung is targeting the server market first. At this year’s Flash Memory Summit, the company showed off 48 of the new drives in a server with a storage of 768 TB. The drives are fast and have been rated at two million input and outputs per second. In comparison, conventional PC drives tend to handle between 10,000 and 90,000 of those same operations per second.
SAMSUNG IS ALSO TALKING OF UPGRADING THEIR 3D NAND FLASH CHIPS
This has been expected of Samsung, as the company had been talking about a major upgrade to their 3D NAND flash chips less than a week ago. With this new 3-bit V-NAND technology with 48 layer, Samsung is doubling the density of their existing flash chips of 256 GB. The company also said that they can easily upgrade and double the density of the current Samsung SSD line up and provide a more ideal solution for the multi-terabyte SSDs.
SANDISK IS ALSO PLANNING OT RELEASE A 16TB SSD NEXT YEAR
Although this was an amazing feat, Samsung might not be at the top for very long. SanDisk announced its own 256 GB, 3-bit-per-cell, 48-layer 3d NANA flash chips in a partnership with Toshiba. While they haven’t announced any new products yet, SanDisk said in a statement that they are expecting to release a 16 TB SSD in 2016.
