1TB and 2TB hard drives are pretty common these days. What isn’t, is a 16TB SSD. That is pretty insane, and it’s exactly what Samsung recently announced. The PM1633a features 500 256 gigabit (32 gigabyte) NAND flash chips crammed inside a 2.5 inch enclosure, albeit one with twice the thickness as a standard 2.5 inch hard drive found in laptops. This gives it a total capacity of 15.36TB, which Samsung feels comfortable calling “about 16TB”. It’s really impressive, and we expect the price to be equally as impressive; considering the drive was demonstrated in a server packed with 48 of them (totally a jaw dropping 768TB, operating at “2,000,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second). By comparison, the consumer-grade SSD that you have in your PC is probably capable of around 10,000-90,000 IOPS, depending on the workload.”), it’s clear the drive is targeted at enterprise customers who will have less trouble justifying its rumoured $5,000 price tag. Exact pricing and availability haven’t been announced yet, however.
[ Ars Technica ] VIA [ DamnGeeky ]
