Samsung has plenty of experience when it comes to pushing out higher capacity SSDs. Back in 2016, Samsung began shipping a 15.6TB SSD, which at the time, was the world's highest capacity. Now this year, Samsung is taking it a step further with the new ‘PM1643', a 30TB SSD built on the latest 512Gb V-NAND.
Samsung was able to create this SSD by combining 32 1TB NAND flash packages, each comprised of 16 stacked layers of 512Gb V-NAND chips. However, raising capacity to 30.72TB wasn't the only goal here, Samsung has also risen performance levels significantly. The PM1643 is said to be twice as fast as the 15.6TB SAS drive from 2016. For specific numbers, this SSD has sequential read/write speeds of up to 2,100MB/s and 1,700MB/s respectively.
Image credit: Samsung
With this SSD, Samsung is debuting a new controller architecture that integrates nine controllers into a single package, enabling a greater amount of space within the SSD form factor to be used for storage. The PM1643 also applies TSV technology to interconnect 8Gb DDR4 chips, creating 10 4GB TSV DRAM packages. In total, this SSD ships with 40GB of DRAM on board- this is also the first time that TSV applied DRAM has been used in an SSD.
Samsung began manufacturing initial batches of these SSDs back in January and mass production has now kicked off. Over the course of this year, Samsung will be adding 15.36TB, 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB and 800GB versions of this drive to their line up for enterprise.
KitGuru Says: In the consumer market, SSDs appear to have stagnated but the same can't be said when it comes to enterprise. A 30TB SSD is certainly an impressive feat.