World’s Highest Capacity 15TB SSD Is Finally Here — Samsung Starts Shipping PM1633a

Short Bytes: Months after Samsung revealed that it’s working to create a super-sized 3D NAND SSD, the company has launched 15.36TB PM1633a — the world’s highest-capacity solid state drive (SSD). With the help of a highly dependable metadata protection mechanics that allows data protection and restoration, Samsung claims that its drive will help system admins recover from abrupt power interruptions.

Last August, Samsung revealed that it’s working on the a massive capacity solid state drive. On Wednesday, the electronics company announced that it’s now shipping the world’s highest-capacity SSD — the 15.36TB PM1633a.

This monster SSD uses the same 2.5-in form factor as for a laptop. It’s based on a 12Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface for use in the enterprise storage. Samsung’s PM1633a SSD is specified to deliver impressive performance with sequential read and write speeds reaching 1200MB/s. Add random reads and writes up to 200k IOPS and 32k IOPS respectively, and you’ve got a beast that dominates every other machine in the room.

Backed with 16GB RAM SAS controller, Samsung says that its drive can endure a full drive write per day over its complete lifespan, which means that 15.36TB data can be written on PM1633a every day without failure.

With the help of a highly dependable metadata protection mechanics that allows data protection and restoration, Samsung claims that its drive will help system admins recover from abrupt power interruptions.

“To satisfy an increasing market need for ultra-high-capacity SAS SSDs from leading enterprise storage system manufacturers, we are directing our best efforts toward meeting our customers’ SSD requests,” Jung-bae Lee, senior VP Samsung Electronic’s Application Engineering Team, said in a statement.

The gigantic 15.36TB storage space in a single drive has been made possible with the help of 512 Samsung’s 256Gbit V-NAND/3D NAND memory chips. The ability of 3D NAND cells to store atop another like a multi-storey building doubles the density and improves the performance.

Later this year, along with its top model 15.36TB PM1633a, Samsung will also offer the SSD in 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB and 480GB versions.

Are you excited to grab this monster? Share your views in the comments below.