Storage capacities are never enough, regardless of the amount you have. The moment you get yourself 500GB worth of storage, more needs pop up and you end up jumping to the next variant available – 1TB.
Apparently, this can go on and on forever. It is, for this reason, Samsung went into the production of a much larger and faster 16TB SSD drive. Announced last year August, this monstrous device brings together the best of sheer capacity and speed in what is basically the largest capacity an SSD drive has ever had.
The PM1633a drive comes in a 2.5-inch size and according to Samsung, this device comes with super amazing read and write speeds. The South Korean giant claims the 16TB SSD drive has read speed of 200,000 input/output operations per second and write speed of 32,000 input/output operations per second. Furthermore, the drive boasts sequential read and write speeds that can go up to 1.2GB per second.
The new Samsung 16TB SSD drive is made up of 32 packages of 512GB in size where each of the packages also consists of 16 layers of 256GB memory chips. The drive comes with support for the 12Gb/s SAS interface and to help it manage all of these, the South Korean giant went for a massive 16GB DRAM. It is no wonder this drive is being touted as one of the fastest, if not the fastest SSD alive today.
Smaller capacities to launch later this year
There is no doubt that the new 16TB SSD drive is targeting the enterprise world. With Samsung still mum on the details of the price, this enterprise grade device is expected to cost massively. The good side of the story is that Samsung will also be unveiling smaller capacities of the same device. The expected lineup will include 8TB, 4TB, 2TB, 1TB as well as smaller 500GB SSD drive.
The bad side of the story is that this drive probably won’t be showing up in any gaming machine anytime soon. But who knows, the technology world changes so fast and in fact, the year is still quite young. At this point, all we know is that the 16TB PM1633a is a target for the enterprise world. We can’t tell whether at some point Samsung will direct this device to the consumer world, but we hope this will actually materialize sooner than later.