Samsung Introduces World's Highest Capacity Enterprise SSD - 15.36 TB

[btarunr]

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, announced today that it is now shipping the industry's largest solid state drive (SSD) - the "PM1633a," a 15.36 terabyte (TB) drive. First revealed at the 2015 Flash Memory Summit in August, the 15.36TB SSD is based on a 12Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface, for use in enterprise storage systems. Because the PM1633a comes in a 2.5-inch form factor, enterprise storage managers can fit twice as many of the drives in a standard 19-inch, 2U rack, compared to an equivalent 3.5-inch storage drive

"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," said Jung-bae Lee, Senior Vice President, Memory Product Planning and Application Engineering Team, Samsung Electronics. "We will continue to lead the industry with next-generation SSDs, using our advanced 3D V-NAND memory technology, in order to accelerate the growth of the premium memory market while delivering greater performance and efficiency to our customers."



The unprecedented 15.36TB of data storage on a single SSD is enabled by combining 512 of Samsung's 256Gb V-NAND memory chips. The 256Gb dies are stacked in 16 layers to form a single 512GB package, with a total of 32 NAND flash packages in the 15.36TB drive. Utilizing Samsung's 3rd generation, 256-gigabit (Gb) V-NAND technology which stacks cell-arrays in 48 layers, the PM1633a line-up provides significant performance and reliability upgrades from its predecessor, the PM1633, which used Samsung's 2nd generation, 32-layer, 128Gb V-NAND memory.

Samsung's new PM1633a SSD provides the opportunity for significant improvements in the efficiency of IT system investments through its high storage capacity and exceptional performance. These performance gains stem from Samsung's latest vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash technology, as well as the company's proprietary controller and firmware technology.

The PM1633a SSD sports random read and write speeds of up to 200,000 and 32,000 IOPS respectively, and delivers sequential read and write speeds of up to 1,200MB/s. The random read IOPS performance is approximately 1,000 times that of SAS-type hard disks, while the sequential read and write speeds are over twice those of a typical SATA SSD. Inside the new SSD lie Samsung's advanced controller units that support the 12Gb/s SAS interface, along with a total of 16GB of DRAM. Samsung also uses specially designed firmware that can access large amounts of high-density NAND flash concurrently.

The 15.36TB PM1633a drive supports 1 DWPD (drive writes per day), which means 15.36TB of data can be written every day on this single drive without failure, a level of reliability that will improve cost of ownership for enterprise storage systems. This drive can write from two to ten times as much data as typical SATA SSDs based on planar MLC and TLC NAND flash technologies.

Further, the drive boasts a highly dependable metadata protection mechanism in addition to featuring a data protection and restoration software tool in case of a momentary blackout, which make enterprise systems more stable and manageable.

Starting with the 15.36TB density, Samsung will provide a wide range of capacity options in its PM1633a SSD line-up - 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960-gigabyte (GB) and 480GB later this year. With more choices in storage capacity, Samsung is reinforcing the competitiveness in its SAS SSD line-up. The Samsung PM1633a SSD line-up is expected to rapidly become the overwhelming favorite over hard disks for enterprise storage systems.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Furunomoe]

Let me guess the price... An arm and a leg, a kidney, and a lung?

 

[manofthem]

This is remarkable! I want one!

 

[Patriot]

Yeah... announced in August...
http://www.pcper.com/news/Storage/F...bit-VNAND-Enables-16TB-PM1633a-Datacenter-SSD

And it is a 2.5" drive... not 3.5"

 

[Musaab]

Ladies and gentlemen, and the price is ............... Tada (more than ten thousand dollars of course )

 

[Patriot]

Ladies and gentlemen, and the price is ............... Tada (more than ten thousand dollars of course )

Well of course... its 7k for a 3.2TB SAS SSD

 

[bubbleawsome]

Still incredible regardless of price.

 

[RejZoR]

Let me guess the price... An arm and a leg, a kidney, and a lung?

Not fiesible for consumers who don't make profit from it, but if it's for productivity, it can repay itself quite quickly if used correctly.

 

[silapakorn]

Finally I can store all my porn collection and have up to 0.36 TB left.

 

[Prima.Vera]

R.I.P. HDDs....

 

[Musaab]

R.I.P. HDDs....

Not because of this. But because Crucial will sell 2 TB for 500$.

 

[AsRock]

Not because of this. But because Crucial will sell 2 TB for 500$.

And you think Samsung will not match that pretty much.

Anyways this is for big company's were space and speed is required and not for people like us but one thing for sure it shows whats coming.

And as for Crucial they don't make probably any thing but the sticker.

 

[Octavean]

Not because of this. But because Crucial will sell 2 TB for 500$.

1TB SSDs for about or under ~$200 USD is enough to get a lot of consumer interest and that is already here. Price per gig could be better though.

Still there are issues that many consumers may have which would make conventional HDD more favorable depending on the situation. For example I would consider a 4TB, 6TB or 8TB HDD more economical and useful (then a 2TB SDD at ~$500 USD) in my Server 2012 Essentials box or Synology NAS. I need the capacity and while SSDs can support TRIM in a RAID 0 array (scary RAID) with Intel controller I've heard of no such support for other implementations of RAID that have redundantcy. If the garbage collection is so good that it doesn't really need TRIM over time then that is great but if not then that is a problem.

What I think this shows though is that an SSD can easily break new ground with respect to capacity that conventional HDDs struggle to reach,....struggle and fail, helium filled of no.

 

[Eric_Cartman]

Not because of this. But because Crucial will sell 2 TB for 500$.

We won't see most people switching to SSDs until a 1TB is under $100.

And we won't see a large shift to SSDs until SSDs are basically as cheap as HDDs so the major computer manufacturers like Dell and HP start putting SSDs in their large volume inexpensive products.

Until that happens, SSDs will still be mostly an enthusiast product, not mainstream.

 

[rtwjunkie]

And as for Crucial they don't make probably any thing but the sticker.

Actually, they do. Crucial is owned by Micron, who makes their RAM and SSD's.

 

[[502]]

This is interestingly awesome.

 

[Patriot]

Actually, they do. Crucial is owned by Micron, who makes their RAM and SSD's.

Yeah... Plextor on the other hand...
Just takes Crucial/micron products and fixes the fw.

 

[yogurt_21]

Yeah... announced in August...
http://www.pcper.com/news/Storage/F...bit-VNAND-Enables-16TB-PM1633a-Datacenter-SSD

And it is a 2.5" drive... not 3.5"

should note this is enterprise 2.5" spec and will not fit in laptops or anything like the nuc that uses the laptop 2.5" bays.

 

[Musaab]

Well of course... its 7k for a 3.2TB SAS SSD

Not because of this. But because Crucial will sell 2 TB for 500$.

And you think Samsung will not match that pretty much.

Anyways this is for big company's were space and speed is required and not for people like us but one thing for sure it shows whats coming.

And as for Crucial they don't make probably any thing but the sticker.

1TB SSDs for about or under ~$200 USD is enough to get a lot of consumer interest and that is already here. Price per gig could be better though.

Still there are issues that many consumers may have which would make conventional HDD more favorable depending on the situation. For example I would consider a 4TB, 6TB or 8TB HDD more economical and useful (then a 2TB SDD at ~$500 USD) in my Server 2012 Essentials box or Synology NAS. I need the capacity and while SSDs can support TRIM in a RAID 0 array (scary RAID) with Intel controller I've heard of no such support for other implementations of RAID that have redundantcy. If the garbage collection is so good that it doesn't really need TRIM over time then that is great but if not then that is a problem.

What I think this shows though is that an SSD can easily break new ground with respect to capacity that conventional HDDs struggle to reach,....struggle and fail, helium filled of no.

We won't see most people switching to SSDs until a 1TB is under $100.

And we won't see a large shift to SSDs until SSDs are basically as cheap as HDDs so the major computer manufacturers like Dell and HP start putting SSDs in their large volume inexpensive products.

Until that happens, SSDs will still be mostly an enthusiast product, not mainstream.

OK some of us were so optimistic and some were too harsh. Truth is somewhere between. When the SSD came some of us were cheering for the new technology and some were causes, then when dust settles and we started seeing reliability and price issues and some became sarcastic. If we take an objective look we see that the technology is moving away from mechanical part except for water blocks which we can't get enough of. So this technology needs sometime to mature and get more reliable and cost less. I think we will see single chip and single DIE SSDs in the future and that may help to solve part of cost problem and maybe we will see self activating chips that can reactivate the dead spots and solve reliability issues. Whether SSD will replace HHD or coexist that is something we will know in the next five years.

 

[AsRock]

Actually, they do. Crucial is owned by Micron, who makes their RAM and SSD's.

Was not aware that Crucial was owned by Micron ^^, fuckity fck must of missed that one and thanks for the update.

Well that's all good i have always had a soft spot for Micron, they done some of the best DDR ram chips.

 

[Patriot]

Was not aware that Crucial was owned by Micron ^^, fuckity fck must of missed that one and thanks for the update.

Well that's all good i have always had a soft spot for Micron, they done some of the best DDR ram chips.

Noooo nonono

Crucial is the consumer front of micron.
Micron and crucial makes shitty ass firmware...
The warm spot in your heart is entirely undeserved.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Micron and crucial makes shitty ass firmware...

Wow, I was not aware of that. I should quickly replace my 4 different M500 SSD's that have been operating flawlessly for well over a year. And while I'm at it, my nearly 3 year old M4 must be about to implode....better replace that too.

 

[Patriot]

Wow, I was not aware of that. I should quickly replace my 4 different M500 SSD's that have been operating flawlessly for well over a year. And while I'm at it, my nearly 3 year old M4 must be about to implode....better replace that too.

Only if you do real work. Those handle read intensive workloads fine, and burst writes.
Micron tries to sell them for enterprise workloads and they are shit for them.

The gc cycle for your m500 there... checks for idle over a 3 minute span by looking at disk usage at 3 points... if it is idle at those 3 points it has to have been idle for the entire time in-between... and kicks off gc that drops you to <100 iops.
So yes, shitty ass firmware.

The hardware is fine, plextor proves that... Micron just needs to buy them to replace their stock fw teams.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Like I said, no abnormal wear, and no out of spec speeds, nor abnormal specs. Your sky is falling prediction might hold weight if their was widespread news about this like with the Samsung debacle, or the long sandforce saga. I'm sorry, but one guy in the back of the auditorium yelling out "you suck" at crucial is just not credible.

I have seen no personal evidence in my own use or heard of any problems from people I have equipped with Crucials.

 

[Patriot]

Like I said, no abnormal wear, and no out of spec speeds, nor abnormal specs. Your sky is falling prediction might hold weight if their was widespread news about this like with the Samsung debacle, or the long sandforce saga. I'm sorry, but one guy in the back of the auditorium yelling out "you suck" at crucial is just not credible.

I have seen no personal evidence in my own use or heard of any problems from people I have equipped with Crucials.

Lol... without traces you don't know that... You are simply John Snow... being blind to something doesn't change its existence.

And I told you your workload is not hard enough to expose it.
I didn't tell you to get rid of them... I told you they write shitty fw that is not suitable for anything other than a read workload with burst writes.... which consequently is all consumer drives are expected of most of the time.

If you thrash them... they will get fucky... just go look at the anandtech benches if you want public knowledge... but you seem to deal in anecdote not facts.

I will not use them personally because of working with then b2b... I do not, not recommend them for consumer workloads... they are cheap adequate READ drives, that simply cannot handle being thrashed and are not backed by the company that sells them.

I never said the sky is falling... I just know more about the inner workings of your own drives than you do.