Samsung begins shipping monster 15TB SSD for enterprise storage

Samsung has begun shipping the industry's largest solid state drive – a 15TB offering designed for enterprise storage systems.

The 15.36TB SSD was announced at last year's Flash Memory Summit and comes in a 2.5-inch form factor, enabling twice as many drives to be fitted into a standard 19-inch 2U rack compared to an equivalent 3.5-inch drive.

The PM1633a is based on a 12Gb/s serial attached Scsi interface.

Jung-bae Lee, Samsung Electronics senior vice president for memory product planning and application engineering team, says the SSD is designed to address increasing market demand for ultra-high capacity SAS SSDs.

"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," Lee says.

Samsung says it can pack the 15.36TB storage into a 2.5-inch package by combining 512 of its 256Gb V-NAND memory chips, stacked in 16 layers to form a single 512GB package, with a total of 32 NAND flash packages in the drive.

"Utilising Samsung's third 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 second generation, 32-layer, 128Gb V-NAND memory," Samsung says.

The company says the new offering '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," Samsung says.

The drive 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.

Samsung says the random read IOPS performance is about 1000 times that of SAS-type hard disks, while the sequential read and write speeds are over twice those of a typical SATA SSD.

The drive supports one DWPD (drive writes per day), enabling 15.36TB of data to be written every day on the single drive, without failure, Samsung says, adding that provides a level of reliability that 'will improve cost of ownership for enterprise storage systems'.

Samsung will provide a range of capacity options in the line up, including 7.68TB, 3.84TB and 480GB later this year.