At 2.5 inches long, the Samsung 16TB solid-state drive is a little package with a lot of storage, the most in the world, to be exact.
The electronics titan broke the news this past week at the Flash Memory Summit in California. The hard drive is called the PM 1633a and is intended for the enterprise market. According to an article by Ars Technica, Samsung was able to cram so much space in the drive through the use of the company’s new 256Gbit NAND flash die, which is twice as big as any die pushed out to market over the past year.
What is most fascinating about the new 16TB drive is the way in which Samsung as able to cram that much space into a 2.5-inch drive.
A series of complex folds are incorporated into a network of individual dies that are then organized in a way that involves “die or package stacking.”
We’re not entirely sure how you squeeze that many dies into a standard 2.5-inch SSD case, but presumably there’s some die or package stacking involved.
Part of Samsung’s presentation at the conference included the unveiling of a server “with 48 of these new SSD’s,” a sight to see considering the computing power of the server is about 200 times more powerful than a consumer-grade solid-state drive.
PC World was also in awe over the news about Samsung’s mega-drive, pointing out that the drive is so small there’s a good chance it “could find its way into laptops and desktop PC’s.”
Don’t get too excited, though — Samsung hasn’t announced a release date for the drive and it “will be a while” before this technology comes to the home consumer.
It’ll be a while before you can even think about putting this kind of solid state storage in your PC.
Samsung currently offers a 2TB solid-state drive for about $750.
