Samsung unleashes world’s largest SSD with 30TB of storage

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Samsung SSD
That's enough storage for 500 days of HD video.
Photo: Samsung

Samsung is again responsible for the world’s largest solid-state drive.

Almost years after the South Korean company released its record-breaking 15.36TB drive, it has unleashed a 30.72TB model. It is the most storage ever squeezed into a 2.5-inch form factor, enough to hold 5,700 high-definition movies.

Swapping a traditional spinning hard disk for an SSD is one of the quickest and easiest ways (unless you own a Mac you can’t get into) to boost system speed. Everything loads faster from flash storage. But beefy SSD drives have been slow to reach the market.

Samsung’s 30TB SSD is world’s largest

Samsung wants to change that. Its new PM1643 drive consists of 32 sticks of 1TB flash storage, each of which contains 16 layers of 512GB NAND chips, for a total of 30.72TB of storage. It’s all packed into a compact, 2.5-inch form factor.

The drive uses Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) technology to offer read speeds of up to 2,100MB/s and read write speeds of up to 1,700MB/s. That’s roughly three times as fast as the SATA SSD drives normally found in today’s consumer machines.

But the PM1643 isn’t aimed at consumers. Instead, it is designed for enterprise customers with big budgets. Samsung hasn’t confirmed how much the drive will cost yet, but big SSDs aren’t cheap. This baby will surely demand thousands of dollars.

Samsung will offer more affordable SAS SSDs, however. 16.36TB, 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB, and 800GB options are on the way. All come with a five-year warranty that shows Samsung has confidence in the drive’s reliability.

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