Samsung just announced that it has begun mass production of its massive 30.72TB PM1643, the industry’s highest capacity Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drive (SSD). The PM1643 is destined for next-gen enterprise applications as Samsung continues to accelerate the growth of all-flash storage arrays and the transition away from traditional hard disk drive technology.
Like some recently released consumer-targeted drives, the massive PM1643 leverages Samsung’s latest V-NAND technology with 64-layer, 3-bit per cell, 512-gigabit (Gb) flash memory. And Samsung is claiming the new 30.72TB drive delivers not only twice the capacity of its previous-gen 15.36TB high-capacity drive introduced in March 2016, but twice the performance too.
“With our launch of the 30.72TB SSD, we are once again shattering the enterprise storage capacity barrier, and in the process, opening up new horizons for ultra-high capacity storage systems worldwide,” said Jaesoo Han, executive vice president, Memory Sales & Marketing Team at Samsung Electronics. “Samsung will continue to move aggressively in meeting the shifting demand toward SSDs over 10TB and at the same time, accelerating adoption of our trail-blazing storage solutions in a new age of enterprise systems.”
Samsung was able to cram over 30TB of flash storage into a single 2.5” drive by using 32 of its new 1TB NAND flash packages, each comprised of 16 stacked layers of 512Gb V-NAND chips. As mentioned, performance has been increased as well. Through its 12Gb/s SAS interface, the Samsung PM1643 offers random read and write speeds of up to 400,000 IOPS and 50,000 IOPS, respectively, and sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,100MB/s and 1,700 MB/s.
The PM1643 drive also uses Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology to interconnect 8Gb DDR4 chips to creating ten, 4GB TSV DRAM packages, for a total of 40GB of DRAM in the drive. According to Samsung, the PM1643 is the first drive in which TSV-applied DRAM has been used in an SSD. The PM1643 also offers support for ECC, to ensure high reliability and minimize errors and its endurance is rated for one full drive write per day (DWPD), for five years.
