Billed as the world's largest capacity Serial Attached SCSI SSD, the PM1643 has now entered mass production. Samsung has managed to cram 30.72 TB of storage space into a 2.5-inch drive format unit, which it hopes will help accelerate the move from hard drives to solid state storage in enterprise systems.
The PM1643 makes use of 32 of Samsung's 1 TB NAND flash packages, each one rocking 16 stacked layers of the latest 64-layer, 3-bit 512 Gb V-NAND chips. Based on a 12 Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI interface, the 30.72 TB drive is reported capable of random read speeds of up to 400,000 IOPS, and 50,000 IOPS write. Sequential read performance clocks in at up to 2,100 MB/s, while write speeds are given as 1,700 MB/s. That's fast. Really fast.
And the 2.5-inch format unit is said to offer enough room for storing around 5,700 Full HD movies (each one 5 GB in size). That's roomy, too.
A controller architecture redesign sees nine controllers present in previous incarnations being integrated into a single package, freeing up space within the drive for more storage, while a high performance interconnect method called Through Silicon Via hooks up DDR4 chips in 10 DRAM packages to make a total of 40 GB of onboard DRAM.
As well as making improvement to system software to protect data in the event of power loss and to enhance data storage reliability, Samsung also promises that the drive should be robust enough to write up to 30.72 TB of data every day for the full 5 years of the warranty period, and claims a mean time between failure figure of 2 million hours.
Though the new drive is aimed squarely at enterprise users, the storage capacity and performance improvements are likely to trickle down to consumers in the near future.
Source: Samsung
