Samsung Targets Enterprise Storage With 30TB SSD

Samsung is to up the storage capabilities of data centre servers with the news that it has begun mass production of what it says is the largest capacity Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drive (SSD).

Dubbed the PM1643, the new SSD is geared towards the next generation of enterprise storage systems, thanks to its 30.72 terabyte (TB) capacity.

There is growing demand for enterprise-grade SSDs and Samsung has been a key player with its competitively priced and high-performing 3D-NAND SSDs.

Bigger, Faster

But now Samsung’s new PM1643 will utilise South Korean’s latest V-NAND technology with 64-layer, and 3-bit 512-gigabit (Gb) chips to deliver over 30TB of storage.

This is almost double that of the previous 15.36TB high-capacity lineup introduced in March 2016.

Samsung said the breakthrough was made possible as it combined 32 of the new 1TB NAND flash packages, each comprised of 16 stacked layers of 512Gb V-NAND chips.

“These super-dense 1TB packages allow for approximately 5,700 5-gigabyte (GB), full HD movie files to be stored within a mere 2.5-inch storage device,” it said.

And Samsung is claiming that its new SSD is much faster, making it ideal for data centres dealing with large amounts of information.

“Based on a 12Gb/s SAS interface, the new PM1643 drive features random read and write speeds of up to 400,000 IOPS and 50,000 IOPS, and sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,100MB/s and 1,700 MB/s, respectively,” said Samsung. “These represent approximately four times the random read performance and three times the sequential read performance of a typical 2.5-inch SATA SSD.”

“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 VP Memory Sales & Marketing Team at Samsung.

“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,” said Han.

Samsung said it had begun manufacturing initial quantities of the 30.72TB SSDs in January and plans to expand the lineup later this year with 15.36TB, 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB and 800GB versions.

Capacity Race

It should be noted that Samsung is not alone in promoting large capacity SSDs.

In August 2016 for example, storage heavyweight Seagate demonstrated a 60TB SSD, which it said at the time was the world’s largest capacity solid state flash drive.

And last year Intel announced its first product based on the new Optane memory technology, a 375GB solid-state drive (SSD) on a PCIe card aimed at applications requiring low latency and high endurance.

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