Samsung Enterprise 2.5-Inch SSD With Huge 15TB Shipping

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. is shipping the industry’s largest SSD – the PM1633a, a 15.36TB drive.

First revealed at the 2015 Flash Memory Summit in August, the 15.36TB SSD is based on a 12Gb SAS interface, for use in enterprise storage systems.

Because the PM1633a comes in a 2.5-inch form factor, enterprise storage managers can fit twice as many of the drives in a standard 19-inch, 2U rack, compared to an equivalent 3.5-inch storage drive.

“To satisfy an increasing market need for ultra-high-capacity SAS SSDs from leading enterprise storage system manufacturers, we are directing our best efforts toward meeting our customers’ SSD requests,” said Jung-bae Lee, SVP, memory product planning and application engineering team, Samsung Electronics. “We will continue to lead the industry with next-generation SSDs, using our advanced 3D V-NAND memory technology, in order to accelerate the growth of the premium memory market while delivering greater performance and efficiency to our customers.”

The 15.36TB of storage on a single SSD is enabled by combining 512 of Samsung’s 256Gb V-NAND memory chips. The 256Gb dies are stacked in 16 layers to form a single 512GB package, with a total of 32 NAND flash packages in the 15.36TB drive. Utilizing Samsung’s 3rd generation, 256Gb V-NAND technology which stacks cell-arrays in 48 layers, the PM1633a line-up provides performance and reliability upgrades from its predecessor, the PM1633, which used Samsung’s 2nd generation, 32-layer, 128Gb V-NAND memory.

The PM1633a SSD provides the opportunity for improvements in the efficiency of IT system investments through its high storage capacity and performance. These performance gains stem from Samsung’s latest V-NAND flash technology, as well as the company’s proprietary controller and firmware technology.

The PM1633a SSD sports random read and write speeds of up to 200,000 and 32,000IO/s respectively, and delivers sequential read and write speeds of up to 1,200MB/s. The random read IO/s performance is approximately 1,000 times that of SAS-type HDDs, while the sequential read and write speeds are over twice those of a typical SATA SSD. Inside the new SSD lie Samsung’s advanced controller units that support the 12Gb SAS interface, along with a total of 16GB of DRAM. Samsung also uses specially designed firmware that can access large amounts of high-density NAND flash concurrently.

The 15.36TB PM1633a drive supports 1 DWPD (drive writes per day), which means 15.36TB of data can be written every day on this single drive without failure, a level of reliability that will improve cost of ownership for enterprise storage systems. This drive can write from two to ten times as much data as typical SATA SSDs based on planar MLC and TLC NAND flash technologies.

Further, the drive boasts a dependable metadata protection mechanism in addition to featuring a data protection and restoration software tool in case of a momentary blackout, which make enterprise systems more stable and manageable.

Starting with the 15.36TB density, Samsung will provide a range of capacity options in its PM1633a SSD line-up – 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB and 480GB later this year.

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2012.01.11 | Press Release