Samsung has built at 16-terabyte flash hard drive, the largest in the world.
Besides announcing bigger products in the Galaxy Note 5 and the Galaxy S6 Edge Plus, the company also revealed their new hard drive at the Flash Memory Summit this past week, according to TechTimes.
Normally. Flash memory is faster than its disc-spinning counterpart but doesn’t give the highest amounts of storage. But this new drive by Samsung offers much more than even the largest conventional drives by Seagate or Western Digital that are known to max out at about 10 TB.
The secret to Samsung’s promised hard drive capacity is its new 256-GB NANA flash die that is two times an already impressive 128 GB NAND die that were entered into commercial use just last year. Samsung was able to fit 48 layers of 3-bits-per-cell 3D vertical NAND (V-NAND) into one die, previously 36 layers last year and 24 the year before that.
Amazingly, unlike traditional flash chips that are arranged in a 2-dimentional way, Samsung was able to bring together its latest die technology with a 3D stacking technique which is what allowed it to fit more storage into the exact same amount of space.
To introduce the new technology, Samsung exhibited a server with 48 of the new hard drives at the summit in California. They were able to demonstrate that it could handle up to 2 million input/output operations every second which is about 90,000 more than the average consumer solid-state drive can handle.
The tech is all able to fit right on a 2.5-inch hard drive enclosure. The only “setback” is that the enclosure is a little bit thicker than hard drive modules found in laptop computers.
Although the technology was presented successfully, Samsung has not released information as to how much the 16 TB PM1633a hard drives will cost. But they did hint that the drive would be aimed at the enterprise level rather than at the consumer. From that, some estimate the cost would be around $5,000 as Samsung’s current 2.5-TB hard drive already costs $1,000.
It is also surmised that now since the technology has presented itself, it is only a matter of time before it ends up in the hands of consumers.
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