It seems people will use SSDs for storage after all

Aug 13, 2015 13:32 GMT  ·  By

In a furious and concentrated push toward stacked V3 V-NAND flash memories, Samsung finally beats the HDD size supremacy by announcing the PM1633a, the world's largest hard drive in existence.

Introduced at the Flash Memory Summit in California, Samsung’s newly unveiled product seems to be the world's largest hard drive, and more than that, it’s the world's first SSD that exceeds any HDDs available today when it comes to memory size. Until now, the largest conventional hard drives in the world belonged to Seagate and Western Digital, with 8 and 10TB, respectively.

To understand the latest powerful move from Samsung, one needs to read the signs that arrived from the company since it developed its first 48-die stacked V-NAND memory flash chips, which are much cheaper to manufacture while being vertically laid out.

They are called 3D NAND because the cells are positioned vertically (hence V-NAND) instead of being laid out in a "field" of cell strings and their new structure can now hold twice the total possible amount of cells, as it is basically a "field" folded in two carrying dies on both sides.

HDDs are a thing of the past

In addition to this ingenious architectural move, another secret for reaching such high capacities was the introduction of the 256Gbit (32GB) NAND flash die, thus doubling the previous 128Gbit NANDs that became mainstream among chip manufacturers. As mentioned before, all this progress was possible because Samsung managed to put 48 layers of 3-bits-per-cell (TLC) 3D V-NAND in one single die.

The 16TB drive, which in fact holds 15.36TB, uses around 480 and 500 256Gbit dies. Although the fact that Samsung managed to cram so many dies on a 2.5-inch form factor might puzzle people, it's clear that some form of stacking is involved, while the actual size of the SSD is exactly the one of an HDD. At least it's obvious that Samsung, with Toshiba's backing, is aiming squarely at the American Seagate and WD HDD alliance.

Pushed ahead by the unstoppable march of Moore's Law , it was only a matter of time until SSDs eventually defeated HDDs. The only thing that prevented them from overtaking HDDs was Moore's law and production costs. Although still pretty high at the moment, prices are expected to drop dramatically, since the new V-NANDs are cheaper to manufacture than the older 2D NANDs.

The guys at Golem.de say that the PM1633a SSD will soon arrive to customers, but no prices are yet in sight from the South Korean manufacturer.

PM1633a is a 16TB SSD (2 Images)

PM1633a - the inevitable happens
Vertically stacked NANDs is what led to the 16TB SSD monster
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