Samsung now shipping world's highest-capacity drive

Samsung is now shipping its 15.36TB solid state drive, which is the largest SSD available. Samsung has not posted any pricing on its site at the time of writing. It is likely that companies who want such a drive will have to contact Samsung directly. The SSD was first announced last August, but it was not available at the time.

The drive uses the 2.5in form factor that is usually used in laptops, opposed to the 3.5in standard adopted by desktops and servers. Samsung points out that this means twice as many of the drives can fit in a 19in 2U rack. This makes sense for companies who need to save on physical space, although the drive likely comes at a steep price. To get this massive storage capacity, the SSD uses 32 NAND flash packages of 512GB each, which are themselves 16 stacked layers of 512 256Gb V-NAND memory chips. Samsung also says its new drive is highly reliable, with one drive write per day. This allows for 15.36TB of data to be written to the drive every day without failure, according to the company.

Samsung is making a big bet on SSDs, which are currently much more expensive than HDDs. The lack of moving parts means the drives are more reliable. With a high-capacity drive potentially being able to save a lot of physical space, some companies might be able to see this as a means of saving money in the long run, although without knowing the price and how long the drives really last, that is difficult to surmise. Still, high-capacity SSDs are where the market appears to be headed. Samsung is just a little early to the party. Some China companies are now getting into SSDs. Xi'an Morebeck, for instance, offers a 240GB SSD. It is not as impressive as 15TB, of course, but the device is in line with normal consumer SSDs.

See a comparison table of selected solid state disk suppliers on GlobalSources.com