Samsung's new 16TB SSD is world's highest-capacity drive

Flash drives have been decreasing in cost and increasingly proliferating in a variety of different devices over the past few years. Nevertheless, finding an economical drive large enough for use in both personal computers and server racks is not quite ready…yet. Samsung, however, has solved the "size" part of the equation.

On August 11, Samsung had announced that they had begun mass production of its 256Gb V-NAND flash memory. The next day, the company announced some of the new products it would be offering as well. Samsung's new PM1633 drive makes use of its new V-NAND technology to take the crown as the world's largest hard drive at almost 16TB. The 48-layer, 256Gb (32GB), vertical NAND flash chip is also the world's fastest drive, with random read speed clocking in at 1 million IOPS.

The initial run of the flash drives, which include 480, 960, 1920 and 3,840GB models, is squarely aimed at the enterprise storage market. The company also unveiled a 2U box with more than 700TB of capacity, translating to about 15 petabytes of memory per rack.

While SanDisk and Toshiba have partnered to build their own 3D NAND memory products based on BiCS technology, for now it appears as though Samsung has at least a 6-month advantage in terms of technology maturity over its rivals.