Samsung begins mass producing world’s largest capacity SSD

Samsung’s PM1643 drive uses Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology to interconnect 8GB DDR4 chips.

Samsung has started mass producing the PM1643 solid state drive (SSD) with 30.72 terabyte (TB) storage space, touted as the world’s largest capacity Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSD. Samsung’s PM1643 SSD is the successor to 15.36TB series, introduced by the company in March 2016. The PM1643 is said to deliver twice the capacity and performance of the company’s previous-generation SAS SSD. Samsung plans to introduce 15.36TB, 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB and 800GB versions as well, which could come later this year.

Samsung combined 32 of the new 1TB NAND flash packages to create the PM1643. Further, each 1TB NAND flash package comprises of 16 stacked layers of 512Gb V-NAND chips. The 2.5-inch 1TB packages will let users store approximately 5,700 5-gigabyte (GB) full HD movie files. Samsung PM1643 drive offers read and write speeds of up to 400,000 IOPS and 50,000 IOPS respectively. Users can expect sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,100MB/s and 1,700 MB/s respectively. Samsung’s PM1643 drive is based on a 12Gb/s SAS interface.

“With our launch of the 30.72TB SSD, we are once again shattering the enterprise storage capacity barrier, and in the process, opening up new horizons for ultra-high capacity storage systems worldwide,” said Jaesoo Han, executive vice president, Memory Sales & Marketing Team at Samsung Electronics in a press statement. “Samsung will continue to move aggressively in meeting the shifting demand toward SSDs over 10TB and at the same time, accelerating adoption of our trail-blazing storage solutions in a new age of enterprise systems,” Han added.

Samsung’s PM1643 drive uses Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology to interconnect 8GB DDR4 chips. This creates 10 4GB TSV DRAM packages, totaling 40GB of DRAM. It should be noted that this is the first time that Samsung used TSV-applied DRAM in an SSD.

Coming to the software front, the PM1643 supports metadata protection. It also includes data retention and recovery from sudden power failures, and an error correction code (ECC) algorithm. “Furthermore, the SSD provides a robust endurance level of one full drive write per day (DWPD), which translates into writing 30.72TB of data every day over the five-year warranty period without failure. The PM1643 also offers a mean time between failures (MTBF) of two million hours,” the press statement reads.

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