Samsung's 16TB SSD Is The World's Largest Hard Drive

If you need so much storage for your computer that a 1 or 2TB hard drive sounds paltry, you might be interested in Samsung's latest solid-state drive (SSD) announcement: the PM1633a, which offers an incredible 16TB of space, yet still features a 2.5-inch hard drive enclosure. Well, technically it only has 15.36TB, which is why Samsung is billing it as "about 16TB," but even then it's being called the world's largest capacity hard drive.

What makes the PM1633a possible is Samsung's recently announced 256 gigabit (32 gigabyte) NAND flash chips, or more specifically, 500 of them. That's how many are used, making up 48 layers, inside the enormous SSD. It's also because of this that the drive is twice as thick as standard 2.5-inch hard drives found in laptops.

Samsung hasn't revealed any availability or pricing information yet, but there's no way the PM1633a will be targeted at anyone other than enterprise customers. After all, the company's initial demonstration was with 48 of the new SSDs installed in a server, making up almost 768TB of storage.

There probably isn't a consumer on Earth who would be willing to pay the price of the drive anyway, as it's expected to be over $5,000. This is after Samsung has just released new 2.5-inch 2TB SSDs in consumer and professional variants, priced at $800 and $1,000, respectively.

SOURCE ArsTechnica