Samsung Releases 16TB SSD, Officially Making It The World's Largest Drive

I run SSDs in my desktops, because I want to enjoy the performance boost that I get from them. My computer will boot faster, programs open faster, and loading times on my games are significantly lower. Of course, I have a NAS where I use traditional spinning hard drives to store my larger bits of data. This is because the older spinning style disks have considerably more storage space than even the largest SSDs. Well, at least that used to be the case.

Last year, Samsung announced the world's highest-capacity SSD. The 16 TB drive was so big that it dwarfed even the largest spinning disk drives, which is a surprising feat. Of course, this isn't the sort of drive that you're just going to pop into your desktop or laptop, as it uses an SAS interface. Well, the company has finally released the drive into the wild.

In order to get this kind of data density, Samsung has had to combine a whopping 512 of their 256Gb V-NAND memory chips. These 256 Gb dies are then stacked in 16 layers, which creates a 512GB package. 32 of these are combined to get your 16TB of storage space. Though technically speaking, you only get 15.36TB.

You're going to see random read and write speeds of up to 200,000 and 32,000 IOPS, and sequential read/write speeds of up to 1,200MB/s. These are fantastic speeds, especially since you can imagine that those who need a drive like this will be pushing a lot of data to them.

Of course, the biggest question is how much one of these will cost. And like so many other things in the world, if you have to ask, you can't afford it. Also, Samsung hasn't provided pricing information at this time.