A solid state drive to store all human knowledge…

A new solid state drive from Samsung offer a whopping 16TB of data storage and is the biggest capacity drive to date. Samsung are targeting data centres and enterprise deployments. Some say that the new solid state drive can store all human knowledge from creation to 1500AD!

The drive uses a SAS or Serial Attached SCSI interface, combining 512 NAND flash chips in a 2.5-inch enclosure. By stacking NAND cell arrays in 48 layers per die and then stacking these 16 layers deep, a total capacity of 512GB is achieved. With 32 more stacks on the PCB, a total capacity of 16Tb is reached. Sequential read/write speeds in excess of 1200MB/sec and 16Gb DRAM acting as the cache is far more than we’ve seen to date. The advantages of moving silicon to three dimensions are clear to see.

Samsung haven’t priced the solid state drive yet, but you can bet that it will be out of the price range of the average user! Similarly don’t expect these drives to be mainstream in the near future. Data densities like these are not going to hit the consumer market for some time. As for data recovery, we are going to have to start developing new tools to cope with these data densities.