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Samsung is announcing that it has begun mass production of their PM1643 30.72TB SAS SSD, the industry’s largest capacity SSD for next-generation enterprise systems. Samsung’s latest breakthrough technology is created by combining 32 of Samsung’s newest 1TB NAND flash packages. Each package consists of 16 stacked layers of 512Gb V-NAND chips. The super-density 1TB packages allow for a massive amount of storage within a single 2.5” form factor drive.
Not satisfied with a mere capacity increase, Samsung has also improved levels of performance with the PM1643. Utilizing a 12Gb/s SAS interface, the PM1643 attains random read speeds of up to 400,000 IOPS, and random write speeds of up to 50,000 IOPS. Sequential read speeds are now stated as up to 2100MB/s, with sequential write speeds of up to 1700MB/s. This represents nearly 4X the random read performance, and some 3X the sequential read performance of typical 2.5” SATA SSDs.
According to Jaesoo Han, executive vice president of the Memory Sales & Marketing Team at Samsung, “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. 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.”
Samsung is utilizing several technology progressions to achieve this level of capacity and performance, including controller design, DRAM packaging and associated software/firmware. Their new highly efficient controller architecture integrates nine controllers (from their previous high-capacity SSD lineup) into a single package, allowing for a greater amount of space within the SSD for storage. The PM1643 also features Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology to interconnect 8GB DDR4 chips, which creates 10 x 4GB TSV DRAM packages, for a total of 40GB of DRAM. This is the first time that TSV-applied DRAM is being used in an SSD.
On the software/firmware side, the PM1643 supports metadata protection, data retention and recovery from sudden power interruptions, and an error correction code (ECC) algorithm that ensures high reliability and a minimum of required maintenance. Endurance is stated as one full drive write per day, allowing for writing of 30.72TB of data every day of its five-year warranty period. Mean time between failures (MTBF) is stated as 2,000,000 hours.
Samsung began manufacturing of the 30.72TB PM1643 in January, and plans to broaden the lineup offerings later this year to include 15.36TB, 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB and 800GB versions. This should help drive the growth of all-flash arrays and migration from HDDs to SSDs in the enterprise market, including industries such as government, financial services, education, healthcare, pharmaceutical, oil and gas, business services, communications services, and of course the ever-important social media platforms.