Samsung has announced its brand-new 16TB solid-state drive (SSD) at the recently held 2015 Flash Memory Summit. This massive increase in density is a 48-layer 3D design with a 256Gb TLC.
As one of the major SSD manufacturers, Samsung has introduced that each of its new 3D NAND chips holds up to 256Gb, which means 32 chips per terabyte and 512 chips to provide 16TB of data. This latest innovation is used for a wide-range of consumer electronics as well as enterprise applications.
As this South Korean multinational conglomerate company unveils its newest contribution to the flash industry, the mass production is scheduled to start in 2016. According to AnandTech, Samsung's new 256Gb TLC will have about 30% lower power consumption than an equivalent capacity of their current 128GB TLC. Moreover, a switch to a dual-plane organization ensures that one 256Gb die will perform at least as well as a pair of the current 128GB dies.
Aside from 16TB SSD, Samsung has also shared some information about its three upcoming drives that use TLC, namely PM1633 Enterprise SAS, PM1633a, and PM953. Firstly, the PM1633 Enterprise SAS drive is intended for read-heavy workloads. Secondly, the follow-on PM1633a model will use the new 48-layer TLC to reach 15.36TB capacity. And lastly, the PM953 is an enterprise NVMe drive in M.2 or 2.5" form factors as well as the counterpart to the MLC-based SM951. All these three drives are intended for OEMs. In addition, the new 3D NAND will be appearing in at least one of Samsung's existing drives, the 850 EVO. It will apparently be getting an update to use the new 48-layer TLC.
Chip density means fewer chips are needed to make the smallest capacity SSD models which directly reduce the potential performance of the drive. However, there is still the potential for future half-a-terabyte SSDs to take the best performance spots, like that of with 240 to 256Gb chips.
Nonetheless, Samsung's flash NAND won't get left behind. All Samsung users and spectators must watch out for this new 16TB SSD in the market soon.
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