“At the Flash Memory Summit in California, Samsung has unveiled what appears to be the world’s largest hard drive — and somewhat surprisingly, it uses NAND flash chips rather than spinning platters,” Sebastian Anthony reports for Ars Technica.
“The rather boringly named PM1633a, which is being targeted at the enterprise market, manages to cram almost 16 terabytes into a 2.5-inch SSD package,” Anthony reports. “By comparison, the largest conventional hard drives made by Seagate and Western Digital currently max out at 8 or 10TB.”
“At the Flash Memory Summit, as reported by Golem.de, Samsung showed off a server with 48 of these new SSDs, with a total storage capacity of 768 terabytes and performance rated at 2,000,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second),” Anthony reports. “By comparison, the consumer-grade SSD that you have in your PC is probably capable of around 10,000-90,000 IOPS, depending on the workload.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Storage advances are coming in leaps and bounds!
This is the kind of thing Samsung should innovate at and concentrate on, not blatantly copying mobile devices from Apple that fewer and fewer want to buy.
Better off thinking of “Samsung” as many separate entities that are part of a mega-conglomerate… (like Apple does) To Apple, there’s a part of Samsung that makes components and a different part that makes consumer products. One is a supplier, the other is a competitor.
OK, what’s the catch?
Price maybe?
Rumored prices ($5,000) don’t seem to be the catch, more so for newer MacBook owners, there are no longer drive bays for this. And that’s why I’m still rocking a non-Retina MBP with du drive bays.
I wouldn’t want to spend $5,000 on a Solid State Drive, but that’s an incredible capacity. It would be pretty neat to have a MacBook Pro with a 16 terabyte Solid State Drive, if it weren’t for the fact that I don’t have a use for that much space. I really only need 2 terabytes at most.
I’m also using a non-Retina MacBook Pro. The dual drive bays really are great for expansion. And it’ll be even better once Apple releases OS X 10.11 El Capitan because it’ll bring back TRIM support for third party Solid State Drives. I tried a Solid State Drive months ago, but it wasn’t as fast as it should have been. TRIM support should help.
What’s the cache?
amazing.
What’s even more amazing to me is that 256GB now easily fits in a tiny wafer-like SDXC card, and they (even quality-brand cards) can be found on sale for under $100 on Amazon.
NOTE: If your Mac has a high-speed SD card slot, you can boot from a (sufficiently large) SDXC card by formatting it for Mac and installing OS X on it normally (like any “disk”).
Cool, I never thought of that. But, what’s the purpose of booting from an SDXC card? Can someone please explain? thank you.
I use it for two things. (1) To have a place to run testing, like for OS X beta releases, that is separate for my day-to-day system on the internal drive that I don’t want to risk. I use a 64GB card for that… And, (2) on a separate card, an “emergency boot” disk with a standard installation of the most current system, plus my disk maintenance and recovery tools (such as TechTool Pro and Carbon Copy Cloner). Even for just using Disk Utility, I boot from it occasionally and run “Repair Disk” on my primary startup disk to check for data corruption (you can’t do that to the disk that is currently the startup disk). These days, you could start up in Recovery HD mode (for running Disk Utility), but then I would not have access to my third-party utilities or be able to run Safari to look up things.
The system runs surprisingly fast from an SDXC card in the high-speed SD card slot. Not as fast as a “real” internal SSD; about the same feel as a typical stock internal hard drive. It’s not noticeably slow like when starting up from a system installed on a USB drive, especially typical “thumb” drives (most of them are designed to be low cost and not particularly fast).
According to previous MDN entry, does this SSD loses its content after not being powered up for a long time. 16TB sounds like a lot to lose.
For a minute I thought you were going to write “Does this SSD lose it’s flavor on the bedpost overnight?” A reference only the older set might understand. Strangely though it sort of works too. 🙂
Willy Wonka! I recognized the reference right off the bat, and I’m not that old.
Sorry but it predates Willy Wonka by many years.
Indeed. I was thinking the 1959 version was the original, but that song actually was a cover of a 1924 song, “Does The Spearmint Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?” Couldn’t figure out why my parents said Spearmint instead of Chewing Gum until I looked it up.
Developed for the NSA and Five Eyes. I hear they bought 100 million of them.
I’m hoping this portends much cheaper SSD drives going forward.
I’d be happy with a reasonably priced 1TB to 3 TB SSD in my iMac. If they can make them that bit it shouldn’t be long before we can dump spinning disks.
Blows my mind how far things have come. My first Mac had 2GB hard drive and I thought that was huge.