The PM1643 has is termed as the world’s largest capacity Serial Attached SCSI SSD and it has now entered the mass production phase. Samsung was successful in cramming 30.72 TB of storage into a 2.5-inch drive format unit. The company is hopeful that this will accelerate the move from hard drives to solid-state storages in enterprise systems.
The PM 1643 uses Samsung’s 1 TB NAND flash packages and each package is equipped with 16 stacked layers of the latest 54-layer, 3-bit 512 GB V-NAND chips. The new SSD is based on a 12 Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI interface and according to some reports, has random read speeds of up to 400,000 IOPS, and 50,000 IOPS write. Sequential read performance clocks in at up to 2,100 MB/s, while write speeds are given as 1,700 MB/s.
To give you a better idea of the amount of space in the SSD, let’s compare it with the number of movies stored. You can store 5,700 Full HD movies on the drive with each movie 5 GBs in size. The controller architecture has been redesigned and like the previous design, which had nine controllers, has been modified into a single package allowing space to free up within the drive for more storage.
There have been further improvements in the system software as well. These improvements include better protection of data in case of power loss to enhance storage reliability. Samsung has promised that the SSD will be robust enough to write up to 30.72 TB of data every day for 5 years and provides a warranty for it. The company claimed that the average failure time is 2 million hours.
The SSD is currently aimed at enterprises but these attractive features will most definitely capture the attention of other enthusiasts who will be looking to get their hands on it as well.