These dies are double the capacity of the 128Gbit units that were commercialised only last year, containing 48 layers of 3D V-NAND flash memory each.
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NAND flash technology is advancing at a rapid clip, and that’s resulting in solid state drives (SSDs) that are faster, more capacious and cheaper (per GB).
Both Samsung and Toshiba (via SanDisk) are expecting to deliver new SSDs based on these 256Gb chips in 2016, and no doubt these will be large capacity TLC models.
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The Samsung PM1633a is described as a next-generation SAS (serial attached SCSI) enterprise SSD, and is said to have a capacity of 15.36TB, easily beating the largest rotating disks now on the market which max out at 8TB or 10TB. If you’re hoping to see this kind of capacity come to consumer drives in the near future, well, don’t get your hopes up.
Samsung managed to fit so much memory on the hard drive by stacking lots of flash cells on top of each other, which makes the drive slightly taller than others.
Pinning high hopes on the new memory chip, he added, “We will expand our premium-level business in the enterprise and data center market segments, as well as in the consumer market, while continuing to strengthen our strategic SSD focus”. Yes sir, the world of hard drives will be on the receiving end of a massive 16TB worth of storage space, thanks to the South Korean conglomerate.
Samsung plans to produce 3rd generation V-NAND until the end of this year to speed up the adoption of terabyte-level SSDs. This is up from 24 layers in 2013, and then 36 layers in 2014.
There’s no hard figure on the price of the new drive yet, but it’s speculated it will debut at a figure around $8,000.
Samsung Electronics’ 48-layer 256Gb vertical NAND flash memory.
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“We are providing high-end capabilities and capacities for all of our latest SSDs, something we believe will elicit a high degree of interest from OEMs and computer enthusiasts throughout the world“, said Jim Elliott, corporate vice president, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.
