Samsung unveils its third generation 3D V-NAND hard drive at 16 TB. This 2.5-inch SSD is world's largest hard drive up to date. Samsung used 48 TLC layers and 256 Gbit per die in order to manufacture the 16TB hard drive.
The new hard drive from Samsung has been announced at the Flash Memory Summit in California. It is surprising that Samsung has chosen to use NAND flash chips to build the large capacity hard drive rather than spinning platters. The world's largest hard drive is named PM1633a and it caters to the enterprise market. The storage device manages to host almost 16 terabytes into just a regular 2.5-inch SSD package. Compared with Samsung new high-capacity hard drive, the largest conventional hard drives currently made by Western Digital and Seagate have storage capacities between at 8 and 10TB.
The technology behind Samsung's 16TB SSD is the new 256Gbit (32GB) NAND flash die. This represents twice the capacity of 128Gbit NAND dies like that of the last year. In order to reach such an exceptional density, Samsung has managed to fit into a single die 48 layers of 3-bits-per-cell (TLC) 3D V-NAND info. This is up from 36 layers last year and a double from 24 layers in 2013.
Like most computer chips, historically NAND flash has been planar, meaning that the functional structures on the chip are laid down on a single two-dimensional plane. Samsung, as well as more recently Intel and Toshiba, has introduced 3D NAND technology in a similar way as to how logic chips are moving towards 3D transistors (FinFETs).
In 3D NAND chips, everything is turned on its side. Dozens of layers of memory cells can fit in a 3D NAND memory chip instead of having just one layer of memory cells on a single plane. In Samsung's V-NAND, the "V" refers to the vertical nature of these cells. The 3D NAND technology is very complex, but it is worthwhile due to the massive potential density increase.
The 16-terabyte drive uses between 480 and 500 of Samsung's new 256 Gbit dies into a standard 2.5-inch SSD case. As reported by Golem.de, Samsung showed at the Flash Memory Summit a server with 48 of these new SSDs. The performance of the server was rated at 2,000,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) and the total storage capacity installed was of 768 terabytes. Compared to this, your PC's consumer-grade SSD is probably capable of only 10,000-90,000 IOPS.
