Samsung wowed the technology market when it unveiled the PM1633a, an SSD that offers a record-setting 16 TB worth of storage last year. This time around, the South Korean company has started to ship the drives to customers — to those who can afford it, at least.
Touted as the "largest in the industry," it's quite impressive how that massive amount of storage is crammed into a 2.5-inch package, and because of that size, it'll make things easy for users who want to take advantage of multiple drives.
Using 256 Gb V-NAND memory chips in 48 layers, Samsung was able to accomplish this remarkable feature. Other products in the PM1633a SSD lineup include drives that support 480 GB up to 8 TB, aside from the 16 TB one.
"We will continue to lead the industry with next-generation SSDs, using our advanced 3D V-NAND memory technology, in order to accelerate the growth of the premium memory market while delivering greater performance and efficiency to our customers," Jung-bae Lee, senior VP of the Memory Product Planning and Application Engineering group at Samsung, says.
Having that much capacity is great, but it won't come cheap. Even though Samsung hasn't revealed the price yet, it's safe to assume that it'll be about $5,000 or more.
Rationally speaking, regular people will hardly find a use for that much space, not to mention that only a couple of them are likely going to be willing to buy one. That's fine and all, as it's hard to imagine that the product is targeted at customers other than enterprises or anything else along those lines.
Producing a device — from drives to SD cards — with the hugest capacity is a never-ending contest among companies in the storage game, and it seems that Samsung is currently at the top of the proverbial food chain with the 16 TB PM1633a SSD.
Although this won't be a standard on prebuilt desktops or laptops any time soon, it's still a good indication of where the technology is headed to in the foreseeable future.
