Samsung begins mass production of 30 TB PM1643 enterprise SSD

Samsung Electronics has just begun mass producing the PM1643 SSD, a drive that targets next-gen enterprise applications. Advertised as "the industry’s largest capacity Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drive (SSD)," the PM1643 uses 64-layer, 3-bit 512 Gb chips, scoring two times higher in both performance and capacity when compared to the 15.36 TB SSD for enterprise that Samsung introduced back in March 2016.

The Samsung PM1643 is based on a 12 Gb/s SAS interface and provides the following maximum speeds:

• Random read: 400,000 IOPS
• Random write: 50,000 IOPS
• Sequential read: 2,100 MB/s
• Sequential write: 1,700 MB/s

The figures above are four times (random read) and three times (sequential read) higher than those achieved by a 2.5-inch Samsung SSD 850 EVO.

Production of the first batches has begun last month, but the 30.72 TB model will be joined by others later this ear. The official press release mentions the following capacities: 15.36 TB, 7.68 TB, 3.84 TB, 1.92 TB, 960 GB, and 800 GB. There is no information about the pricing, but given the specs of this new drive, no home users will be able to afford it anytime soon.

Jaesoo Han, executive vice president, Memory Sales & Marketing Team at Samsung Electronics, says that "Samsung will continue to move aggressively in meeting the shifting demand toward SSDs over 10TB and at the same time, accelerating adoption of our trail-blazing storage solutions in a new age of enterprise systems."