Imagine how many games from your Steam library you could install if you had a 30TB solid state drive. For many gamers, that's enough capacity to store all of them, negating the need to uninstall less frequently played games to make room for newer ones, or having to shuttle certain games to a secondary storage device (usually a mechanical hard drive). Such a scenario might not be all that far off, as Samsung is now mass producing 30.72TB SSD.
Having that much storage space on a single 2.5-inch SSD seems bananas by today's standards, but who knows in a year or three. After all, in the early days of the SSD, having a 128GB SSD was viewed as a luxury, compared to 64GB, 32GB, and even smaller SSDs. It's also substantially larger than the current largest single hard drives, which 'only' hold 12TB each.
Samsung's new PM1643 leverages 64-layer, 512 gigabit (Gb) V-NAND TLC flash memory chips. Specifically, the 30.72TB SSD combines 32 of Samsung's new 1TB NAND flash packages, each one comprised of 16 stacked layers of 512Gb V-NAND chips. This arrangement allowed Samsung to effectively double the capacity of the 15.36TB SSD that it introduced nearly two years ago.
"With our launch of the 30.72TB SSD, we are once again shattering the enterprise storage capacity barrier, and in the process, opening up new horizons for ultra-high capacity storage systems worldwide," said Jaesoo Han, executive vice president, Memory Sales & Marketing Team at Samsung Electronics. "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."
As you might imagine (and as Han alludes to), the PM1643 is an enterprise SSD, not a home consumer model. That's the way these things often go—enterprise clients get the bleeding edge stuff, and eventually it trickles into the consumer space.
Based on a 12Gb/s SAS interface, the PM1643 can hit sequential reads of up to 2,100MB/s and sequential writes of up to 1,700MBs. It is also capable of up to 400,000 IOPS of random read performance and up to 50,000 IOPS of random write performance.
To put the PM1643's capacity into perspective, Kingdom Come: Deliverance requires around 40GB of disk space. There is enough room to install the game 768 times. Even accounting for the occasional game that takes up 100GB when going all-in with DLC, there is room to install hundreds of games on this thing.
Samsung began producing the PM1643 in January and has plans of expanding the lineup later this year. Other capacities on tap include 15.36TB, 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB, and 800GB. Pricing information was not announced, though as a distant point of reference, Samsung's 4TB 860 Evo SSD goes for around $1,400.
