Watch out, Tokyo! Samsung readies a 15 terabyte SSD

No sign of Mothra at the Flash Memory Summit, however

Samsung has revealed what can only be described as the Godzilla of flash drives, a 15TB SSD, at the Flash Memory Summit.

Samsung opened the kimono on the new drive at its keynote session Memory Technology Advances Shape a New Era in Flash Innovation on 11 August.

As reported by Golem.de the PM1633a uses Sammy's third generation 48-layer V-NAND 256Gbit chips.

Samsung goes over the top and says it's a 16TB SSD; but we're a tad pedantic detail-wise, and it's actually 15.36TB.

At that capacity it holds four times more data than the 3.84TB PM863 SSD used by Dell which is built from the same chips. This suggests that, somehow, the PM1633a packs in four PM863 boards inside its casing.

The 2.5-inch SSD has a 15.36TB capacity, and a 2U box of these guys is said by Samsung to hold 768TB, calculated from 48 x 16TB; Sammy over egging its pudding again. The real number is 48 x 15.36TB, or 737.28TB

Okay, let's play with the numbers and say a 40U rack could hold 20 of these ... only 14.75 petabytes, extraordinary. Oh, and the 2U boxful of PM1633a would deliver two million IOPS according to Samsung. That would be 40 million from a rackfull of these JBOFs (Just a Box Of Flash).

There's no price and availability info. Don't bother searching for it on Samsung's website; it ain't there.

What is there for sure is a marker for Intel/Micron and SanDisk/Toshiba. For them to strut their stuff on Flash Avenue they have to have the tech balls to come up with 16TB SSDs of their own. ®