[CM] How about a 16TB solid state drive?

[RS Wood]

From the «I don't care how many LoCs it holds» department:
Title: World's Largest Capacity Storage Drive Announced: It's a 15.36 Terabyte SSD
Author: CoolHand
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 19:14:00 -0400
Link: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/08/18/1549234&from=rss

martyb[1] writes:

We have previously run stories about 2 TB[2], 4 TB[3], and 6 TB[4] Solid State
Drives (SSDs) and their seemingly inevitable but gradual increase in capacity
over time. Samsung just announced a HUGE increase in drive capacity,
leap-frogging all other storage devices out there — including spinning hard
disk storage [takyon: a 6 TB 2.5" drive already leapfrogs spinning disk]!

Ars Technica is reporting that Samsung unveils 2.5-inch 16TB SSD: The world's
largest hard drive.[5] The third-generation 3D V-NAND is now up to 48 TLC
layers and 256Gbit per die. From the article:

At the Flash Memory Summit in California, Samsung has unveiled what appears
to be the world's largest hard drive—and somewhat surprisingly, it uses NAND
flash chips rather than spinning platters. The rather boringly named PM1633a,
which is being targeted at the enterprise market, manages to cram almost 16
terabytes into a 2.5-inch SSD package. By comparison, the largest
conventional hard drives made by Seagate and Western Digital currently max
out at 8 or 10TB.

The secret sauce behind Samsung's 16TB SSD is the company's new 256Gbit
(32GB) NAND flash die[6]; twice the capacity of 128Gbit NAND dies that were
commercialised by various chip makers last year. To reach such an astonishing
density, Samsung has managed to cram 48 layers of 3-bits-per-cell (TLC) 3D
V-NAND into a single die. This is up from 24 layers in 2013, and then 36
layers in 2014.

Though claimed capacity is 16 TB, actual available storage is 15.36 TB
(providing 640 GB of over provisioning.) The drive is 15mm high so it is geared
to the enterprise market; it probably won't fit in your laptop where 9.5mm is
an unofficial standard. [7]

In case you were wondering, by some estimates this capacity is enough to store
1.5 copies of the uncompressed textual data in the print collection of the US
Library of Congress[8] (LoC).

It boggles my mind to consider such large storage capacities. Given the global
population is about 8.3 billion, just one of these drives would be sufficient
to store 1.8 KiB on every human being on the planet, never mind an entire rack
of these drives.

What practical use is there for such capacities? What would you do with one (or
more) of these? How would this fit into your "Big Data" application?
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Original Submission[9]

Read more of this story[10] at SoylentNews.

Links:
[1]: http://soylentnews.org/~martyb/ (link)
[2]: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/07/07/038240 (link)
[3]: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/05/01/0945254 (link)
[4]: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/05/10/0048215 (link)
[5]: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/samsung-unveils-2-5-inch-16tb-ssd-the-worlds-largest-hard-drive/ (link)
[6]: http://global.samsungtomorrow.com/samsung-electronics-begins-mass-producing-industry-first-256-gigabit-3d-v-nand-flash-memory/ (link)
[7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5_inch_hard_drive#2.5_inch (link)
[8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measurement#Library_of_Congress (link)
[9]: http://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=9027 (link)
[10]: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/08/18/1549234&from=rss (link)


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