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 , twice the capacity of 128Gbit NAND dies that were commercialised last year by various chip makers. To reach such astonishing capacities, 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. A diagram that goes some way to explaining what 3D NAND is. Historically, like most computer chips, NAND flash has been planar—that is, the functional structures on the chip are (for the most part), laid down on a single two-dimensional plane. In a similar way to how logic chips are moving towards 3D transistors ( FinFETs ), Samsung (and more recently Toshiba and Intel) has been forging ahead with 3D NAND . Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Samsung unveils 2.5-inch 16TB SSD: The world’s largest hard drive
