Samsung had announced a new 16TB SSD at the 2015 Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California. The considerable increase in the density is the result of the 48-layer 3D TLC NAND which was announced by Samsung earlier this week.
The formatted capacity is 15.36TB not exactly 16TB. Each of the new 3D NAND chips can hold up to 256 GB, which means 32 chips per TB and 512 chips to offer 16 TB of data storage. Samsung packed 500-600 NAND chips into this device that gives a limitation to the consumer drive scaling.
This device has a 2.5″ form factor so that this device could fit in the laptops. The price of this device is expected to be around $5000 and $7000. The amount is not so huge for the invention of this capacity. The cost per TB storage will be $312.50 per TB if the value is $5000 and will be $0.3125 per GB of storage.
This device is rather cheap since the cost per GB of the traditional SSD available in the market is ten times the cost per GB of this device if we pay $0.3125 per GB storage.
During the summit, Samsung also revealed a server that had 48 of this new 16TB SSD, which had total 768TB of storage and 2,000,000 IOPS (Input Output Operations Per Second) rated performance.
With this breakthrough invention, we can hope that the consumer drives will continue to improve in the future with a massive increase in the density of storage.