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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: Samsung shows off the world’s biggest hard drive: a 16TB SSD ScienceAlert... Its not always easy to fit our computing lifestyles within the bounds of our computing hardware. Photos, movies, music, games you name it. All our digital media starts to add up after a while, and before you know it youve run out of room on your hard drive. Which is why the news that Samsung has just unveiled the worlds biggest hard drive immediately piqued our interest. The Korean company revealed its new uber-mega-drive this week at the Flash Memory Summit currently underway in California. And this thing really is big, offering a whopping 16 terabytes of storage, which is a whole 6 terabytes larger than the previous record holder. To put things in perspective, 16 terabytes would hold over 3 million MP3s, more than 4,000 movies, nearly 5 million digital photos
you get the picture. This sucker is huge. Its 1,000 times bigger than an entry-level iPhone and 32 times bigger than the storage in the computer on which Im writing these words. Best of all, Samsungs new drive is a solid state drive using NAND flash for storage, not a mechanical hard disk drive using platter technology. This means itd be quick, lightweight and energy efficient, with no moving parts like the ones used in older hard drives and computers. (Admittedly, theres still oodles of mechanical hard drives being released onto the market each year, although mostly for cheaper devices or desktop PCs.) According to Sebastian Anthony at Ars Technica, Samsung had to increase the density of its flash chips in order to squeeze so much capacity into a conventional 2.5-inch SSD: The secret sauce behind Samsungs 16TB SSD is the companys new 256Gbit (32GB) NAND flash die; 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. Sadly, there a few caveats to the PM1633a, the model number Samsung is using for the drive. First, its being targeted at enterprise markets, with no word on when (or if) well ever see a consumer release. This actually makes perfect sense. As nice as it would be to enjoy so much digital head room, its unlikely thered be much genuine consumer demand for such a capacious hard drive. For example, its unlikely you know anybody whos taken 5 million photos. (In fact, its quite possible nobody ever has.) Huge companies and government bodies do however need data capacity and lots of it. Scary amounts, in fact. Then theres the tiny matter of price. Anthony estimates the PM1633a will cost in the order of US$8,000 when it eventually hits the market. Now if youll be so kind, please excuse me while I remove it from my online cart. Read these next: A DNA hard drive has been built that can store data for 1 MILLION years Genetic data storage approaching crisis point, growing faster than YouTube Obama pledges US will build exascale supercomputers within 10 years Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top Page Up Full Thread Page Down Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Tatarewicz (#0)
(Edited)
Soon everybody will have one -- and almost as soon, it will be obsolete trash. Does sound way cool, though.
I upgraded my Toshiba laptop with a Samsung SSD 850 Pro (128 gb), it'll do more than I'll ever need.
#3. To: X-15 (#2) Being able to store all the movies, books, records and pics you want, that would be something -- just save everything. Legally, of course :-)
#4. To: NeoconsNailed (#3) Memory sticks should work as well, no? Index content on envelope.
#5. To: Tatarewicz (#4) Having it all in one place that you'll always know where it is -- only thing that would ever work for me. I tried copying my entire HD onto one or two Kingston 64GB DataTraveler SE9's but things down download very well from it so far. Yeah, I know they're not meant for that, but it's what I feel the need to do.
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