Samsung just announced the world’s largest 2.5″ SSD with 30TB of space
Feb 21, 2018
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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A couple of sites are calling this the “World’s largest SSD“, because that’s what Samsung are claiming. But, it is a little inaccurate (sort of), seeing as Seagate showed off their 60TB 3.5″ SSD in late summer 2016. But, this is the largest SSD with a 2.5″ form factor. Coming in at 30.72TB total capacity that’s a whole lot of space and a whole lot of speed. And while Seagate’s 60TB drive may be bigger, it seems it was more of a proof of concept that never actually went on sale. This one, Samsung say, absolutely will.
The drive is made by combining 32 of the new 1TB NAND flash packages. Each of those, in turn, is made up of 16 stacked layers of 512gigabit V-NAND chips. Samsung say that they’ve managed to cut the chip size in half, which precisely doubles the capacity over their previous 15.36TB SSD model, which currently sits at around the $10K price mark. A little expensive for just storing your photos on, but for big video production who need fast access to a whole ton of footage, it’s not that bad of an investment.
To help with the increased capacity, Samsung have also done some work on the speed of the device. They say that the performance also comes in at almost twice that of the 15.36TB model.
In addition to the doubled capacity, performance levels have risen significantly and are nearly twice that of Samsung’s previous generation high-capacity SAS SSD. Based on a 12Gb/s SAS interface, the new PM1643 drive features random read and write speeds of up to 400,000 IOPS and 50,000 IOPS, and sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,100MB/s and 1,700 MB/s, respectively. These represent approximately four times the random read performance and three times the sequential read performance of a typical 2.5-inch SATA SSD.
No official price or release date has been announced yet, although they that they started manufacturing the drive in January. They also plan to expand the lineup with a new 15.36TB model, as well as 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB and 800GB versions to help “accelerate the transition from hard disk drives (HDDs) to SSDs in the enterprise market”.
I think it’s great that SSD capacity and speed are ever on the increase. But, for the most part, Samsung seems to be leading the charge with everybody else playing catchup. This means that Samsung can pretty much name their price, and SSDs have a long way to go before they reach the $-per-GB of something like traditional hard drives. I really hope that other manufacturers, especially the merged Western Digital/SanDisk really start to innovate and help drive the prices down.
Find out more over on the Samsung website.
[via The Verge]
John Aldred
John Aldred is a photographer with over 25 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter – and occasional beta tester – of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.
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12 responses to “Samsung just announced the world’s largest 2.5″ SSD with 30TB of space”
Thats a lot of information/photos to lose when that eventually fails – which it will of course, as all hd’s fail eventually
SSDs have a .01% failure rate. In the event of being that unlucky, there’s always cloud backup.
Henry Rodgers didn’t realise it was that low. good to know
unless you defrag it :D
Henry Rodgers .01% failure rate… throughout which period?
Every SSD has a problem with total ammount of data that can be written on it before it fails but with never SSD models that amount is larger that couple of years ago so they last longer. Also larger capacity SSDs, due to having more available sectors and more “room” to use before failing, should last longer in a predictable manner. For example, if a 250GB Samsung 840 MLC drive failed at 900 TBW, it would be reasonable to expect a 1TB drive to last for considerably longer, if not necessarily all the way to a massive 3.6 petabytes written.
In some studies some high-end drives from Samsung or Corsair managed to survive after writing over 1000 terabytes of data (one petabyte). The other drives failed at between 700 and 900 TBW.
must cost a million dollars lol
One day we’ll actually have a 30TB drive that is actually 30TB. I’ll settle for an 8TB drive where a big chunk of it doesn’t mysteriously disappear shrinking the drive into a 7.4TB drive instead.
Like it or not, data uses a different scheme of Tera
https://www.diyphotography.net/memory-cards-have-less-space-advertised-here-why/
30Tb. On a single drive? A disk drive is only useful if you can readily copy/move all the data to a backup in a practical amount of time (this particularly goes for cloud drives). 30Tb copied drive to drive on even a quick desktop computer will take a very, very long time. Almost certainly longer than is practical.
But hey, perhaps you also take travel photos with a mythical 12-1200mm zoom and not worry about the minor nuisance of practical usability.
By the way, my point is not that I am innately against large capacity drives, but that at this time they are squarely aimed at industrial/racked computing scenarios and should not be introduced as being suitable for photographers in general.