The time when the Perseids can be seen at night is also where the Flash Memory Summit, a conference of companies producing NAND, SSD and related technologies, takes place every summer. We had a report from her about a Silicon Motion controller that will hopefully bring a PCIe 5.0 SSD without high power consumption. At the same event, Samsung presented the first 256TB SSD, or its prototype. It almost doesn’t come anymore, but it’s an enormous storage capacity, today even SSDs 1000x smaller are still commonly sold.
This has come up a few times in discussions over the last few months: although the price per gigabyte or terabyte of capacity is still much lower for HDDs, hard drives lose in absolute capacity that can be achieved. Although Seagate is starting to deliver 32TB HDDs with HAMR technology, 32TB SSDs for servers have been around for longer, and modules and drives twice as large are on the way – see Solidigm’s 61.44TB SSD. And the gap between the peak capacities of HDDs and SSDs will widen even further as NAND memory seems to scale further and further in the foreseeable future.
256 TB in one SSD
In its presentation at the Flash Memory Summit, Samsung announced an as yet unnamed SSD with a capacity of 256 TB. It is not a currently launched product, but apparently only a planned one. But it sounds like Samsung already has samples or prototypes, as the press release says that this SSD has “achieved” a record density of integration between storage.
Due to this, not many details are known yet and the company has not shared photos of this device. Therefore, we do not know whether it has the format of a PCIe card, a module (here it would not be an M.2 module, but an E1 or E3, or a disk with a U.2 interface), or even something completely different.
Samsung has confirmed that the disk uses NAND memory with QLC writing and is apparently not just a case in which an individual smaller SSD is coupled behind the RAID controller. According to Samsung, the 256TB disk prototype works with seven times lower consumption compared to eight 32TB SSDs, which such a RAID solution would logically not handle. So it is probably a truly integrated SSD, perhaps already with a unified single controller, which has some special interfaces enabling a much larger number to be connected instead of a limited number of NAND chips (for consumer SSDs, it is typically four per channel).
Samsung states that this 256TB SSD will be the solution for achieving the maximum capacity of stored data in a given physical space limited, for example, by the size of one server rack. From this, one could speculate that the drive will be produced in the design used by today’s storage servers and rack NAS, so it could also have a 3.5″ drive format, only with an NVMe U.2 interface instead of SATA connectors. However, Samsung can instead, expect some new design and that new servers will already be designed for it, aimed at providing the highest possible number of positions for these storages.
Samsung presentation at Flash Memory Summit 2023 announcing 256TB SSD
Author: Samsung
The future is still unclear
If you are looking forward to the fact that SSDs will completely replace mechanical HDDs in all spheres, including internal and external drives for ordinary users, you probably can’t wait for that yet. This solution will definitely be very expensive, and therefore will probably remain only in data centers. The question is whether such an explosive increase in capacities will lead to a similar growth in the size of SSDs in notebooks and desktop computers, and whether SSDs will eventually have to cost the same as magnetic disks at capacities of 8.16 TB. There may well be a situation where such giant and very expensive server modules and drives will be significantly cheaper instead, but we will not know this in the consumer area and progress will be much slower without such a revolution.
In any case, Samsung has not yet confirmed when this announced 256TB SSD could actually appear on the market. We may be talking about a reality two or three years away, and even then it may be a piece of hardware where the dream capacity will be matched by a nightmarish price.
2023-08-12 05:00:00
#SSDs #Samsung #introduced #disk #capacity #Cnews.cz
