Global tech leader Samsung has announced that it is now shipping one of its newest products, the PM1633a SSD. While the name of the product is very utilitarian and nowhere near as catchy as the company's Galaxy S7 Edge, it is nonetheless a product that stands at the very top of a very specific niche market.
For what, one might ask? Storage, plain and simple. See, the PM1633a is equipped with a record-breaking 15.36TB capacity, far surpassing all other SSD drives from rivals Western Digital and Seagate, whose largest drives have topped out at about 8 to 10TB. In fact, the drive is so large, it currently holds the title of being the largest hard drive, period.
What's even more amazing is the fact that the South Korean tech manufacturer has managed to create the drive and still maintain a conventional 2.5-inch SSD package. That's just a fraction of the size of conventional, portable hard disks that are still widely used today.
Samsung has stated that the company was able to accomplish the feat of stuffing 15TB of storage in a 2.5-inch package through the use of its 3D V-NAND technology which allows the South Korean tech giant to layer NAND cells vertically, allowing for greater storage density.
Of course, such a ridiculously large drive is not really aimed at the conventional market. Rather, Samsung has specifically designed the PM1633a with the corporate enterprise in mind. After all, with companies across the world becoming increasingly reliant on technology, the demand for higher storage options has never been greater.
Jung-bae Lee, Samsung's senior vice president of memory product planning and application engineering, has asserted this fact in an announcement.
"We are directing our best efforts toward meeting our customers' SSD requests. We will continue to lead the industry with next-generation SSDs, using our advanced 3D V-NAND memory technology, in order to accelerate the growth of the premium memory market while delivering greater performance and efficiency to our customers," he said.
Samsung might be very transparent about how the company was able to create the drive, but it has been quiet about the product's price. Since the PM1633a is targeted toward business enterprises, the estimated cost of the SSD unit would probably reach thousands of dollars.
In the highly competitive world of business, however, a few thousand dollars is a small price to pay for the sheer bragging rights of having the world's largest SSD.
