If money is no issue and you want to get the largest storage drive known to man, then Samsung might have just the solution.
Hot on the track of its recent announcement of a 48-layer,256Gb V-NAND memory module, the Korean giant has unveiled a 15.36TB solid state drive at the Flash Memory Summit and German website, Golem, was in the audience.
This drive is nearly twice as capacious as the Seagate 8TB external hard drive we tested recently and has nearly four times more storage than the Samsung 4TB portable drive we reviewed last week.
You could pack about 100 years worth of MP3 tracks (encoded at 64kbps).
Record-breaking capacity
The drive, called the PM1633a, is being touted as a next generation SAS entreprise drive and will be available in a 2.5-inch form factor for now.
It is not known whether Samsung is planning bigger form factors (3.5-inch or others) which could improve capacity even more.
Samsung demonstrated a 768TB setup that included 48 of these drives. The server managed to reach two million IOPS, making it ideal for OLTP (Online Transaction and Processing) solutions.
Don't expect these drives to hit the bargain bins anytime soon. Even extrapolating the average price of 2TB Samsung consumer drives, the PM1633a is likely to cost well over £4,000 (about $6,250).
