World Largest single unit hard drive, "16 terabytes". In this Review we will take a look at the new record-breaking drive from Samsung and then we'll take a look at the Fun factual history of hard drives to put things into perspective and hopefully get some brains ticking.
So you'll know 16 terabyte is about 16000 gigabytes but how much storage is that exactly, here is a nice viusalization to give you an idea.
Please note that this visualization was made in 2008 and was for 12 terabytes. we can put the extra 33% storage on top to make it a 16 terabytes and the updated numbers are about 7 billion single-spaced typewritten Pages, 3500 DVDs or 12.8 human brains.
So 16 terabytes is a lot, well almost sixteen technically 15.38 of the total 16 terabyte is actually used as the storage that aside the most amazing thing is that this hard drive is not a hard disk drive but a solid state drive (SSD) the kind that has no moving parts and a much faster than the traditional Spinning Disk drives, Samsung first announced the drive in April 2015 and cratively titled it the PM1633A it's only 2.5 inches in width but has a read, write speed of 1.2 gigabytes a second, that's so fast that It needs 16 gigabytes of DRAM and specially designed firmware to make it all Take along by comparison the largest conventional single unit hard drives made by seagate and Western Digital currently max out at 8 to 10 terabytes.
So the question is how did Samsung do it?
Well this unprecedented 16 gigabytes of storage on a single SSD is enabled by Samsung new 32 gigabyte NAND flash drive technology the company has managed to cram 48 layers of these into a single die using 3D v-nand technology the simplest way of describing 3D nand is to imagine everything turned on the side so instead of having just one layer of memory cells in a single plane you can now have dozens of layers of cells all standing up next to each other, this refers to the vertical nature of the cells. Samsung claims that 3D v-nand chip technology is more reliable than its predecessors while performing faster and more efficiently.
They are saying that due to their new technology all 15.36 terabytes of usable data can be Rewritten daily without failure, in the press release Samsung stated that this drive is purely for the Enterprise Market, that's bad news for PC enthusiasts.
Though we can expect this technology to trickle down into consumer drives in the future there's no pricing yet available but rest assured it's going to cost a fair bit but at least the technology now exists.
With the passage of time once expensive storage methods usually come down to an affordable price perhaps in two to five years we could see this kind of storage hit the price point of $300 if recent history is any indication.
Speaking of history for a wider context and a quick bit of fun let's see where we've come from in terms of storage check out this IBM 305 hard drive from 1956 the 305 was composed of 5024 inch disc stacked together taking up 16 square feet of real estate and wait a ton and it cost about $160,000 and stored only 5 megabytes of data.
