I think we can safely say that the old storage limits of solid-state drives have disappeared. The cost factor still needs several optimizations, but storing data on an SSD will no longer be a strategic decision thanks to products like the new PM1633a from Samsung, originally announced last August. The South Korean manufacturer hasn't yet shared pricing details, but if it's already on the market, the radio silence won't last long.
With each new generation, available technologies keep eliminating the drawbacks that directly affect adoption, and in the case of solid-state drives, nobody doubts that the most critical point is storage space. Everyone knows that Windows can run on a 60-gigabyte partition (or even less), but we're in the second decade of the 21st century, and nobody wants to be watching their drives with eagle eyes. The consumer demand was clear, and manufacturers had to respond immediately. After great efforts, today we find what at first glance is the world's largest SSD, the PM1633a developed by Samsung.
If the name sounds familiar, it's because we talked about this SSD last August, when Samsung shared the first details about its technology. Today's announcement only confirms the arrival of the PM1633a to the enterprise market, and its general specifications remain unchanged. Samsung managed to pack a total of 15.36 effective terabytes into the "thicker" 2.5-inch format. Any complaints about its installation or not on laptops are meaningless, since the SSD uses a SAS interface, and in the best case, Samsung anticipates a synchronized speed (read-write) of 1,200 megabytes per second.
Such speed and density force us to think about the durability of the PM1633a, but in the official announcement Samsung guarantees a total daily write endurance without failures of the full capacity (15.36 TB per day), a number that allows it to offer between two and ten times more writes than a conventional SATA SSD. The last confirmed detail from the South Korean giant is that there will be smaller models of the PM1633a, split into 7.68 TB, 3.84 TB, 1.92 TB, and 960 and 480 gigabytes. Price and warranty? A mystery.
