Samsung to Release 16TB SSD Next Year

[Thomas the Tank Engine]

Samsung Electronics will reportedly release a 16 TB solid state drive (SSD), the world's highest-capacity SSD, next year. With the storage of SSDs surpassing that of hard disk drives (HDDs), SSDs are expected replace HDDs entirely soon.

According to industry sources on Aug. 16, Samsung is likely to introduce a 15.36 TB corporation-oriented SSD named the PM1633a to the market early next year, which was previously showcased in the U.S. in the second week of this month.

"Considering Samsung's technical capability, I think that it will be possible to commercialize the PM1633a by early next year," noted Michael Yang, director of the memory and storage research teams at IHS iSuppli. He added, "Since only one 16 TB-level SSD is required to store the data from as much as four of the latest SSDs combined, the cost needed to build a high-capacity server can be drastically reduced."

The largest current HDD can store 10 TB of data. But thanks to an advance in NAND flash-making technology, the storage capacity of SSDs has increased rapidly. Once this 16 TB SSD is commercialized, the capacity of SSDs will surpass that of HDDs for the first time.

 

 

 

Read the rest: http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/news/ict/11732-sixteen-terabytes-samsung-release-16tb-ssd-next-year

[neufuse Veteran]

replace HDD's entirely? seriously? even for constantly writing and rewriting media like video surveillance systems? for some reason I find that hard to believe...

[dragontology]

The most important point from the article omitted from the OP, the price: "between USD $5,000 and $7,000." Of course this is a corporate thing, not for average Joes. Then again, the average Joe doesn't need 16TB on an SSD. I struggle to think what the benefit of that would be.

I want an SSD. Having never owned one, I have a 750GB 7200RPM hard drive and a 3TB 5400RPM hard drive. The former for Windows, applications, and games; the latter for media. I would like to replace the former with an SSD, but I do not want to lose space. 512GB is acceptable, but I would prefer 1TB. But $300 for 1TB is just too much, and my money is tight as it is. Though costs have fallen since last I looked, around April when I built my current rig.

[MorganX]

The most important point from the article omitted from the OP, the price: "between USD $5,000 and $7,000." Of course this is a corporate thing, not for average Joes. Then again, the average Joe doesn't need 16TB on an SSD. I struggle to think what the benefit of that would be.

I want an SSD. Having never owned one, I have a 750GB 7200RPM hard drive and a 3TB 5400RPM hard drive. The former for Windows, applications, and games; the latter for media. I would like to replace the former with an SSD, but I do not want to lose space. 512GB is acceptable, but I would prefer 1TB. But $300 for 1TB is just too much, and my money is tight as it is. Though costs have fallen since last I looked, around April when I built my current rig.

There is a great need in the Datacenter. It will lower the cost of adding SSD to SANs. The more the merrier. Density is king.

Right now this doesn't mean much for the consumer, but at 7k for 16TB, that's not a bad start and it means we should see 1TB to 3TB for consumer use in the $500 range sooner rather than later. The sooner they can get the density up to 1TB or more in m.2 format for consumers the better. With 3D nand, the cost of SSD is going to plummet across the board.

This is a major evolution. The HD truly is or will soon be dead. This won't kill the desktop but it may kill the large form factors. My latest, and last personal build is another silent ITX and I'm using a 512GB M.2 x4 in it. All the sata ports are free and for personal storage I use a USB 3, M.2 in an external enclosure. 500MBs R/W.

This is pretty exciting. I would expect AIO's in a much smaller form factor to make a comeback in various form factors. I also expect SSD to start showing up in more consumer electronics as well.

[patseguin Global Moderator]

Wow, 10 of those in my Synology NAS would be sweet. I currently have 20TB storing 500 movies and 300 TV shows and it's only about 75% full. SSD would be much faster and no doubt stream 4K easily.

[FMH]

Can anyone make an educated guess about the retail price for this? Just curious. 

[+JHBrown Subscriber¹]

Nice. Price. Makes my 1TB 850 Pro insecure. 

[Mr. Gibs]

replace HDD's entirely? seriously? even for constantly writing and rewriting media like video surveillance systems? for some reason I find that hard to believe...

The limited writes claim has been greatly exaggerated tbh. Most SSD makers undersell it as well.

I think it was anandtech or arstechnica can't remember tested a whole bunch of consumer SSDs and found they last 2-3 times longer than the endurance limit the manufacturer claims. For example my 850 Pro is warrantied upto 300 TBW, they found the 840 pro burnt out around 800-900 TBW. But let's go with 300 as an example.

If you write 100gb a day (18TB a year), it would take you 8 years to eat up the SSDs warrantied write endurance and that's per drive. Most video surveillance systems would have multiple drives and the actual write endurance limit is significantly higher than the warrantied one, it will take you a long long long time to burn out that SSD.

Can anyone make an educated guess about the retail price for this? Just curious.

$5000-$7000. It's aimed at businesses / data centers for now.

[T3X4S]

OK, who wants to buy my crappy Samsung 950 Pro ?

 

[neufuse Veteran]

The limited writes claim has been greatly exaggerated tbh. Most SSD makers undersell it as well.

I think it was anandtech or arstechnica can't remember tested a whole bunch of consumer SSDs and found they last 2-3 times longer than the endurance limit the manufacturer claims. For example my 850 Pro is warrantied upto 300 TBW, they found the 840 pro burnt out around 800-900 TBW. But let's go with 300 as an example.

If you write 100gb a day (18TB a year), it would take you 8 years to eat up the SSDs warrantied write endurance and that's per drive. Most video surveillance systems would have multiple drives and the actual write endurance limit is significantly higher than the warrantied one, it will take you a long long long time to burn out that SSD.

we write about 15 TB  a month to our SQL Server SAN, even distributed across 24 SSD's that still is a lot of write wear.. but yeah they do under estimate it... I've written 54TB to my Samsung 840 SSD as part of a reliability test before we decided to use them in our systems

[Mr. Gibs]

we write about 15 TB  a month to our SQL Server SAN, even distributed across 24 SSD's that still is a lot of write wear.. but yeah they do under estimate it... I've written 54TB to my Samsung 840 SSD as part of a reliability test before we decided to use them in our systems

So that's about 625gb a disk a month, 20gb a day. Let's go with the 300TBW warranty and that means those drives should last you 41 years haha.

Now granted other things could fail before that but the SSD endurance would probably outlast the drives technology in the sense that you'd probably replace them for newer/better/higher capacity drives before you even come close to the endurance limits.

[Gotenks98]

I hope this happens soon. I can then replace my existing system drives with these. I dont need 16tb, 10tb would be more than enough.

[neufuse Veteran]

 

So that's about 625gb a disk a month, 20gb a day. Let's go with the 300TBW warranty and that means those drives should last you 41 years haha.

Now granted other things could fail before that but the SSD endurance would probably outlast the drives technology in the sense that you'd probably replace them for newer/better/higher capacity drives before you even come close to the endurance limits.

oh yeah, at the enterprise level a SQL Server SAN gets swapped out with new every 2-3 years at max... data just grows too fast...

we used to have to RAID 1+0 everything, but with the IOPs SSD's give us, we only have to mirror our arrays now and still be faster then a 15K 1+0 RAID array

 

RAID 1+0 is still good through for making massive volumes that are mirrored though out of smaller SSD's

 

you also have to remember though, since we are mirroring it that life time would be halved since we are doubling the writes ;)

Edited November 3, 2015 by neufuse

[Mr. Gibs]

oh yeah, at the enterprise level a SQL Server SAN gets swapped out with new every 2-3 years at max... data just grows too fast...

we used to have to RAID 1+0 everything, but with the IOPs SSD's give us, we only have to mirror our arrays now and still be faster then a 15K 1+0 RAID array

 

RAID 1+0 is still good through for making massive volumes that are mirrored though out of smaller SSD's

 

you also have to remember though, since we are mirroring it that life time would be halved since we are doubling the writes

Thank you! Someone else who thinks RAIDed SSDs are pointless....People seem to have this crazy idea that RAIDing them is going to give them this ridiculous performance increase that will unlock the secrets of the universe...

And oh god only a 20 year lifetime?!?!?!?! Teh shockery!!!! 

[T3X4S]

Thank you! Someone else who thinks RAIDed SSDs are pointless....People seem to have this crazy idea that RAIDing them is going to give them this ridiculous performance increase that will unlock the secrets of the universe...

And oh god only a 20 year lifetime?!?!?!?! Teh shockery!!!! 

These are the same people who simply dont understand a system is only as fast as the slowest part.

[neufuse Veteran]

Thank you! Someone else who thinks RAIDed SSDs are pointless....People seem to have this crazy idea that RAIDing them is going to give them this ridiculous performance increase that will unlock the secrets of the universe...

And oh god only a 20 year lifetime?!?!?!?! Teh shockery!!!! 

yeah, we only mirror data for reliability... since an SSD could still fail

These are the same people who simply dont understand a system is only as fast as the slowest part.

but but but HP Enterprise Services told me to RAID my SSDs! hehe......

[Seabizkit]

Thank you! Someone else who thinks RAIDed SSDs are pointless....People seem to have this crazy idea that RAIDing them is going to give them this ridiculous performance increase that will unlock the secrets of the universe...

And oh god only a 20 year lifetime?!?!?!?! Teh shockery!!!! 

FYI - your not making much sense....

striped = twice as fast

mirrored = provides fault tolerance

doesn't matter if this is HDD or SSD.

yes a single SSD is faster than RAID 0  HDD

but

RAID 0 SSD is faster than single SSD. (can be up to 75% faster..)

[Mr. Gibs]

 

FYI - your not making much sense....

striped = twice as fast

mirrored = provides fault tolerance

doesn't matter if this is HDD or SSD.

yes a single SSD is faster than RAID 0  HDD

but

RAID 0 SSD is faster than single SSD. (can be up to 75% faster..)

Sorry I meant RAID 0 SSDs. RAID 1 SSDs sure.

And no raid 0 ssds do not give you twice as fast performance in the real world. Sure if all you like doing is sitting there and keep running benchmarks over benchmarks and going wow look at my results, then yes good for you. But in real world performance usage you really won't notice the difference with RAID 0 SSDs. All you're doing is doubling your chances of failure and losing all your data.

If the only thing you care about is read / write tests and that's your only benchmark then yes you'll see faster performance but that's not a very good indicator of actual SSD performance. You'll find random 4KiB is a much more accurate performance of your drive and you'll also find that 2 SSDs RAIDed 0 vs. 1 SSD will get very similar random 4KiB readings. So in real world usage you'll notice nothing. Sure if you do have a need where you're transferring huge files back and forth across multiple clusters then yeah RAID 0 might help you out. But for things like boot, loading games, loading applications, regular day to day usage...raid 0 will provide you with no noticeable benefit

You also have to be aware that with some chipsets (not all of course) TRIM will not work when RAID 0 is enabled. So now you'll eventually notice a significant performance drop as your blocks fill up and have to be emptied, and you'll reduce the lifespan of your drive as well.

---

This is also why I hate the way SSDs are advertised. They're fast and I love them but dear god stop posting ######## file transfer speeds, they're so completely meaningless for 90%+ of people who buy SSDs.

Edited November 4, 2015 by -Razorfold

[Seabizkit]

Sorry I meant RAID 0 SSDs. RAID 1 SSDs sure.

And no raid 0 ssds do not give you twice as fast performance in the real world. Sure if all you like doing is sitting there and keep running benchmarks over benchmarks and going wow look at my results, then yes good for you. But in real world performance usage you really won't notice the difference with RAID 0 SSDs. All you're doing is doubling your chances of failure and losing all your data.

If the only thing you care about is read / write tests and that's your only benchmark then yes you'll see faster performance but that's not a very good indicator of actual SSD performance. You'll find random 4KiB is a much more accurate performance of your drive and you'll also find that 2 SSDs RAIDed 0 vs. 1 SSD will get very similar random 4KiB readings. So in real world usage you'll notice nothing. Sure if you do have a need where you're transferring huge files back and forth across multiple clusters then yeah RAID 0 might help you out. But for things like boot, loading games, loading applications, regular day to day usage...raid 0 will provide you with no noticeable benefit

You also have to be aware that with some chipsets (not all of course) TRIM will not work when RAID 0 is enabled. So now you'll eventually notice a significant performance drop as your blocks fill up and have to be emptied, and you'll reduce the lifespan of your drive as well.

---

This is also why I hate the way SSDs are advertised. They're fast and I love them but dear god stop posting ######## file transfer speeds, they're so completely meaningless for 90%+ of people who buy SSDs.

For average Joe.... yes completely agree, but you cannot say "RAIDed SSDs are pointless" whether is Joe or not.

Raid 0 - up to 75% faster (Real world) with 2 

Raid 1 - provides fault tolerance (Real world)

File transfer speeds are important... you get high end vs low end, first gen vs latest gen.

First gen consumer SSD's could barely do +- 120 Mb/s latest can do over 520 Mb/s (yes average Joe will be able to see this diff)

also what your find is the IOPS increases with each gen, so buying a drive with higher transfer speeds, will more than likely yield better IOPS  performance.

For Joe, yes semi pointless, but Raided SSDs, pointless... i think not.

[Mr. Gibs]

 

For average Joe.... yes completely agree, but you cannot say "RAIDed SSDs are pointless" whether is Joe or not.

Raid 0 - up to 75% faster (Real world) with 2 

Raid 1 - provides fault tolerance (Real world)

File transfer speeds are important... you get high end vs low end, first gen vs latest gen.

First gen consumer SSD's could barely do +- 120 Mb/s latest can do over 520 Mb/s (yes average Joe will be able to see this diff)

also what your find is the IOPS increases with each gen, so buying a drive with higher transfer speeds, will more than likely yield better IOPS  performance.

For Joe, yes semi pointless, but Raided SSDs, pointless... i think not.

If the ONLY thing you care about is file transfer, then yes RAID 0 will help you out. I already mentioned I was specifically talking about RAID 0.

But when it comes to SSD performance file transfer rates aren't the best metric and they're only important in a very specific circumstances. Random 4KiB is the best metric, currently, to measure real world SSD performance. And with that benchmark you'll find the difference between 2x SSDs in Raid 0 and 1x SSD is almost completely negligible. 

The other reason why file transfer speeds aren't as important is because they give you a very misleading figure of performance. Take the Samsung 840 Pro, it's a great drive very fast and according to the file transfer rate it was the fastest SSD of that generation. However numerous people have proven that even though the Samsung drive has the much higher transfer rate, the Sandisk one had much better actual performance. Except you wouldn't know that until you actually got two computers and tried both of them out. Which I have. I have 2 laptops both with i7s, 16gb ram etc (one is a bit more powerful). I put my old Samsung 840 (haven't tried it with my Samsung 850) in the more powerful laptop (specs in my sig) and I put my Sandisk extreme pro in my older laptop. Both were wiped clean and had a new installation of Windows, drivers etc. There's a difference between the two SSDs. On paper you'd expect the 840 Pro to defeat the Sandisk because well its "supposedly" the faster drive and its in a more powerful computer. But in reality the Sandisk won. I then swapped the drives, repeated the tests and same thing. Sandisk one again but this time in the more powerful computer.

There's also other things like people have proven that even though Samsung claims all their SSDs have the same performance with the same file transfer rates, the 512GB version of the 850 Pro actually has the slowest actual performance with the 256GB one having the best ifrc. 

So yes I'm talking about the average Joe because the people who actually know what they're talking about understand that and if they're RAIDing their drives they are doing it for a specific reason. The other people, the average Joe's, get fooled into believing that RAID 0 SSDs will somehow double the overall performance of their drive and they'll see twice as fast boots, games loading twice as fast etc. When in reality they won't see either of that. That's who I was talking about it. Go on any hardware forum you'll see people claiming that if you RAID your SSDs everything will run twice or three or four times as fast...it won't lol.

---

Oh and btw current gen SSDs can do a lot more than 520 Mb/s That's a limitation of SATA 3. Once you start moving into PCI-E or NVMe SSDs they can do something like 2100Mb/s read, 1500-1700Mb/s write.

[seeprime]

replace HDD's entirely? seriously? even for constantly writing and rewriting media like video surveillance systems? for some reason I find that hard to believe...

I replaced our hard drive in the computer we use for recording video in our shop, last year, with a larger SSD. So far so good. I figure I'll replace it just before the warranty expires. If it dies before then. I have drive images that I can restore to a new drive and RMA the dead one. Depending on the complexity of your video system SSD's replacing hard drives may be quite suitable. Of course, indexing, hibernation, and superfetch are all disabled to keep writes only to what is needed for recording video. I hope it lasts the entire 3 years. When it's replaced, I'll install a Samsung 850 Pro with a 10 year warranty. It should be interesting to see if it really lasts 10 years.

[+LogicalApex MVC]

There is a great need in the Datacenter. It will lower the cost of adding SSD to SANs. The more the merrier. Density is king.

Right now this doesn't mean much for the consumer, but at 7k for 16TB, that's not a bad start and it means we should see 1TB to 3TB for consumer use in the $500 range sooner rather than later. The sooner they can get the density up to 1TB or more in m.2 format for consumers the better. With 3D nand, the cost of SSD is going to plummet across the board.

This is a major evolution. The HD truly is or will soon be dead. This won't kill the desktop but it may kill the large form factors. My latest, and last personal build is another silent ITX and I'm using a 512GB M.2 x4 in it. All the sata ports are free and for personal storage I use a USB 3, M.2 in an external enclosure. 500MBs R/W.

This is pretty exciting. I would expect AIO's in a much smaller form factor to make a comeback in various form factors. I also expect SSD to start showing up in more consumer electronics as well.

1TB SSDs are already <$500 for consumer SSDs and have been for 6 months or so, at least. This is getting very close to killing the HDD, as you noted.

1TB Samsung 850 EVO - $342

1TB Samsung 850 Pro - $437

[sc302 Veteran]

replace HDD's entirely? seriously? even for constantly writing and rewriting media like video surveillance systems? for some reason I find that hard to believe...

yep,you can order servers and san storage with solely ssd's in them now. 

I think as new technologies increase you will find them becoming more the norm.  FWIW, SSD's seem to be pretty decent compared to HDD's and last longer than HDD's...I have had more dick drive failures than ssd failures in the past few years, I would say that read/write capability is negligible in comparison.   By the time the SSD stops being able to read/write you would have probably replaced that drive or storage array once or twice and moved the data over to that array/server...as far as home computers, you would have replaced that a few times by now.  we are in 2015 now, 10 years ago sata was still coming around, 15 years ago sata wasn't even a thought.  YOu think 10 years from now you will still be utilizing that same drive?  I highly doubt it.