It has been a little over two years since Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. bragged about having the world’s highest-capacity solid-state drive, which had an impressive 15.36 terabytes of storage. The company seems intent on keeping that record, as it unveiled a new SSD today that doubles the capacity of its previous drives, with 30.72TB of storage space crammed in.

The SSD, which carries the boring designation of PM1643, contains 64 layers of 512GB chips that were made using Samsung’s V-NAND flash memory technology, and it offers lightning-fast sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,100 megabytes per second and 1,700MB/s, respectively.

Although there are SSDs out there with more storage space than PM1643, what makes Samsung’s drive impressive is its 2.5-inch form factor. Samsung said that it managed to fit so much storage into such a small device by making its chip layers twice as dense as as they were previously. The small size of PM1643 makes the drive an attractive option for laptops and workstations, especially for professionals and enterprise users who can make use of all that space.

“With our launch of the 30.72TB SSD, we are once again shattering the enterprise storage capacity barrier, and in the process, opening up new horizons for ultrahigh-capacity storage systems worldwide,” said Jaesoo Han, executive vice president of the company’s memory sales and marketing team. “Samsung will continue to move aggressively in meeting the shifting demand toward SSDs over 10TB.”

Samsung said it started producing initial quantities of its beefy new SSDs in January, and the company plans to expand its SSD line to include a number of other capacity options later this year. The company said its goal is to expand the growth of all-flash arrays and accelerate the transition from hard disk drives to SSDs in the enterprise market.

The transition to SSDs started out slowly at first, because early SSDs had less storage and higher costs than HDDs. That gap has nearly disappeared in recent years, and Samsung’s PM1643 has made it even smaller.

Photo: Samsung