While most eyes were drawn to Samsung Electronic Co. Ltd.’s launch of new phones Thursday, the company also announced to less fanfare a possibly far more import new product: the world’s largest hard drive.

The unexcitedly named PM1633a is reported to offer a staggering 16 terabytes into a 2.5 inch package, compared to the largest drives on the market today offered by Seagate and Western Digital that hit 8 or 10 terabytes.

But if the storage capacity isn’t remarkable enough, its gets better: Samsung’s new drive isn’t a conventional magnetic spinning drive, but a solid-state drive (SSD,) complete with all the benefits of speed they entail.

SSD’s have traditionally lagged behind conventional hard drives when it comes to storage, so Samsung has had to seriously innovate with the PM1663a, implementing the company’s new 256Gbit (32GB) NAND flash die, while cramming in 48 layers of 3-bits-per-cell (TLC) 3D V-NAND into a single die, up from the 36 layers it offered in SSD’s starting from 2014.

The new drive is capable of around 2 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) compared to the average consumer SSD today that only gets to around 90,000 operations per second.

Samsung, at least to begin with, is pitching the new drive at the enterprise market, and demonstrated the drive at the Flash Memory Summit in a server configured with 48 of the new drives, delivering total storage capacity of 768 terabytes.

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Despite many pundits continuing to predict the end of Moore’s Law, in 2015 it powers on and while many may not have expected to see 16TB SSD’s so quickly, it was only a question of time.

In terms of the enterprise market around servers the product will over time alter the economics in the space through a combination of reducing the size of servers, as well as saving money due to to factors including servers physically taking up less room, needing less electricity, let alone the speed efficiencies provided in markets such as Big Data when it comes to improved processing speeds decreasing delivery times in number crunching; it may be hard to put an exact efficiency saving figure on the new drives once implemented, but processing data more quickly provides, without argument, savings in the enterprise.

For consumers, it may be some years before they can get their hands on the drive, but like all new innovations in the storage space, it will only push the entire sector forward in both providing larger amounts of storage, for an ever decreasing price.

There’s no hard figure on the price of the new drive yet, but it’s speculated it will debut at a figure around $8,000.

Image credit: Golem.de