There's a thing called the Flash Memory Summit in California, because of course there is. And there, Golem.de reports, Samsung has introduced the PM1633a. It's a terrible name for a wonderful thing: the world's largest hard drive, packed into a 2.5-inch case. It's listed as 16TB (technically, it's 15.36TB), and the best part about it is that it's a solid state drive using Samsung's new 256GB NAND flash as the basis for the storage. As Ars Technica reports, that new flash memory is the key to stuffing more storage capacity into the same space, and it works by stacking the transistors vertically.
When we saw the news this morning, a debate ensued inside The Verge offices about whether or not it was accurate to call this thing a hard drive. "Hard drive" is usually shorthand for "hard disk drive," and therefore has built into its name the idea of spinning magnetic platters. But this is an SSD, so if you want to be that person who pushes their glasses up and #actuallys about it, you could argue that it's not technically a hard drive. But really, we all just think of a hard drive as the component where you store stuff on a computer, and this PM1633a can store more stuff than anything else. Hence, the headline you see above.
No pricing has been announced, but it'll be expensive, and it's safe to assume it'll be sold primarily to enterprise customers for use in servers. In fact, Samsung was touting a reference design for a server with 48 of these hard drives installed, which adds up to a total capacity of 768TB. Samsung called it "JBOF," which stands for "Just a Bunch Of Flash." Maybe let's just leave this whole "what is a hard drive, really?" debate aside and start using JBOF instead.
No pricing has been announced, but it'll be expensive, and it's safe to assume it'll be sold primarily to enterprise customers for use in servers. In fact, Samsung was touting a reference design for a server with 48 of these hard drives installed, which adds up to a total capacity of 768TB. Samsung called it "JBOF," which stands for "Just a Bunch Of Flash." Maybe let's just leave this whole "what is a hard drive, really?" debate aside and start using JBOF instead.
