Samsung Announces The World’s First SSD With 256 TB

(Samsung Announces The World’s First SSD With 256 TB) I don’t know how much memory the cell phone or computer you are using to read this article has, but I am sure of one thing: it is less, much less than Samsung’s new SSD. The South Korean manufacturer created a 256 TB drive. It’s not a typo, no — it’s actually 256 terabytes.

The announcement was made during the Flash Memory Summit (FMS), the largest memory industry event, held in August 2023 in California (USA). The Quad Level Cell (QLC) NAND SSD is the first in the world to reach the 256 TB mark.

Achieving this storage density has its advantages. The first, obviously, is physical space: servers would not need more machines and buildings to offer more memory to customers and companies, reducing operating costs.

Another positive point is energy consumption. According to Samsung, the new 256 TB SSD uses seven times less energy than eight stacked 32 TB SSDs. Once again, savings are in your pocket, and the planet thanks you.

Samsung has released a few details about its new SSD. As it is aimed at data centers, the SamMobile website speculates that it should use the ESDFF or NGSFF formats, aimed at corporate use.

“With the exponential growth of data and its many applications, the demands of consumers operating servers and data centers are expanding,” Samsung writes on its website. “To get ahead of the era of artificial intelligence, Samsung must push the limits of the server storage memory market.”

Other Samsung news in SSDs

Samsung took advantage of the Flash Memory Summit to present other launches in the memory market. One of them is the PM9D3a SSD, also aimed at data centers.

According to the brand, the PM9D3a offers a sequential reading speed 2.3 times faster than the older model PM9D3. In random write speed, the speed is 2 times faster than the previous one. Energy efficiency increased by 60%.

The PM9D3a uses the PCIe 5.0 standard. It arrives in the first half of 2024, with capacities ranging between 3.84 TB and 30.72 TB.

The PM1743 SSD revealed at last year’s FMS, should begin to be used in 2023. It promises twice the efficiency of other server SSDs and is aimed at artificial intelligence uses, such as ChatGPT.