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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the check-out-our-big-"disk" dept.

We have previously run stories about 2 TB, 4 TB, and 6 TB Solid State Drives (SSDs) and their seemingly inevitable but gradual increase in capacity over time. Samsung just announced a HUGE increase in drive capacity, leap-frogging all other storage devices out there — including spinning hard disk storage [takyon: a 6 TB 2.5" drive already leapfrogs spinning disk]!

Ars Technica is reporting that Samsung unveils 2.5-inch 16TB SSD: The world's largest hard drive. The third-generation 3D V-NAND is now up to 48 TLC layers and 256Gbit per die. From the article:

At the Flash Memory Summit in California, Samsung has unveiled what appears to be the world's largest hard drive—and somewhat surprisingly, it uses NAND flash chips rather than spinning platters. The rather boringly named PM1633a, which is being targeted at the enterprise market, manages to cram almost 16 terabytes into a 2.5-inch SSD package. By comparison, the largest conventional hard drives made by Seagate and Western Digital currently max out at 8 or 10TB.

The secret sauce behind Samsung's 16TB SSD is the company's new 256Gbit (32GB) NAND flash die; twice the capacity of 128Gbit NAND dies that were commercialised by various chip makers last year. To reach such an astonishing density, Samsung has managed to cram 48 layers of 3-bits-per-cell (TLC) 3D V-NAND into a single die. This is up from 24 layers in 2013, and then 36 layers in 2014.

Though claimed capacity is 16 TB, actual available storage is 15.36 TB (providing 640 GB of over provisioning.) The drive is 15mm high so it is geared to the enterprise market; it probably won't fit in your laptop where 9.5mm is an unofficial standard.

In case you were wondering, by some estimates this capacity is enough to store 1.5 copies of the uncompressed textual data in the print collection of the US Library of Congress (LoC).

It boggles my mind to consider such large storage capacities. Given the global population is about 8.3 billion, just one of these drives would be sufficient to store 1.8 KiB on every human being on the planet, never mind an entire rack of these drives.

What practical use is there for such capacities? What would you do with one (or more) of these? How would this fit into your "Big Data" application?


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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by takyon on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:53PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday August 18 2015, @10:53PM (#224643) Journal

    That's a couple hundred thousand 50 megapickle RAW files as the come off a Canon 5Ds.

    One pickle is about 65 grams [self.com].

    Here's an estimate [esbtrib.com] that says 455 exabytes can be stored in a gram of DNA. Let's call that the lower limit for the data storage in pickle matter.

    65 * 455 EB * 50,000,000 = 1,478,750 yottabytes = 1.47875 nonillion bytes

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:36PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:36PM (#224670) Journal

    Did you know a cucumber is 96% water?
    Did you know that, as acid one would like to call the DNA, it isn't sour enough to make a pickle?
    Did you know the estimate of the average DNA in the human body is roughly around 0.6-0.7 kg [metafilter.com]?

    The relevant conclusion: I think I'll donate my body after death to a pro photographer to store her/his Canon 5D raw pictures using my DNA.

    (grin)

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    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:43PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday August 18 2015, @11:43PM (#224675) Journal

      I actually wanted a figure for the theoretical limits of storage in matter itself, not DNA, but I couldn't find it. For example, like this [wikipedia.org] for computation:

      It may be possible to use a black hole as a data storage and/or computing device, if a practical mechanism for extraction of contained information can be found. Such extraction may in principle be possible (Stephen Hawking's proposed resolution to the black hole information paradox). This would achieve storage density exactly equal to the Bekenstein Bound. Professor Seth Lloyd calculated the computational abilities of an "ultimate laptop" formed by compressing a kilogram of matter into a black hole of radius 1.485 × 10−27 meters, concluding that it would only last about 10−19 seconds before evaporating due to Hawking radiation, but that during this brief time it could compute at a rate of about 5 × 1050 operations per second, ultimately performing about 1032 operations on 1016 bits (~1 PB). Lloyd notes that "Interestingly, although this hypothetical computation is performed at ultra-high densities and speeds, the total number of bits available to be processed is not far from the number available to current computers operating in more familiar surroundings."

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      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday August 19 2015, @01:13AM

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 19 2015, @01:13AM (#224718) Journal
        The upper limit of modelling: the most compact and exact model for the behaviour of a matter/energy configuration is the configuration itself.
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      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 19 2015, @03:59AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 19 2015, @03:59AM (#224777) Journal

        I actually wanted a figure for the theoretical limits of storage in matter itself, not DNA, but I couldn't find it.

        That's actually a key limit. Surface area not matter is the upper limit. The universe is thought to have negative curvature due to "negative energy", that allows for a certain maximum information density throughout the universe without collapsing the universe.