Samsung is close to launching a 1,000TB SSD, said Kyungryun Kim, general manager of NAND Flash Product Planning Group, at the 2023 China Flash Memory Market Summit, the Chinese source said ASMag.
The top executive said that “in the next ten years” the capacity of an SSD will reach 1PB. Note that he could mean in ten years or in the next decade. He also noted that to achieve the goal, work is being done in three areas: physical scaling, logical scaling, and packaging.
It is likely that when designing this SDD you will need to move to PLC (Penta-Layer-Cell) or even HLC (Hexa-Layer-Cell) memory cells – cells that can store 5 or 6 bits of information respectively. This is the only way to fit 1024 TB into a device of an acceptable size. In 2020, the release of a 100TB SSD from niche manufacturer Nimbus Data became a milestone. It was a 3.5-inch form factor device priced at $40,000. Samsung’s petabyte drive will most likely be aimed at enterprise users – hyperscalers. We’re probably talking about the “linear” form factor EDSFF E1.L. Such a drive cannot be installed in a desktop PC, let alone in a laptop.
Samsung isn’t the only manufacturer getting into the petabyte SSD race. The Korean giant faces SK Hynix, Kioxia, Micron and China’s YMTC, which is struggling with US sanctions. Developers are actively increasing the number of layers in NAND chips, having now managed to release components with 238 layers.
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