Unbelievable advances are once again being made in the world of data storage. Now available is a 16 TB SSD storage drive which is currently the world’s largest. This is 16,000 GigaBytes of space. How much storage is that exactly? It is around 7 billion pages of text or 4,000 DVDs. Even better, this is a solid state drive (SSD) which means it has no moving mechanical parts and is much faster than a traditional computer hard drive which are spinning disc platters. It has a read/write speed of 1.2 GigaBytes per second so you can fill this new drive up in just over 3 hours.
Samsung was able to achieve this much storage using their new 3D V-NAND technology which allows them to vertically stack the memory cells. They claim this new technology allows their drive to run faster and more efficiently than other SSD storage devices.
This is currently targeted to the enterprise market and not immediately available to PC enthusiasts however I am sure this new technology will become available in consumer products in the near future.
BY COMPARISON
IBM ships one of the first hard drives in 1956, a whopping 5 MegaBytes of space which was comprised of (50) 24″ discs and weighed a literal ton.
Today’s hard drives fit in the palm of your hand.
Whoa! I never heard of this release until now. I’m really getting excited about it, however, keeping in mind that an 1TB SSD is still around $200, I don’t imagine this being accessible for everyone too soon. But hey, buying it would give you the largest and the fastest drive in the world! Definitely not worth spending so much money (it won’t be cheap, I’m sure) in the first 10 years of its launch.
I mean, it’s great and all that they made it, but what’s the point. They probably spent so much time and so many resources to make it when these are probably gonna be around in 10 years.
This is just crazy.
Requires more thought on backup strategies.
I have a setup where Differential and full backups are in place to cover our organisation for 2 years worth of data, having users who save to their local drive, then synch up to their profile, and then backing up the insane amount they could store…….back-ups take long enough as it is.
We have definitely come a long way with storage technology. I remember a time when I brought a 1 GB drive and felt I was never going to be able to use that much data. How time flies. I can’t wait to see what comes next. One thing that especially interests me is quantum storage.
I’m not sure how they made it 16TB and still kept it relatively small. I’m using a 250GB SSD in my computer right now, and it looks the same size. It seems like some think that this advance in technology is not important, but it is. SSDs are so much faster than HDDs. I wonder how much money this would cost if it was available to consumers. Probably a lot.
After reading this the first thing I thought was, “the SSD is going to be damn expensive.”
And it certainly is. I did some price comparison on a number of websites and the least you can get it for is $1821.
I suppose though that the prices will start creeping down when other companies start using the same technology to make similar SSD drives. That will be the time I’ll get myself that 16TB SSD drive.
Amazing! It’s amazing to see how far we have gotten, I mean… look at the size of that thing, and now look at the size of our hard drives now! It’s so shocking and unbelievable. I bet the people back then, even the techies, never thought things would be this way. I mean… back then no one thought almost every home in america would have a computer. I know someone who has 6 computers in their home :O Wonder what those people from the 50’s would think about this?
And here I am barely managing to afford a 512GB SSD, haha! I imagine a 16 TB one goes for thousands of dollars at least.
I’m always impressed by how fast technology is improving daily, we went from to 5MB of hard drive space that literally weighed a ton to terabytes and terabytes of space into something that fits in the palm of our hands in only 60 years, I imagine we’re going to use SD cards for our computers soon. 😀
This is crazy! 5 megabytes weighing a literal ton to that small solid state drive containing 16 entire terabytes. Memory is something that gets cheaper and smaller so quickly you can actually notice it. I’m not even that old but I can remember how expensive measly 32 GB USB sticks were, now we are looking at this. Technology is quite amazing. I wonder how much bigger and smaller memory can get and if its even necessary, whether or not it is it’ll happen, but still the question is interesting.
In a few years a lot of people will have at least a 128TB SSD. It’s unavoidable. Technology is advancing rapidly, Moore’s law is still in full effect. On another note, backing up that much data is going to be an enormous task. I don’t know where they’ll use this big SSDs.