PM166a: Samsung begins shipping monster 15TB SSD – the world's highest capacity drive

Samsung has started shipping its 15.36TB solid state drive (SSD), the highest capacity drive on the market. The 2.5-inch drive is aimed at business storage systems.

The PM166a was first unveiled by Samsung at the 2015 Flash Memory Summit in August 2015. The unit combines 512 of Samsung's 256GB V-NAND flash storage chips and can support 1 DWPD, meaning 15.36TB of data can be written onto the drive every day "without fail", Samsung claims. This drive can write between two and ten times as much data as typical SATA SSDs based on triple-level and multi-level cell NAND flash technologies, the company added.

Jung-bae Lee, SVP memory product planning and application engineering team at Samsung Electronics, said: "To satisfy an increasing market need for ultra-high-capacity SAS SSDs from leading enterprise storage system manufacturers, we are directing our best efforts toward meeting our customers' SSD requests.

"We will continue to lead the industry with next-generation SSDs, using our advanced 3D V-NAND memory technology, in order to accelerate the growth of the premium memory market while delivering greater performance and efficiency to our customers."

Samsung is yet to give any pricing or availability info on the PM166a. The company has been going big on storage products in recent weeks, with the launch of the manufacturer's mega-SSD following the introduction of its 256GB mobile storage chip in February. A 128GB chip is allegedly on its way to market, though we've yet to see it break cover.