The capacity of SSDs compared to traditional hard drives has always been the most questioned factor, because yes, SSDs are much faster but mechanical drives offer greater storage capacity… or not? Samsung presented the new BM1743which uses the seventh generation of memory 176-cap 3D V-NAND to provide a capacity of up to 61.44 TBbecoming the largest in the world to date.
It may seem that SSDs are fairly new devices, but in reality they have been developing since the 1950s, although it is true that the first commercial SSD based on Flash memory was sold in 1991 for $ 1,000 and had only 20 MB of capacity. The first PCIe SSD was introduced in 2007, and from then until today the technology has evolved a lot, with SSDs becoming faster and with greater capacities, although the issue of capacity has always been quite delicate, and proof of this is that today , the standard for PCs is capacities between 1 and 4 TB at most (and at quite high prices).
The world’s largest SSD comes from Samsung and has 61.44TB
The new Samsung BM1743 represents a significant step forward from its predecessor, the BM1733, which was launched in 2020 with 96-layer technology and a maximum capacity of 32TB. In terms of performance, the BM1743 delivers up to 1.6 million random read IOPS and 110,000 random write IOPS, with sequential read and write speeds of 7.2GB/s and 2GB/s respectively.
As you can already guess from its specifications, this SSD is designed for environments where the read workload is very intense. At the moment it is only available with the U.2 form factor, which unfortunately we don’t usually have on home PCs, but there will be an E3.S variant compatible with PCIe 5.0 that will have a custom Samsung controller.
In any case, the big news is having managed to create a commercial SSD that reaches a capacity of 61.44 TB, but be careful because the Korean company has hinted that it already has a 122.88 TB model in development, double that. This decision puts Samsung in a position to compete with the Solidgm D5-P5336, which until now was the highest capacity SSD in the world.
And why is this important to us? After all, it is an SSD with a format that we cannot use on our home PCs and that surely has a price that we will not be able to afford. Well, it is important because it marks a milestone in the development of SSDs, in this case with 176 3D V-NAND layers that, sooner or later, will reach devices intended for the consumer market.
In other words, Samsung is investing a lot of resources in the development of higher capacity SSDs, which means that it won’t be long before we see “normal” SSDs with the now usual M.2 2280 format and a larger PCIe interface (be it 4.0 or 5.0), since currently the standard is 4TB maximum. For a normal user, 4TB is more than enough, but higher capacities could finally mean that mechanical drives are no longer needed… if the price is not prohibitive.
