A new take on Samsung’s massive 256TB teased for the first time earlier this month found that it uses the new E3.L EDSFF form factor and adopts an ‘accordion’ structure to vastly expand the space available for NAND chips.
The drive, spotted at Flash Memory Summit 2023 by Serve the House, is certainly the highest capacity SSD we’ve ever seen. But it will probably be a while before you can take full advantage of it. For starters, it doesn’t have a serial number, and there’s little information on retail prices or a release date. For that reason, it feels like a prototype device.
As a reference, the largest SSD we encountered different is the 100TB Nimbus ExaDrive SSD, which costs $40,000. Otherwise, they top out at around 64 GB, with most commercially available SSDs available in much smaller maximum capacities, such as the 16TB Team Group QX SSD.
Energy saver
Many new SSDs in the enterprise space, meanwhile, adopt the E3.S form factor, but Samsung’s 256TB SSD uses E3.L EDSFF and is a bit chunkier as a result, according to Serve the Home. The accordion structure is bolted on to accommodate the additional NAND packages – as there is not enough space on the PCB to accommodate all 64 V7 1Tb QLC NAND units.
Rather than amplifying the performance benefits, Samsung positioned this drive as a means of saving energy. For example, the press release states that a single 25 ssd6TB SSD consumes seven times less power than eight 32 TB SSDs. It is largely aimed at hyperscalers and business users looking for efficiency gains – both in terms of physical space and energy use.
It remains to be seen how important the Samsung E3.L 256TB QLC SSD can be in the enterprise space. It’s also hard to predict the price, should this prototype make its way to mass production – and you’d expect it to be well above the Nimbus’ $40,000 price tag. That said, the potential energy savings could, in a sense, be attractive to hyperscalers willing to invest.