Several companies, including Samsung, Phison and Huawei, have been announcing 128TB SSDs this year. Inevitably, these products are not aimed at consumers, but are designed to meet the growing storage needs of AI servers and data centres.
128TB is certainly a big step up in terms of capacity. It’s worth remembering that Solidigm’s 61.44TB SSD was the world’s largest solid-state drive when it launched in January, and nobody else was offering anything like it. Things change quickly.
Samsung recently unveiled its upcoming 128TB SSD, the BM1743, at the Future of Memory and Storage 2024 event (formerly Flash Memory Summit). There’s no word yet on when that model is expected to see the light of day, but Samsung wants you to know that it’s already working on an SSD with twice the capacity. Yes, really.
256TB SSD for servers
Korean business daily South Korean memory rivals Samsung and SK Hynix have reportedly recently taken to the stage at Semicon Taiwan 2024 to discuss high-bandwidth memory (HBM), with the two companies detailing efforts they are making to boost production of the in-demand chips. During a keynote speech, which marked the first time a Samsung representative has given a talk in Taiwan, Jung-Bae Lee, corporate president and head of Samsung’s memory business, said, “To maximize the performance of AI chips, custom HBM is the best choice. We are working with other foundry players to offer more than 20 custom solutions.”
It was during this presentation, Conquered Dr. Lee reportedly dropped his casual bombshell, stating that “Samsung is preparing to introduce a 256 terabyte (TB) solid-state drive (SSD) for servers to meet the growing demand for high-capacity storage devices in AI servers.”
No additional information has been provided, so it's unclear when such a device will be released – it could be next year or in the more distant future. However, the fact that Samsung has mentioned it suggests that the company is quite far into the development process.
