Samsung to introduce storage solutions that will enable storing data worth hundreds of terabytes

The South Korean conglomerate is up to something big. Reportedly, the tech firm is looking forward to introducing storage solutions that will enable users to store terabytes of data. The recent development was discussed by the company at the China Flash Memory Market Summit. Samsung claimed that its future SSDs could offer storage capacities of 1 petabyte [1PB].

1 petabyte of storage equals 1,024 terabytes / 1 million GB. It is sufficient enough to store almost 2.5 years’ worth of 4K video. A few dozen of these future 1PB SSDs can store the contents of the complete Library of Congress. Well, these are just figures. Practically, it is not going to happen soon. Nonetheless, the company claimed that during the next ten years, advancements in physical, logical, and packaging technologies should boost storage drive capacities to 1PB.

There are significant technical obstacles to getting over

The manufacturing of future SSDs requires improved physical as well as logical scaling. Physical scaling indicates that NAND cells should shrink while on the other hand, the number of layers must be increased. Only then Samsung will be able to achieve such high capacities on future SSDs.

Conversely, this physical scaling has some restraints. The company asserts that 1,000 layers per 3D NAND are not sufficient to foster flash memory capacity to 1PB and beyond. Therefore, logical scaling must be taken into consideration. Logical scaling will work to improve the number of bits stored per cell. However, before the logical stage of 1PT SSDs, some technical obstacles i.e., material science and temperature management need to be resolved.

 Samsung must introduce new manufacturing techniques to achieve a storage capacity greater than a thousand terabytes. Users of PCs and smartphones will eventually profit from these developments, but this transition seems inevitable.