Samsung's monstrous 15TB SSD drive is now shipping

Regardless of how much storage you have, you always want more. But marrying sheer capacity with speed can be a daunting task.

Not anymore. Samsung has started shipping its 15.36 terabyte SSD — the largest capacity SSD we've ever seen.

Originally announced in August 2015, the new 2.5-inch PM1633a drive is not only huge in terms of capacity; it's also really, really fast. Samsung boasts read and write speeds of up to 200,000 and 32,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) respectively, with sequential read and write speeds reaching 1,200MB/sec.

The SSD consists of 32 512GB flash packages, each consisting of 16 layers of 256Gb V-NAND memory chips. It has a controller that supports the 12Gb/s SAS interface, and a whopping 16GB of DRAM to help manage all of it.

Unfortunately, you won't be seeing this — or any similar SSD — in your next gaming machine anytime soon. It's an enterprise grade device that will likely come at an enterprise grade price, though Samsung hasn't released any details about how much this will set you back.

Later this year, the same drive will be available in smaller capacities as well: 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB and a meager 480GB. The company expects the new lineup to become the "overwhelming favorite over hard disks" in enterprise storage systems.

For the rest of us mortals, let's hope some of this tech trickles into consumer devices as soon as possible.