Samsung has finally started shipping world’s largest Solid State Drive for consumers, its 15.36TB “PM1633a” SSD. The Korean company announced this digital storage drive at the Flash Memory Summit in California in August last year, with an unprecedented amount of storage.

As many companies claim “world’s first” during their product launches, many experts and analysts hasn’t surprised and took this as a publicity stunt and thought that it wouldn’t reach the consumer-end anytime soon. Now it turn out to be Samsung’s turn to shut all mouths – it has already began shipping this drive along with a bunch of low capacity SSD.

Samsung notes in its announcement post that businesses can fit more drives in their server racks due to its 2.5-inch size than if they use 3.5-inch drives. The company has combined 512 of its third-generation 256-gigabit (Gb) V-NAND memory chips. To form a single 512GB package, they have stacked the V-NAND memory chips in 16 layers. The 15.36TB SSD has a total of 32 such 512GB packages layered on top of another. Samsung claims that PM1633a is much reliable and high-performer than its predecessor PM1633, which used 32-layer of second-generation 128Gb V-NAND memory chips.

It’s noted that the NAND memory chips used in this process are twice the capacity of 128Gbit NAND memory chips that were utilized by various chip makers last year.

Jung-bae Lee, Senior Vice President, Memory Product Planning and Application Engineering Team, Samsung Electronics, said in a statement:

“To satisfy an increasing market need for ultra-high-capacity SAS SSDs from leading enterprise storage system manufacturers, we are directing our best efforts toward meeting our customers’ SSD requests. We will continue to lead the industry with next-generation SSDs, using our advanced 3D V-NAND memory technology, in order to accelerate the growth of the premium memory market while delivering greater performance and efficiency to our customers.”
An SSD with a massive 16 TB storage space will not be cheap, and while Samsung has made no mention of the price of PM1633a SSD, it’s safe to assume that it will have a price tag within the $5000 range. And this price range wouldn’t make any normal consumers to buy one for them. By understanding this reality, Samsung is marketing this product for enterprise storage systems. If you are really interested in having a large SSD drive on your laptops and desktops, you can wait till the end of 2016, as Samsung will be rolling out 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB and 480GB SSDs with latest 3rd generation 256Gb V-NAND memory chips later this year, and that wouldn’t be pricey as this 16TB giant.

Although this massive SSD won’t appear in any of the latest computers, this launch provides a clear picture of how our future is shaping in terms of larger digital storage spaces and faster technology growths.