Reports about Samsung prepping a high-capacity SSD subscription storage service made quite a splash earlier this week. Samsung showcased its PBSSD as a Service solution at Nvidia-hosted GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2024) and we were able to check it out and learn more about the service. indeed we are talking about a solution potentially enabling petabytes of all-flash storage. But at the same time, this is not quite what we expected based on the report.
Despite the name, PBSSD is not a petabyte-scale solid-state drive (Samsung's highest-capacity drive can store circa 240 TB), but rather a 'petascale' storage system that can scale-out all-flash storage capacity to petabytes. Samsung demonstrated Supermicro's all-flash storage system at GTC as an example of a 'petascale' machine. Supermicro's server is based on AMD's EPYC 9004-series processor and can accommodate 16 E3.S NVMe drives with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface for added performance.
