The Korean company starts shipping the largest solid-state drive in history. The device can store over 15TB of data. If used for the current version of bitcoin blockchain, it would suffice for three centuries.

As of March 2016, the overall size of the bitcoin blockchain is nearing 60GB and keeps growing exponentially. The concerns have been voiced that the constant swelling of the space occupied by the blockchain reduces average users’ ability to keep full nodes and, therefore, affects the system’s stability and performance.

Along with scaling improvement and block size optimisation, better storage options may be the answer to the problem. The new Samsung PM1633a drive features 15.36TB capacity and a 2.5” form factor, used in laptops and other portable devices. If bitcoin block kept its original size of 1Mb forever (which is quite unlikely), the SSD would have enough space to contain transaction data for at least 100,000 days. But even with the block size increased up to 8 Mb, it is plenty.

Despite the well-known solid-state drives’ downside, namely, limited write endurance (the number of write cycles per block), Samsung claims that the new device affords full drive write per day. In other words, you can overwrite the whole 15TB of data daily, and it still will be alive in 5 years to meet its warranty terms. The company is sure the PM1633a and its derivative models will soon become the industrial standard for enterprise storage systems.

Using Samsung products for the needs of the blockchain industry is well matched to the company’s sustained interest towards distributed ledger. As early as in April 2015 the company’s Silicon Valley outlet Samsung Research America started a research of the blockchain’s authenticating possibilities.

Svetlana Nosova