Brian Roemmele(@BrianRoemmele):1 Petabyte Storage On The Way! Samsung is developing nearline solid-state drives that scale from 250 terabytes to 1 petabyte. One petabyte is 1,024 terabytes. The form factors under discussion are EDSFF E3.L or E2. At the upper end, nearly fifty of the largest drives could occupy a 4U shelf and approach 50 petabytes; a full rack would approach half an exabyte. The information comes from a May 2026 briefing between storage software maker Scality and Blocks & Files. Scality chief product officer Erwan Girard stated that Samsung is building these ultra-density units with the explicit goal of replacing hard drives. He described a new type of flash with endurance of roughly 0.1 drive writes per day, about one-fifth the rate of contemporary QLC. Scality has early samples in its lab. Initial manufacturer numbers suggested slower performance, but lab tests showed no visible difference from QLC. Scality CEO Jérôme Lecat said the company has a co-development agreement with the Samsung Memory Research Center and that a 2026 release is unlikely. Samsung has shown high-capacity enterprise SSDs before. In 2022 it displayed a 128 TB QLC prototype. In 2023 it announced a 256 TB QLC drive aimed at data centers and outlined a petabyte-scale PBSSD architecture built from multiple drives. The current nearline work uses a different flash type, optimized for density and low write traffic rather than general-purpose endurance. For data-center operators the density reduces the number of racks needed for archives, model weights, or infrequently rewritten datasets. The endurance limit sets the boundary: the drive is not built for daily rewrites. Scality positions the devices in a warm tier alongside nearline hard drives, where the workload is read-heavy. Samsung’s semiconductor division continues to publish roadmaps that list higher layer counts and packaging advances as the route to larger single-drive capacities. The nearline samples under test represent one step along that path. No public product name or firm ship date has been announced. Samsung Semiconductor:

2026.11.07 20:34

1 Petabyte Storage On The Way! Samsung is developing nearline solid-state drives that scale from 250 terabytes to 1 petabyte. One petabyte is 1,024 terabytes. The form factors under discussion are EDSFF E3.L or E2. At the upper end, nearly fifty of the largest drives could occupy a 4U shelf and approach 50 petabytes; a full rack would approach half an exabyte. The information comes from a May 2026 briefing between storage software maker Scality and Blocks & Files. Scality chief product officer Erwan Girard stated that Samsung is building these ultra-density units with the explicit goal of replacing hard drives. He described a new type of flash with endurance of roughly 0.1 drive writes per day, about one-fifth the rate of contemporary QLC. Scality has early samples in its lab. Initial manufacturer numbers suggested slower performance, but lab tests showed no visible difference from QLC. Scality CEO Jérôme Lecat said the company has a co-development agreement with the Samsung Memory Research Center and that a 2026 release is unlikely. Samsung has shown high-capacity enterprise SSDs before. In 2022 it displayed a 128 TB QLC prototype. In 2023 it announced a 256 TB QLC drive aimed at data centers and outlined a petabyte-scale PBSSD architecture built from multiple drives. The current nearline work uses a different flash type, optimized for density and low write traffic rather than general-purpose endurance. For data-center operators the density reduces the number of racks needed for archives, model weights, or infrequently rewritten datasets. The endurance limit sets the boundary: the drive is not built for daily rewrites. Scality positions the devices in a warm tier alongside nearline hard drives, where the workload is read-heavy. Samsung’s semiconductor division continues to publish roadmaps that list higher layer counts and packaging advances as the route to larger single-drive capacities. The nearline samples under test represent one step along that path. No public product name or firm ship date has been announced. Samsung Semiconductor:

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