[skuhn]

I don't know what the Samsung drive looks like internally, and obviously they did figure some way to do it. For comparison, here's a teardown of an Intel S3710: http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/intel-dc-s3710-enterprise-...

It has 16 NAND packages, the controller, two 1GB DRAM chips and capacitors. No idea if the Samsung drive includes capacitors, but I sure hope it does.

The Intel board fits in a 7mm enclosure, but 2.5" enclosures can go up to 15mm. To be generous, lets say that Samsung fit two double-sided circuit boards into the enclosure and also squeezed another 4 NAND packages in per-board. The NAND dies are 256Gbit vs Intel's 128Gbit, so with similar NAND packages that gets them to 10TB.

So now you either need to fit more NAND per-package -- no idea what die size they are -- or add more packages. Maybe their packages are physically smaller or maybe they're able to get >256GByte per-package. Either would help tremendously.

But regardless, that is a lot of packages for your controller to handle and if you're constrained on physical space you aren't going to be able to put additional DRAM chips on the board. You could replace the 1Gbit chips with 8Gbit chips in a similar footprint and maintain your 1,000:1 ratio of NAND:DRAM, but those chips will obviously cost a substantial amount more. I feel like this drive is going to really blow minds in terms of cost.