Samsung PM1663a SSD ships in 15TB or 7TB capacities, priced at $10k

If you need a massive SSD for storing data in a business of some sort, Samsung in now shipping the PM1633a SSD with a whopping 15.36TB of storage space inside. The SSD began shipping to select customers back in March and Samsung now has the drive available at select retailers. As you can imagine, an SSD with such massive storage space is far from cheap.

The 15.36TB SSD sells for around $10,000 making it one of the most expensive SSD storage drives around. Pricing on the larger SSD varies significantly retailer to retailer with CDW asking $10,311.99 while SHI wants a more reasonable $9,690 for the same thing on pre-order. You can also get a 7.68TB version of the drive for a bit over $5,700.

These SSDs use Samsung 256Gb TLC 3D V-NAND memory chips that were released last year. Samsung crams 16 of the chips together for a small 512GB package and then uses 32 of those packages to build the largest of the PM1633a SSDs. The extra 1TB of NAND is used for overprovisioning. Samsung developed a new controller specifically for this drive to increase the performance offered. The 15.36TB SSD offers sequential read performance of up to 1200 MB/s and sequential write performance of up to 900 MB/s using a SAS-12Gbps interface.

Random read/write operations are 195,000 and 31,000 IPOPs respectively. Those wanting to spend less money and needing less storage can also opt for 480GB, 960GB, 1.92TB, 3.84TB, and 7.68TB models. While the pricing seems high from a retail perspective the Samsung PM1633a could wind up being cheaper for business running massive data centers than other currently available devices thanks to its performance. Power consumption is around 11W active and 4.5W idle for the SSDs.

SOURCE: Andandtech