Samsung’s 15TB SSD Goes On Sale For Around $10k

Earlier this year we discovered that Samsung had developed an SSD with unprecedented capacity, 15.36TB to be exact. For a while now, access to this device has only been available to system builders, but some of the drives are beginning to surface on reseller sites for the princely sum of around $10,000. This means that the drive comes in at around 63 cents per gigabyte, which puts it above the everyday SSD, but when you consider the performance and capacity it offers, the price begins to make a little more sense.

Even if you have the money to burn, however, this SSD clearly isn’t designed with the typical consumer in mind. Targetted firmly at the enterprise market, Samsung’s PM1633a SSD offers an incredible random read and write speeds of up to 200,000 and 32,000 I/Os per second (IOPS) as well as sequential read and write speeds of up to 1,200 Mbps. In order to deliver this performance, instead of a typical SATA or PCIe connection, the PM1633a makes use of a 12Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface and while it may be the same 2.5″ form factor as most SSDs, it is almost twice as tall as the other drives in the same form factor.

This drive shows that for consumers, mass storage is still best done by more affordable mechanical drives, but it easy to see drives like this one becoming the norm in the near future. Can you imagine making use of a drive this size and if so, do you think it is worth the money?