Samsung’s PM1633a Now Available: $10k for 15 TB, $6k for 7 TB
by Anton Shilov on July 29, 2016 5:00 PM ESTSamsung started to ship its PM1633a SSD with 15.36 TB capacity to select customers in March and recently it began to supply the drive to select resellers as well. The enterprise-class SSD is now offered by two U.S.-based retailers and can be purchased for ~$10,000, which makes it one of the world’s most expensive commercial solid-state drives. Meanwhile, Samsung officially expanded its PM1633a family of SSDs with many lower-capacity models and has begun to ship the 7.68 TB version to at least one reseller.
The Samsung PM1633a drives are based on the company’s third-generation 256 Gb TLC 3D V-NAND memory chips introduced last year. Samsung stacks 16 of such ICs to form a single 512 GB package and then uses 32 of them to build its flagship 15.36 TB SSD, leaving about 1 TB of NAND flash for overprovisioning. Typically, high-capacity SSDs do not provide very high performance, because of peculiarities of their internal architecture and limitations of contemporary controllers (which cannot simultaneously access many high-density chips, or multiple controllers in a RAID-0 stripe configuration). To speed up its most spacious PM1633a drive, Samsung had to develop a new proprietary controller that can concurrently access large amounts of high-density NAND flash with the help of a special firmware. For its flagship PM1633a 15.36 TB SSD, the manufacturer declares sequential read performance up to 1200 MB/s as well as sequential write performance up to 900 MB/s using the SAS-12Gbps interface. As for random read and write operations, the 15.36 TB SSD can deliver up to 195,000 and 31,000 IOPS respectively (which is slightly lower than the company advertised back in March).
When Samsung announced its PM1633a SSD earlier this year, it only introduced one model with 15.36 TB capacity. Since then, the company has officially expanded the PM1633a family with 480 GB, 960 GB, 1.92 TB, 3.84 TB and 7.68 TB models (see flyer for details). The expansion of the lineup demonstrates Samsung’s confidence that its third-generation V-NAND TLC memory is reliable enough for enterprise usage scenarios. In fact, the PM1633a series consists of six SKUs, whereas the PM1633 family based on the second-gen 32-layer V-NAND includes only four configurations (up to 3.8 TB capacity, but they are faster than the PM1633a). Both lineups are aimed at enterprise storage applications with SAS 12Gbps interface.
Samsung PM1633a SSD General Specifications | |||
Capacity | 480 GB, 960 GB, 1.92 TB, 3.84 TB, 7.68 TB, 15.36 TB | ||
Controller | Samsung proprietary controller | ||
NAND | Samsung's 256 Gb 48-layer TLC NAND | ||
DRAM Cache | up to 16 GB DDR3 SDRAM (15.36 TB model) | ||
Sequential Read | 1200 MB/s | ||
Sequential Write | 900 MB/s | ||
Random Read | up to 195,000 IOPS (15.36 TB model) | ||
Random Write | up to 31,000 IOPS (15.36 TB model) | ||
Power Consumption (active/idle) | 11W/4.5W (15.36 TB model) | ||
MTBF | 2,000,000 hours | ||
Endurance | 1 DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day) | ||
Power Loss Protection | Based on tantalum capacitors | ||
Warranty | 5 Years | ||
Interface and Form-Factor | 2.5"/15mm SAS-12 Gbps (15.36 TB model) |
Back in March, Samsung only began to ship its PM1633a to select clients. We suspect that these clients are those that run large cloud data centers, and require such drives to run their specific workloads. Now,the manufacturer has started to ship its flagship SAS SSD to a broader range of customers. For example, the Samsung PM1633a 15.36 TB drive (MZILS15THMLS) is now offered by CDW for $10,311.99 as well as by SHI for $9,690 on preorder. Both retailers ask to contact them for actual availability, depending on when stock is available (which is not surprising, given the price of the SSD as well as its very special positioning). In addition, CDW also offers the PM1633a 7.68 TB (MZILS7T6HMLS) drive for $5,729.99, which ships within 11–13 days.
The price of Samsung’s PM1633a 15.36 TB SSD may seem excessive, but for large cloud data centers (which always try to maximize their storage capacity) as well as mission-critical storage applications such drives make a lot of sense. For example, Supermicro has 2U machines that can fit in 48 SAS3/12G storage devices (1, 2). Each of such servers can store 737.28 TB of data (if fully populated with Samsung’s 15.36 TB SSDs), whereas storage capacity of a 42U cabinet featuring 21 of such servers will be 15482 TB (15.4 PB). By contrast, a standard 42U storage rack featuring 360 3.5” 10 TB hard drives can store around 3600 TB. Moreover, given very high sequential and random read/write performance of the PM1633a, just one such device can substitute many 10K or 15K mission-critical HDDs (each of which can cost $400 – $700). Hence, there will be numerous customers interested in buying the Samsung PM1633a 15.36 TB for its price-point.
Sources: Samsung, CDW (via PC World), SHI.
Other Reading:
The Samsung 850 EVO 4TB SSD Review
Samsung's 850 EVO 4TB Now Available at $1500
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svan1971 - Saturday, July 30, 2016 - link
what are you going to do with 15 Terabytes of storage? Thats a hell of allot of porn and pirated movies...Death666Angel - Sunday, July 31, 2016 - link
Or, you know, ~350 to 400 legally ripped full blu rays? Which wouldn't even be my whole collection.svan1971 - Sunday, July 31, 2016 - link
sure i believe you....400 blu rays? hell you can afford the 10,000 thenDeath666Angel - Sunday, July 31, 2016 - link
When do you live, 2007? 37 BRs of Lost cost me 80€. That's 2.16€ per BR. 50€ for 10 BR is a normal sale on Amazon.Lolimaster - Monday, August 1, 2016 - link
I prefer to archieve data with high chances of dissapearing from the net like anime bd-mkv and hentai manga/magazines.Hollywood movies can be found at any time.
bigboxes - Sunday, July 31, 2016 - link
Things change. With 4k here (and 8k+ looming) there will be a need for larger storage and faster bandwidth. This will drive the industry. I realize that many on here don't hoard media. But this is a site for techies. I have a main rig that has 32GB of ram, an SSD, and water cooling. I have a file server with two controller cards and 8 hard drives, three of which are 4TB. I have a 29" ultrawide monitor. I built a dedicated HTPC this January that I control with an app on my phone. It's really crazy to see ATers tell others what they "don't need".svan1971 - Sunday, July 31, 2016 - link
4k and 8k are just that "looming" and people can't seem to notice there is a difference between want and need.Hydrans - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
Why do you need so much storage? Surely you are buying your movies and not illegally downloading them. That much storage would have a decade of movies and TV shows on it. What are you legally doing with that much storage? For most people that don't horde, then I suspect that this is still overkill and in 3-5 years when what you are talking about is real, then the price per GB will be so low that price is not important.Lolimaster - Monday, August 1, 2016 - link
My own private in-house server consist of 4x6TB WD Blues. It's only enough for the next 5years.mrvco - Monday, August 1, 2016 - link
aka Evidence