We need to go back almost a year to discover the first details about the Samsung PM1633a, a new enterprise-focused SSD with a truly terrifying capacity. Last March, the South Korean giant not only started shipping the drive but also shared additional technical specs. Now, the genie is completely out of the bottle, and anyone wanting those (almost) 16 terabytes in their server will need to pay around 10,300 dollars.
Inside the Behemoth
Solid-state technology has entered a “gloves-off” stage, so to speak. Consumer drives continue to drop in price while improving stability and density, making them the number-one option to inject speed into almost any computer (you just need a SATA port and AHCI enabled in the BIOS, assuming it’s available). But this progress is fueled by many new options appearing in the enterprise world. Robustness and capacity levels are already within the parameters that large data centers need, so every tangible advantage translates into greater performance and lower cost in the medium term. Once again, this complex equation brings us to the PM1633a, Samsung’s new monster that causes an earthquake with every step.
The specialized press (and yours truly) has presented the PM1633a as “the 16TB SSD”, but Samsung never left room for speculation or doubt. The effective capacity is 15.36 terabytes, and although it seems silly to argue over a difference that slightly exceeds half a terabyte, the market this SSD targets takes those details very seriously.
Samsung’s official presentation confirms several details about the PM1633a, such as its durability (15.36 TB per day), but we must also add a maximum power consumption of 11 watts while active (4.5W on standby), a weight of 140 grams, sequential write speed of 900 MB/s (reads stay at 1.2 GB/s), and five years of warranty.
The big unknown in our previous article about the PM1633a was its price. Today we finally know it... and we can only sigh. The average is around 10,300 dollars, with the occasional “special offer” that brings it down to the $9,600 level. In short: Yes, the number freezes your blood, but we must not lose sight of the fact that this SSD has the potential to change the entire strategy in a data center, replacing between three and five hard drives per unit (depending on capacity) while consuming less power. A 42U cabinet equipped with the right servers could cross the 15 petabytes mark, while a traditional configuration would achieve a fifth of that. Samsung plans to launch the lower-capacity editions in the coming weeks.
