This 15TB Samsung super SSD is now surprisingly affordable

Samsung PM1643 15TB SSD - $2,395.91 at Amazon

Samsung PM1643 15TB SSD - $2,395.91 at Amazon
This high capacity drive from Samsung has fallen in price dramatically, now available at under $2,400. This might still sound expensive, but 15TB is a serious amount of SSD storage!

Five years is a very long time in technology, but it's been that long since since Samsung unveiled its ground-breaking PM1643a SSD range, with a 15.36TB capacity. 

Since then, the average price of this capacity model has fallen steadily but dropped like a lead ball more recently, as shown by the Nimbus Data ExaDrive NL.

You can now buy the drive for a mere $2,395.91 from Amazon, which is far cheaper than the $2,900 the 16TB Nimbus model.

At just under $156 per TB, Samsung's drive is less than twice the average price of entry level, consumer-grade SSDs, making this a very enticing deal for those looking to consolidate, say, a dozen of 1TB SSDs.

But this drive is a different beast altogether; it doesn’t use the usual SATA connector, opting instead for the enterprise-grade SAS interface.

Samsung claims the PM1643 MZILT15THMLA-00007 can reach random read/write speeds of up to 400K/50K IOPS, with sequential read/write speeds of 2.1 and 1.7GBps respectively.

Targeted at data centres, it comes with a five-year warranty with a maximum recommended one drive write per day (essentially one petabyte write per month), which is far superior to any consumer-focused drives.

It's built using Samsung’s 3rd generation, 256-gigabit (Gb) V-NAND technology that stacks cell-arrays in 48 layers.

Note, while the drive is the standard width (2.5 inches), it's far thicker than the usual 9.5mm.

TechRadar is rounding up all the top deals over the Prime Day sales period, and we’ve put all the best Prime Day deals in an easy-to-navigate article to help you find the bargains you’re looking for.

Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.