This 31TB Samsung super SSD is now almost affordable

(Image credit: Samsung)

It’s been nearly five years since Samsung unveiled its PM1643 SSD range, and in that time, the average price of its highest capacity model (the 30.72TB MZILT30THMLA) has fallen steadily in line with the wider industry.

You can now buy the drive for a mere $8,379 (roughly £6,500) from US-based online retailer Serversupply, after a two percent discount applied at checkout.

At just over $270 per TB, Samsung's drive is about three times more expensive than entry level, consumer-grade SSDs, making this a very approachable deal.

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 it 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). 

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

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.