You won’t fnd this in retail stock. Have you contacted Samsung?

I always suggest buyers to contact us with such purchases as our contacts can usually help significantly, however, yes…this is not a NewEgg purchase.

HOLY COW buying these things is VERY different than just going to newegg and putting in your credit card and then they ship them to you. I had to dig up memories from days gone by and put on my old reseller hat…

For posterity’s sake, here’s what I’ve gone through:

In a nutshell, it’s taken a week, and I FINALLY have an MSRP on these things. I was wondering if they were in the realm of the Hitachi eMLC (SSD400M) drives or more along the lines of the OCZ Deneva’s. (Hint, they are pretty much right in the middle.)

Anyway, Samsung has a few distributors in the USA – many of which won’t deal with “small” purchases (we’re looking at 44 of these things, and they consider that quite small). I ended up at Arrow, but Avnet would have worked too. (I think there are 3 in the US. Crestone is the company that supplies the other 3).

If you don’t know how the channel works, prepare to be mired in red tape.

I also finally got a call back from Samsung itself. I basically had to sell what we were doing with the product to them. Don’t get me wrong, the guy was very nice and quite helpful, but we’re not usually the kind of place they would sell to. If you’re not a NetApp, EMC, HP, Dell, Oracle, Cisco, etc, well, they’re not quite sure what to do with you. The guy explained that they couldn’t be expected to send an engineer from Korea to diagnose problems and then produce custom firmware for with such small quantities ordered. I told him I just want a bunch of fast reliable enterprise drives… Custom firmware not required…

IMHO, you’re probably better off waiting for these drives to come to your preferred storage vendor. Enterprise just moves more slowly than consumer. In other words, although this drive was released in late 2011, it’s still considered a new product, and the channel is still trying to figure out how to handle/sell it. But, if you’ve got a definite need for a bunch of these, it is perhaps possible to acquire them. Just be prepared to exercise extreme patience.

Thanks. I’ve got a request in to Samsung Business. We’ll see how long they take to get back to me.