Samsung Begins Production of Largest SSD for Enterprise Systems

Samsung Begins Production of Largest SSD for Enterprise Systems
Samsung

Samsung announced that it has begun mass producing the industry’s largest capacity Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drive (SSD), the PM1643, for use in next-generation enterprise storage systems.

Leveraging Samsung’s latest V-NAND technology with 64-layer, 3-bit 512-gigabit (Gb) chips, the 30.72 terabyte (TB) drive delivers twice the capacity and performance of the previous 15.36TB high-capacity lineup introduced in March 2016. This was made possible by combining 32 of the new 1TB NAND flash packages, each comprised of 16 stacked layers of 512Gb V-NAND chips.

In addition to the doubled capacity, performance levels have risen significantly and are nearly twice that of Samsung’s previous generation high-capacity SAS SSD. Based on a 12Gb/s SAS interface, the new PM1643 drive features random read and write speeds of up to 400,000 IOPS and 50,000 IOPS, and sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,100MB/s and 1,700 MB/s, respectively. These represent approximately four times the random read performance and three times the sequential read performance of a typical 2.5-inch SATA SSD.

Samsung reached the new capacity and performance enhancements through several technology progressions in the design of its controller, DRAM packaging and associated software. Included in these advancements is a highly efficient controller architecture that integrates nine controllers from the previous high-capacity SSD lineup into a single package, enabling a greater amount of space within the SSD to be used for storage. The PM1643 drive also applies Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology to interconnect 8Gb DDR4 chips, creating 10 4GB TSV DRAM packages, totaling 40GB of DRAM. This marks the first time that TSV-applied DRAM has been used in an SSD.

Samsung started manufacturing initial quantities of the 30.72TB SSDs in January and plans to expand the lineup later this year with 15.36TB, 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB and 800GB versions to further drive the growth of all-flash-arrays and accelerate the transition from hard disk drives (HDDs) to SSDs in the enterprise market. The wide range of models and improved performance will be pivotal in meeting the growing storage needs in a host of market segments.