Samsung's million-IOPS, 6.4TB, 51Gb/s SSD is ... well, quite something

Five full drive writes a day for five years? This is serious

VMworld Samsung is showing off a monster million IOPS SSD that can pump out read data at 6.4 gigabytes per second and store up to 6.4TB.

NVMe PCIe is the fastest SSD interface, blasting SAS and SATA out of the park and the early promise of Fusion-io is now being realised with 3D NAND PCIe flash drives.

The PM1725a [PDF] comes in both 2.5-inch dual-port NVMe 1.2 and PCIe HHHL NVMe formats, the 2.5-inch product being dual-ported and sporting a gen 3 4-lane PCIe interface (32Gbit/s).

The half height, half length (HHHL) add-in-card version has an 8-lane gen 3 PCIe interface and its data delivery – 51.2Gbit/s – soars.

Both drives are made using Sammy’s third-generation V-NAND with 48 layers of TLC (3bits/cell) flash. The read/write latency is 90/20 µs, with Sammy telling us the QoS (quality of service, 99 per cent) latencies are 95μs reads/60μs writes. Endurance is five full drive writes a day for five years, making these drives a great fit for high-performance enterprise data centre server use – if, we suppose, you can afford them.

Performance data:

• 2.5-inch (dual-port)
• • Random read and write IOPS – up to 800,000 and 160,000
  • Sequential read and write bandwidth – up to 3.3GB/sec and 2.9GB/sec
• HHHL PCIe AIC (Add-in Card)
• • Random read and write IOPS – up to 1,080,000 and 170,000
  • Sequential read and write bandwidth – up to 6.4GB/sec and 3GB/sec

NVMe is at the 1.2 level. A Samsung EPIC controller is used and capacitor-based power fail protection is provided. The drives have a two million hours MTBF rating.

This is Sammy's third generation V-NAND with 48-layers and a 256Gbit die. We understand fourth generation, 64-layer V-NAND with a 512Gbit die is coming and it's easy to think of a capacity doubling next year.

Servers fitted with these PM1725a suckers will simply fly and, for performance data servers, disk and disk-based SATA and SAS interfaces are now dinosaur tech. ®