Samsung just announced a new NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) solid state drive with a capacity of 8TB optimized for big data analytics and virtualization applications. That news in and of itself isn’t terribly impressive, especially considering the company already offers 30TB+ enterprise SSDs, but this new drive leverages the proposed Next-Generation Small Form Factor (NGSFF), is wafer thin, and only 11cm x 3.05cm.
The NGSFF is a proposed SSD standard, which is likely to be accepted by JEDEC later in the year. NGSFF succeeds the current M.2 standard and offers the potential for much higher density storage arrays should NGSFF drives supplant common 2.5” drives. Samsung believes this is a strong possibility because the new drives can offer up to 3x the density within existing server infrastructures, to the tune of up to 576TB of storage in a 2U server.
"By introducing the first NF1 NVMe SSD, Samsung is taking the investment efficiency in data centers to new heights," said Sewon Chun, senior vice president of Memory Marketing at Samsung Electronics. “We will continue to lead the trend toward enabling ultra-high density data centers and enterprise systems by delivering storage solutions with unparalleled performance and density levels.”
The Samsung 8TB NF1 SSD Features A New Controller With A PCIe Gen 4 Interface.
SamsungThe 8TB Samsung NF1 SSD is packed with much of the company’s latest storage technology. The drive features 16, 512GB (gigabyte) NAND packages. And those 512GB packages are comprised of 16 layers of 256Gb (gigabit) TLC V-NAND chips. When added together, the sum total of all that NAND is 8TB in a form factor that dwarfs 2.5" drives.
The NAND is paired to a brand new NVMe 1.3 compliant controller with a PCI Express Gen 4 interface and a 12GB LPDDR4 DRAM cache. According to Samsung, the 8TB NF1 SSD delivers sequential read and write speeds of 3.1GB/s and 2GB/s, respectively, with random reads of upwards of 500,000 IOPS and random writes of 50,000 IOPS. The 8TB Samsung NF1 SSD’s endurance is rated for 1.3 drive writes per day and it carries a 3 year warranty, which is somewhat shorter than is typical with enterprise-class drives.
No word yet on pricing and availability.
