Samsung has been showing off various new memory technologies at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, California. Highlights of its new wares included; 4th generation Vertical-NAND technology products, very high capacity SSDs, and the breakthrough performance on offer from its new Z-SSDs.
4th Generation V-NAND
Samsung's 4th gen V-NAND stacks 64 layers of cell-arrays and uses TLC flash. Improved scaling, performance, and storage capacity is the result with Samsung saying that it can now offer 512Gb in a single die, and IO speeds of up to 800Mbps. Products packing 4th generation V-NAND flash will start to ship from Q4 this year.
32TB SAS 2.5-inch SSD
Upping the data density stakes for enterprise storage, Samsung also showed off a 32TB SAS SSD in a 2.5-inch form factor. It claims this is the "World Largest Capacity Drive". However, earlier in the week we saw a 60TB SAS SSD from Seagate (using Micron V-NAND), albeit in a 3.5-inch form factor.
Samsung says that its 32TB SAS SSD is based upon the previously outlined new 4th generation V-NAND 512Gb chips. To construct the drive, 512 of these are stacked in 16 layers to make a 1TB package, and 32 of these packages are installed in the 32TB SSD. These SSDs won't be rolling off production lines until next year. Samsung expects its 2.5-inch drives to offer over 100TB of storage by 2020 thanks to the continuing refinement of its V-NAND process.
Z-SSD with breakthrough performance
Forking its efforts in a different direction, Samsung has developed the Z-SSD. This is a high performance, ultra-low latency SSD solution. It is said to use the same fundamental tech as V-NAND but the memory is paired with "a unique circuit design and controller that can maximize performance". Headline performance increases are 1.6 times better sequential reading, and four times lower latency, than the Samsung PM963 NVMe SSD.
Samsung's Z-SSD looks to be targeted at a similar market to Intel Optane and Micron QuantX SSDs, offering significantly better performance than NVMe SSDs, and even Phase-Change RAM solutions, thereby filling the storage performance gap between flash and DRAM.
We don't have a lot of official info about the Z-SSDs but more should emerge as a 1TB Z-SSD drive launches later this year, followed by 2TB and 4TB Z-SSDs in 2017.
