(iTers News) - Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. unveiled two ground-breaking SSD solutions, newly opening up ultra-high speed TB or terra-byte-level SSD market for consumers and enterprises.
At 2013 Samsung SSD Global Summit held in Seoul, Samsung has unleashed two PCIe interface 1TB level SSDs – a 1TB SATA SSD solution for consumer market and a 2.5-inch 1.6TB NVMe SSD for corporate market.
The rollout of the ultra-high speed, high storage capacity SSD solutions caps Samsung’s year-long effort to democratize the use of SSDs across a plethora of consumer electronics devices from mobile PCs to Ultrabooks to desktop PCs.
At the opening session of the forum, Jim Elliot, vice president with memory marketing, Samsung Electronics said, “6 out of every 10 PCs to be shipped will come equipped with Samsung SSDs in 2013.”
SSD, or solid state drives are a collection of NAND flash memory chips aligned on a circuit board, featuring ultra-fast read and write speed. Samsung has built around both of the two 1 TB-level SSDs around eight 128Gb NAND flash memory chips of 19nm geometry.
Highlighting its new 1TB-level SSD product is it NVMe interface technology. A short for non-volatile memory PCI express, the NVMe represents the industry’s first optimization of PCIe, PCI express interface technology into SSDs. The PCIe is nothing new, but is an old legacy interface technology between a CPU and other integrated and add-on peripherals like memory system. To newly apply it for SSDs, which used to use SATA interface, Samsung has rewritten a suite of software driver.
The NVMe is a newly coined term by Samsung, and the chip maker formed the NVMe standard-setting consortium of more than 80 members to make it one of the three de facto interface standards that PCIe and SATA.
The technology breakthrough translate into unparalleled speed advantage. For example, the VMe SSDs boast 10 times faster read and write speed, compared with the predecessor SATA SSD, while reading and writing data two times faster than PCIe version 2-based SSD. That’s because Samsung has applied PCIe version 3.0 technology and other speed accelerator algorithm for the NVMe SSD.
(Jim Elliot, VP, Memory Marketing with Samsung Electronics)
“After accelerating the growth of the SSD market by last year’s launch of entry-level, high-performance SSDs we are introducing a much faster SSDs with up to 1TB capacities offering consumers a wider range of choices,” said Young-Hyun Jun, executive vice president, memory sales & marketing, Samsung Electronics. “Samsung continues to enhance its SSD brand image by delivering the industry’s highest quality solutions and continuously increasing its SSD market share by expanding the adoption of higher density SSDs especially in client PC segments”
The 1TB SATA SSD -Samsung SSD 840 EVO- will be shipped in early August.
The SSD 840 EVO comes complete with a collection of 128Gb NANA flash memory chips, its proprietary multi-core controller and software as well as firmware.
The XS1715, the industry’s first 2.5-inch NVMe SSD line-up will be available in the second half of this year.
The new NVMe SSD XS1715 delivers random read performance that is over 10 times faster than Samsung’s former high-end enterprise storage SSD.
The new NVMe SSD utilizes both the PCIe 3.0 interface, which is approximately two times faster than the PCIe 2.0 interface, and NVM express technology which accelerates the SSD’s overall speed.
Samsung created the industry’s first SATA-based SSDs for ultra-slim notebook PCs and enterprise servers. Now, Samsung continues to improve on this development, providing SATA, SAS, PCIe and NVMe SSD line-ups which complete the industry’s largest line-up of SSD products and solutions for enterprise use. This will lead to even faster replacement of HDDs across the industry.
Samsung has released the entry-level SSD '840 EVO' line-up with significantly higher sequential write performance. Utilizing the industry’s most compact 10nm-class 128Gb high-performance NAND, Samsung proprietary controller and Turbo Write drive, the Samsung SSD 840 EVO boasts superior performance. The Samsung SSD 840 EVO also has flexible product supply capacity, making it the most competitive device on the market today.
Compared with the 250GB 840 Series SSD, the highest selling capacity of the 840 lineup, the new 250GB 840 EVO now delivers 520MB/s sequential write speed – making it more than 2 times faster than last generation. In the case of 120GB model, the 840 EVO achieves 410MB/s sequential write speed, which is approximately 3 times as fast as that of the 120GB 840 Series SSD.
For the 1TB 840 EVO SSD, the sequential read/write performance has reached 540MB/s and 520MB/s. Furthermore, both the random read and write performance have achieved the highest level, reaching 98,000 IOPS (Input Output Operations Per Second) and 90,000 IOPS, respectively. This significantly enhances the user’s real-world computing experience, especially when he or she is dealing with very large data files.
The Samsung SSD 840 EVO line-up is available in five capacities: 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, 750GB, and 1TB, supporting a wide range of computing environments and IT applications. It has also significantly narrowed the capacity-induced differences in performance, which gives consumers a broader spectrum of devices to choose from.
Industry's first 2.5” 1.6 TB NVMe SSD for Next-Generation Enterprise Storage
Samsung has developed the industry’s first 2.5-inch (SFF-8639) NVM Express (NVMe) PCIe solid state drive (SSD), to open up the high-end enterprise storage market.
The newly developed high-speed 1.6TB NVMe SSD provides a sequential read speed at 3,000MB/s, which allows it to process 500GB of data (equivalent to 100 Full HD movies 5GB in length) in less than 3 minutes. When compared to other products with similar specifications, this new SSD is 14 times faster than a high-end enterprise HDD for server use, and six times faster than Samsung’s former high-end enterprise SSD storage.
The XS1715’s random read performance reaches up to 740,000 IOPS (Input Output Operations Per Second), which is more than 10 times as fast as existing high-end SSD storage options.
The new NVMe SSD XS1715 comes in 400GB, 800GB and 1.6TB versions. It can also be found on the NVMe Integrators List (IL), which makes it an easy-to-manage and highly reliable solution for data center and server storage customers. System performance can be improved dramatically by upgrading to the NVMe SSD XS1715 from a 2.5-inch HDD or a 2.5-inch SATA SSD.
Over the next several years, Samsung expects to continue to develop a variety of NVMe SSD products with increasingly high performance levels.
By strengthening its eco-friendly cooperation with global enterprise customers through the production of low-power (green) NVMe SSDs, Samsung will endeavor to help its server and storage customers maximize the efficiency of their IT investments.
Photos and Videos by JH Bae