VMworld Samsung is showing off a monster million IOPS SSD that can pump out read data at 6.4 gigabytes/sec 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 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 – 64Gbit/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.

Samsung PM1725a

Performance data:

• 2.5-inch (dual-port)
• • Random read/write IOPS – to 800,000/160,000
  • Sequential read/write bandwidth – to 3.3/2.9 GB/sec
• HHHL PCIe AIC (Add-in Card)
• • Random read/write IOPS – to 1,050,000/160,000
  • Sequential read/write bandwidth – to 6.4/2.9 GB/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. ®

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