After introducing two new 970 Pro and 970 EVO SSDs to the general public last month, Samsung is once again announcing a new product, this time for data centers.
For this new output, the South Korean manufacturer has a SSD format even smaller than the SSD M.2. It is an NVMe SSD in NGSFF format (for Next Generation Small Form Factor) with a storage capacity of 8 TB (terabytes). Note that NGSFF is a new connector and daughter card format that is expected to be standardized by the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) in October, according to Samsung. It replaces the M.2 standard by incorporating the advantages of the U.2 and M.2 standard and backwards compatibility with the M.2 devices.
According to Samsung's announcement, the new 8 TB NVMe NF1 SSD is the SSD with the highest capacity on the market based on this new NGSFF format (still called NF1). It consists of 16 NAND chips of 512 GB, each stacked in 16 layers of V-NAND 3-bit chips of 256 GB for a size of 11 cm x 3.05 cm. According to Samsung, "This is twice the capacity offered by NVMe M.2 SSDs (11 cm x 2.2 cm) commonly used in hypersal server design and ultra-thin laptops". Because of these advantages, the South Korean manufacturer argues that these SSDs NF1 should "quickly and easily replace conventional 2.5-inch NVMe SSDs".
As additional features, the 8M NVMe NF1 SSD features a new high-performance controller that supports the NVMe 1.3 protocol and the PCIe 4.0 interface. For reading and writing, it offers sequential speeds of 3,100 MB / s (megabytes per second) and 2,000 MB / s, respectively. In terms of random performance, it delivers a reading speed of 500,000. IOPS for read operations and 50,000 IOPS for writes. To keep its promises in reading and writing, it also includes a 12 GB LPDDR4 DRAM memory. In addition, to ensure long-term data reliability, Samsung announces that the NVMe NF1 SSD was designed with a level of endurance 1.3 Write per day (DWPD), which would guarantee the writing of 8TB of data 1.3 times a day, thus exceeding the three-year warranty period.
With these features, Samsung estimates that the "8MB NVMe NF1 SSD has been optimized for data-intensive analytics and virtualization applications in next-generation data centers and enterprise server systems." According to the manufacturer, up to 72 NF1 SSDs could be used in 2U servers in order to have the highest storage density (576 TB) in this type of server.
For those who would have been conquered by this new SSD format, Samsung plans to release a version of 512 GB in the second quarter in addition to this V-NAND 3-bit version of 256 GB.
