Samsung rollsout 8TB SSD for data centres

Samsung Electronics has launched the industry’s highest capacity NVMe solid state drive (SSD) based on the Next-generation Small Form Factor (NGSFF) – an eight-terabyte (TB) NF1 SSD. The new 8TB NVMe NF1 SSD has been optimised for data-intensive analytics and virtualisation applications in next-generation data centres and enterprise server systems.

“By introducing the first NF1 NVMe SSD, Samsung is taking the investment efficiency in data centres 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 centres and enterprise systems by delivering storage solutions with unparalleled performance and density levels.”

The new SSD is built with 16 of Samsung’s 512GB NAND packages, each stacked in 16 layers of 256GB 3-bit V-NAND chips, achieving an 8TB density in a footprint of 11cm x 3.05cm. This is twice the capacity offered by the M.2 NVMe SSD (11cm x 2.2cm) commonly used in hyper-scale server designs and ultra-slim laptops. The NF1 SSD is expected to replace conventional 2.5-inch NVMe SSDs by enabling up to three times the system density in existing server infrastructure, allowing for an unprecedented 576TB of storage space in the latest 2U rack servers.

The NF1 SSD features a brand new, high-performance controller that supports the NVMe 1.3 protocol and PCIe 4.0 interface, delivering sequential read speeds of 3100MB/s and write speeds of 2000MB/s. These speeds are more than five times and three times that of a typical SATA SSD, respectively. Random speeds come in at 500,000 IOPS for reading operations and 50,000 IOPS for writes. Utilising the new NF1 storage solution, an enterprise server system can perform over one million IOPS in a 2U rack space, significantly claiming to enhance the return on investment for next-generation large-scale data centres. The SSD also includes a 12GB LPDDR4 DRAM to enable faster and more energy-efficient data processing.

To ensure long-term data reliability, the NF1 NVMe SSD has been designed with an endurance level of 1.3 drive write per day (DWPD), which guarantees writing an entire 8TB of data 1.3 times a day over its three-year warranty period.

Samsung plans to accompany its 256GB 3-bit V-NAND-based SSD with a 512GB version in the second half of this year to accommodate even faster processing for big data applications, while also accelerating the growth in next-generation enterprise and mid-market data centres.

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