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Samsung is announcing an 800GB SSD, designated as the SZ985 Z-SSD™, geared toward the most advanced enterprise applications. This includes the rapidly growing fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and supercomputing. The 800GB Z-SSD was developed in 2017, providing the most efficient storage solution for these type of applications, as well as those that utilize high-speed data caching and/or log data processing.
Samsung’s latest, a single port, four-lane Z-SSD features Z-NAND chips that offer 10 X the cell read performance of 3-bit V-NAND chips. The Z-SSD also utilizes a 1.5GB LPDDR4 DRAM chip and a high-performance controller to generate 1.7 X the random read performance (up to 750,000 IOPS!) and 5 X less write latency (16µs) than the 3-bit V-NAND NVMe SSD PM963. The Z-SSD also provides random write speeds of up to 170,000 IOPS.
According to Jinman Han, Samsung’s senior vice president of Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering, “With our leading-edge 800GB Z-SSD, we expect to contribute significantly to market introductions of next-generation supercomputing systems in the near future, enabling improved IT investment efficiency and exceptional performance. We will continue to develop next-generation Z-SSDs with higher density and greater product competitiveness, in order to lead the industry in accelerating growth of the premium SSD market.”
The 800GB Z-SSD offers high reliability, guaranteeing up to 30 drive writes per day (DWPD) for five years, totaling 42 petabytes. This is the equivalent of storing a total of nearly 8.4 million 5GB-sized full-HD movies during a five-year period. This is further underscored by the Z-SSD’s mean time between failures (MTBF) of 2,000,000 hours.
Samsung will be introducing the new Z-SSD in both 240GB and 800GB models, as well as related technologies at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2018) in San Francisco from February 11th through February 15th.
This is going to be a very interesting showdown between Intel’s 900p. If Samsung can bring this 800GB drive at $600 which is what the 480GB 900p is going for right now, this may sell like hot cakes.
(I’m not too sure how many people are buying the 280GB 900p’s and we will see how well the even lower capacity 240GB ZDrives will do.)
The Samsung 960 Pro 1TB is going for about $632 so my wild guess at $600 for the ZDrive is not completely arbitrary.
Thanks for the article Mr. Strong.