Samsung Displays New 3D V-NAND Based Enterprise SSDs at CES 2015
by Kristian Vättö on January 15, 2015 4:00 AM EST
Along with the release of the SM951 PCIe SSD, Samsung had several new enterprise SSDs on display at the show. The PM863 and SM863 are SATA 6Gbps drives and pack a new Mercury controller (unfortunately I don't have any specifics at this point), but what's intriguing is the available capacities. The PM863 with 32-layer 128Gbit TLC NAND comes in up to 3.84TB capacity in 2.5" form factor, whereas the SM863 with 32-layer 86Gbit MLC NAND offers a half of that (i.e. 1.92TB). Sustained 4KB random write performance is a decent 15K IOPS for the PM863 and 20K for the SM863, but there is no word about endurance at this point.
In addition to SATA drives, Samsung showed off three new SAS drives with new REX controller and 3D V-NAND. Capacities are once again impressive with the PM1633 packing up to 3.84TB in 2.5" and thanks to the SAS 12Gbps interface sequential performance is doubled compared to the SATA 6Gbps drives.
And lastly, Samsung also displayed the enterprise version of the SM951 i.e. the SM953. The change compared to the SM951 is M.2 22110 form factor to fit the capacitor on the PCB for power-loss protection, but otherwise the SM953 shares the same core hardware. The firmware is obviously enterprise-oriented with focus on sustained figures, hence the slightly lower performance specs.
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Greg100 - Thursday, January 15, 2015 - link
YES, YES, YES!!!!! PM863 - 3.84TB capacity in 2.5" form factor!!!!! I will buy two and will say bye to all my HDDs :-)bill.rookard - Thursday, January 15, 2015 - link
I don't even want to know what those will cost. But I eagerly await the consumer version at the equivalent size. :) 4tb SSD drives would be wonderful in my NAS, assuming of course that they're priced reasonably.SleepyFE - Thursday, January 15, 2015 - link
I don't use the computer for much more than games so i have to ask. Does that make sense? Isn't the 1Gb ethernet a bottleneck? Do you really need an SSD where you can't even make full use of an HDD?Shadowmaster625 - Friday, January 16, 2015 - link
There is no consumer NAS that would benefit from an SSD. Yes, its just a waste of money. There is no household usage scenario where a 4TB SSD could possibly be anything but a waste of money. You'd need at least 20 users hitting that thing before it made sense.Solandri - Friday, January 16, 2015 - link
My NAS does double-duty as my virtual machine server. It's great for off-loading battery-consuming and heat-generating tasks like video re-encoding from my laptop (what I use around the house), as well as making sure the browser I use for my banking isn't infected by some web-based malware. It also lets me "run" modern software on ancient hardware I still have (just use remote desktop). It has a 512 GB SSD right now, but I'd been thinking of bumping it up to 1 TB. It's good to know 4 TB will be available down the road.Even without virtual machines, using a SSD as cache or even raw storage on a NAS makes sense in certain cases. Most HDDs can only manage 1 MB/s (if that) at 4k read/writes. Add to that the overhead of iSCSI or Samba and networking, and you're down around 0.5 MB/s. I tried offloading some of my game installations to my NAS and this was the bottleneck I ran into, not gigabit ethernet (125 MB/s). Some of the load times were 3-4 minutes for things that would load in 15-20 sec on a local SSD. I tested one game on a 128 GB partition I have on my NAS SSD for fast storage, and it went back to about 30-45 seconds.
bsd228 - Wednesday, January 21, 2015 - link
There is tremendous gains from SSD caching, particularly for small writes/reads. IOPS go from hundreds to thousands. And if your workload was heavily biased towards random access (db type stuff), clear win. If we're talking about 4TB ssd to stream movies and mp3s, yes, you're correct. Not compelling until the price is closer and the power/compactness factors get on top.For the people doing video editing and can run a faster pipe (10G pci cards as low as $200), it would allow for mirrored SSDs rather than 4+ stripe R0 arrays.
Romulous - Thursday, January 15, 2015 - link
It would not make any sense in a nas unless it's 10gbehojnikb - Thursday, January 15, 2015 - link
FYI you could get sandisk optimus in 4TB capacity for quite some time now.Greg100 - Thursday, January 15, 2015 - link
In Germany SanDisk Optimus MAX 4TB, SAS 6Gb/s (SDLLOCDR-038T-5CA1) is 4678EUR, but:Samsung SSD PM853T 960GB, SATA 6Gb/s (MZ7GE960HMHP) is 538EUR
So… I would expect PM863 - 3.84TB about 2000EUR.
danjw - Thursday, January 15, 2015 - link
Any idea when we will start seeing SATA Express (SATAe) drives? Intel bet on the technology when they released PCHs that supported it. But, as far as I can see, no one is shipping actual drives.