Samsung keeps raising the bar on storage capacity in its solid-state drives with a 3.2TB SSD, which is now in production.
The SM1715 drive is Samsung’s highest-capacity SSD to date, and is built for reliability and durability, Samsung said in a statement. Samsung didn’t provide either a price or shipment date for the 3.2TB drive, but the company usually ships SSDs months after they go into production.
Samsung’s previous highest-capacity SSD could store 1.6TB, but the SM1715, which is targeted at enterprise customers, will provide a speedier, power efficient and more reliable alternative.
SSDs are used by enterprises in storage arrays or as cache in servers where data is temporarily stored when being processed. The SM1715 drive will plug into the PCI-Express 3.0 slot, as opposed to the SATA interface for hard drives and older SSDs.
Samsung is leaning to transition over to the PCI-Express 3.0 for drives with capacity of more than 3TB. The PCI-Express drives are based on the NVMe (NVM Express) protocol, which is for high-speed SSDs.
The drive is made using Samsung’s latest 3D V-NAND technology, in which storage chips are placed on top of each other, much like a skyscraper. The storage chips are connected through a thin, high-speed connector called TSV (Thru Silicon Via). The technologies make the driver faster than traditional SSDs, in which storage chips are placed next to each other.
The SSD’s sequential read speed is 3,000 megabytes per second and write speed is 2,200 megabytes per second, according to Samsung’s measurements. The random read speed of the drive is 750,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) and write speed is 130,000 IOPS.
The SM1715 will also come with 1.6TB in storage capacity, Samsung said.