Samsung announced that it is shipping its new enterprise Z-SSDs, which come with a radical new flavor of existing NAND technology, in 800GB and 240GB capacity points.
Samsung designed the new Z-SSD to tkae on Intel and Micron’s 3D XPoint memory. However, 3D XPoint is a completely new type of memory that has only surfaced in Intel’s relatively expensive Optane products, while Samsung’s Z-SSD comes with Z-NAND, which is a heavily modified version of existing NAND technology. That should ostensibly provide faster performance than normal SSDs but at a lower price point.
| Samsung SZ985 Z-NAND SSD | Intel Optane (3D XPoint) | Samsung PM1725a | Intel DC P3700 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Interface | PCIe 3.0 x4 | PCIe 3.0 x4 | PCIe 3.0 x8 | PCIe 3.0 x4 |
| Media | Z-NAND | 3D XPoint | 48-layer 3D TLC NAND | 20nm MLC NAND |
| Sequential Read/Write (GB/s) | 3.2 / 3.2 | 2.4 / 2 | 6.4 / 3 | 2.8 / 2 |
| Random Read/Write IOPS | 750,000 / 170,000 | 550,000 / 500,000 | 1,080,000* / 170,000 | 460,000 / 175,000 |
| Random Read Latency | 12 – 20µs | 10µs | 90µs | 115µs |
| Random Write Latency (typ) | 16µs | 10µs | 20µs | 25µs |
| Drive Writes Per Day (DWPD) | 30 | 30 | 5 | 17 |
| Capacity | 800GB | 350 / 750GB | 1.6 / 3.2 / 6.4TB | 400 – 800GB / 1.6 – 2TB |
Samsung hasn’t shared pricing for the new drives yet, but it will introduce them at the ISSCC 2018 (International Solid-State Circuits Conference), which will be held February 11-15 in San Francisco.
