Samsung 8TB SSD Based on NF1 Form Factor Launched for Data Centres

Samsung Electronics has launched an 8TB solid state drive (SSD) based on NF1 form factor for data centres. The South Korean electronics giant says that it is the industry's highest capacity NVMe solid state drive (SSD) based on the next-generation Small Form Factor (NGSFF). Samsung claims that 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. The world's biggest maker of memory chips' has seen business going well, helping the company post record profits. It had recently started mass producing the industry's first 16Gb, 64GB DDR4 RDIMM (registered dual in-line memory module).

Coming to the new SSD by Samsung, it is built with 16 of the company's 512GB NAND packages, each stacked in 16 layers of 256Gb 3-bit V-NAND chips. This method, Samsung says, helps in achieving an 8TB density in an ultra-small footprint of 11x3.05cm. It has double the capacity offered by the M.2 NVMe SSD that is used in hyper-scale server designs and slim laptops. Samsung says that the new NF1 SSD will replace conventional 2.5-inch NVMe SSDs by enabling up to three times the system density in existing server infrastructure that will allow 576TB of storage space in the latest 2U rack servers.

The NF1 SSD comes with a new, high-performance controller that supports the NVMe 1.3 protocol and PCIe 4.0 interface. It delivers sequential read speeds of 3,100MBps and write speeds of 2,000MBps. The company claims that it is able to reach over five times and three times the speed compared to that of a typical SATA SSD, respectively. Additionally, random speeds come in at 500,000 IOPS for read operations and 50,000 IOPS for writes, claims Samsung.

Samsung says an enterprise server system can perform over one million IOPS in a 2U rack space by leveraging the new NF1 storage solution. The company believes that this will significantly enhance the return on investment for next-generation large-scale data centres.

Notably, the SSD also includes 12GB of LPDDR4 DRAM to enable faster and more energy-efficient data processing. For long-term data reliability, the NF1 NVMe SSD has been designed with an endurance level of 1.3 drive write per day (DWPD). It guarantees writing an entire 8TB of data 1.3 times a day over its three-year warranty period, Samsung claims.

Meanwhile, Samsung is also planning to accompany its 256Gb 3-bit V-NAND-based SSD with a 512Gb version in the second half of 2018, to accommodate faster processing for big data applications.

"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."