Samsung said new software for its latest PCIe 4.0 SSDs make them so reliable, they can essentially “never die.”
Three new software features were announced in total, with two tied to data integrity: a virtualization technology dubbed “V-NAND machine learning technology” to verify data, and “fail-in-place.” Officials said FIP allows an SSD continue running normally even during chip-level failures.
Fail-in-place can detect a failed or failing NAND chip, check for damaged data, and then move that data to undamaged parts of the drive. Samsung cited its 30.72TB PM1733 SSD, which contains 512 NAND chips inside. If any of those 512 chips failed, lit would continue to roll along.
Yes, if you saw the 30.72TB capacity, you can guess the SSD isn’t intended to be sold to consumers. The PM1733 is a PCIe 4.0 drive, which mean it’s best paired with a newer AMD-based Epyc server that supports PCIe 4.0 speeds.
No price was announced for the PM1733 last month, but it’ll come in the U.2 form factor in capacities of 0.96TB, 1.92TB, 3.84TB, 7.68TB, 15.36TB and 30.72 TB.
Samsung will also offer an add-in board of Half Height, Half Length (HHHL) as well with lower capacities of 1.92TB, 3.84TB, 7.68TB and 15.36TB. The U.2 SSDs are rated at 6,400MBps reads and 3,800MBps writes. The HHHL cards are rated at 8,000MBps reads and 3,8000MBps writes. Samsung didn’t detail the performance advantage of the HHHL card but the connector looks to be a x8 PCIe 4.0 connection versus the standard x4 PCIe 4.0 of the U.2 drive.
Samsung will also offer another PCIE 4.0-based SSD called the PM1735 that will feature less capacity as the PM1733, but three times the drive writes per day.
Although none of the drives or software are aimed toward consumers, the fact that Samsung has PCIe 4.0 SSDs on tap for data center customers likely means a PCIe 4.0 consumer can’t be too far off.
Samsung