Samsung unveils 1Tb V-NAND chip for commercial SSDs
Samsung Electronics has developed a 1 terabit (Tb) V-NAND chip that will be used for commercial products launching next year, the company announced.
The South Korean tech giant will stack 16Tb dies for a single V-NAND package with memory capacity of 2 terabytes (TB), it said at the Flash Memory Summit in San Francisco.
Use of the packages will significantly increase the memory capacities of solid-state drives (SDD), it said.
Samsung also announced Next Generation Small Form Factor (NGSFF) SSD to replace the current M.2 SSD standard.
The firm is sampling a 16TB NGSFF SSD. It measures 30.5mm x 110mm x 4.38mm, allowing four times the memory capacity of a 1U chassis that uses M.2, or NGFF. This will allow datacenteres to utilize space better and hyper-scale, it said.
The company gave an example of a reference server system that delivers 576TB in a 1U rack, using 36 16TB NGSFF SSDs. Using 2U racks will achieve petabyte capacity.
The NGSFF SSD will begin production in the fourth quarter of the year and complete JEDEC standardization in the first quarter of 2018 for deployment.
Samsung also showed off SZ985, a SSD that uses its Z-SSD technology for datacentres and enterprise systems with extremely large, data-intensive tasks, such as real-time big data analytics and high-performance server caching. It has 15 microseconds of read latency time, around a seventh of an NVME SSD.
At the application level, "the use of Samsung's Z-SSDs can reduce system response time by up to 12 times, compared to using NVMe SSDs," Samsung added.
The company also introduced a new technology called Key Value SSD that, unlike conventional processes that turns data into blocks, assigns a key to specific data locations. It enables direct addressing of a data location which reduces redundant steps, leading to faster input/output and reduced costs.
In June, the company announced expanded availability of its 64-layer, 256-Gigabit V-NAND, its current main commercial supply.
The conglomerate is enjoying an all-time-high demand for its DRAM and NANDs, which helped triple profits of its semiconductor business for the second quarter this year.