Samsung intros the first NF1 NVMe SSD

Samsung Electronics has taken another step forward in the field of enterprise storage thanks to the new 8TB NVMe NF1 SSD. According to the company, this drive is "the industry’s highest capacity NVMe solid state drive (SSD) based on the incredibly small Next-generation Small Form Factor (NGSFF)" and has been optimized for virtualization and data-intensive analytics apps in enterprise server systems and data centers.

The new drive is built using 16 512-GB NAND packages, each of these being stacked in 16 layers of 256 Gb 3-bit V-NAND chips. The result is a data density of 8 TB in an 11 x 3.05 cm footprint. The M.2 NVMe solution currently used in ultra-slim laptops and server applications provides about half the storage for a size of 11 x 2.2 cm.

In terms of performance, the NF1 SSD delivers up to 3,100 MB/s sequential read and 2,000 MB/s write speeds. The random speeds hit 500,000 IOPS (read) and 50,000 IOPS (write). The NF1 NVMe SSD can achieve these new highs thanks to the brand-new controller with NVMe 1.3 and PCIe 4.0 support combined with 12 GB LPDDR4 DRAM cache memory.

The NGSFF standard is the direct successor of the rather popular M.2 standard, providing more than twice the storage capacity for the same physical space occupied within a computer system. Also referred to as NF1, the new standard is expected to be standardized by JEDEC in October.

In the second half of the year, Samsung is expected to double the capacity of this storage solution. Designed with an endurance level of 1.3 drive writes per day over the three-year warranty period, the NF1 NVMe SSD might not reach the average consumer anytime soon. Sadly, Samsung has not revealed any information about the availability and pricing of this new piece of hardware, but we will let you know as soon as we find out anything new.