Samsung launches 800 GB ultra-low latency SSD for supercomputing

While NVMe SSDs are very fast storage solutions, some applications need even more. For such demanding tasks, Samsung has just introduced the SZ985 Z-SSD, a solid state drive that has a latency of just 16 ns, thus being five times faster at accessing data when compared to an NVMe SSD PM963.

The 800 GB SZ985 Z-SSD features Z-NAND chips that are 10 times faster when reading than 3-bit V-NAND chips, as well as a high-performance controller and 1.5 GB LPDDR4 cache memory. The Samsung SZ985 can hit a random read performance of 750K IOPS and a random write speed of up to 170K IOPS.

Next to performance, reliability is also a must-have for high-end storage solutions. In this case, the SZ985 is guaranteed to handle up to 30 drive writes per day for five years. The total amount of data that results is an impressive 42 PB or around 8.4 million full HD movies of about 5 GB each. 

At last, the mean time between failures value is also very good, but the 2,000,000 hours MTBF is not as impressive as all the other figures we mentioned earlier.

According to the official press release, Samsung will bring the 800 GB Z-SSD and a 240 GB variant to the ISSCC 2018 tech show that is scheduled to take place in San Francisco starting February 11. There is no information about pricing yet, but do not expect this enterprise product to come cheap as long as Samsung advertises it as a solution "for the most advanced enterprise applications including supercomputing for AI analysis."