Samsung has announced that it is shipping a 2.5-inch form factor 30.72 TB Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSD. Samsung made this SSD by combining 32 of its new 1TB NAND flash packages, each with 16 stacked layers of 512Gb V-NAND chips. Performance of these drives are nearly twice its prior generation product. With a 12 Gb/s SAS interface the PM1643 drives offers random read and write speeds of up to 400,000 IOPS and 50,000 IOPS respectively and sequential read and write speeds up to 2.1 GB/s and 1.7 Gb/s respectively.

The new drive combines nine flash controllers from the previous high-capacity SSD family into a single package, saving extra space for storage.  The PM1643 drive also applies Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology to interconnect 8Gb DDR4 chips, creating 10 4GB TSV DRAM packages, totaling 40GB of DRAM.  Samsung says that this is the first time that TSV has been used in an SSD.  In addition to the 15.72 TB drive the company will offer this product family with 15.36TB, 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB and 800GB versions.

Samsung introduced 15.36 TB SSDs with its 32-layer technology in early 2016.  At the 2017 Flash Memory Summit Samsung announced that it would be possible to build 128 TB SSDs using a 32-die stack of 1 Tb QLC NAND.

Intel introduced its DC P4510 and P4511 Series SSDs for data centers.  The P4510 Series uses 64-layer TLC 3D NAND.  It enables up to four times more terabytes per server and delivers up to 10 times better random read latency at 99.99% QoS than previous generations. The drive can also deliver up to double the IO/s/TB. The 1 and 2TB capacities have been shipping to CSPs in volume since August 2017 and the 4 and 8TB capacities are available to CSPs and channel customers. All capacities are in the 2.5-inch 15mm U.2 form factor and utilize a PCIe NVMe 3.0 x4 connection.

To accelerate performance and simplify management of the P4510 Series PCIe SSDs, and other PCIe SSDs, Intel is also delivering two new technologies that work together to replace legacy storage hardware. Xeon Scalable processors include Intel Volume Management Device (VMD), enabling management such as surprise insertion/removal and LED management of PCIe SSDs directly connected to the CPU.  According to the company, Intel Virtual RAID on CPU (VROC) uses VMD to provide RAID to PCIe SSDs. By replacing RAID cards with VROC, customers are able to enjoy up to twice the IO/s performance and up to a 70% cost savings with PCIe SSDs directly attached to the CPU, improving customer's ROI in SSD-based storage.

The firm is also bringing innovation to the data center with new low-power SSDs and the Enterprise and Datacenter SSD Form Factor (EDSFF, also called ‘ruler’), introduced at the 2017 Flash Memory Summit. The SSD DC P4511 Series offers a low-power option for workloads with lower performance requirements, thus enabling data centers to save power. The P4511 Series will be available later in the first half of 2018 in M.2 110mm form factor.

Intel also said that its EDSFF SSD  is available for PCIe 3.0 today and version 4.0 and 5.0 when they are ready.  Intel says that the new form factor delivers storage density, system design flexibility with long and short versions, thermal efficiency, scalable performance (available x4, x8 and x16 connectors) and easy maintenance, with front-load, hot-swap capabilities.

Recently, the Enterprise and Datacenter SSD Form Factor specification was ratified by the EDSFF Working Group, which includes Intel, Samsung, Microsoft, Facebook and others. Intel has been shipping a pre-spec version of the SSD DC P4500 Series to select customers, including IBM and Tencent, for more than a year, and the SSD DC P4510 Series will be available in EDSFF 1U long and 1U short starting in the second half of this year.

In separate flash memory news Toshiba Memory Corp. say that it would invest 27B Yen in its Fab 6 to boost output of 3D BiCS chips.  Fab 6 is scheduled for completion by the end of 2018.  The new investment will cover essential equipment for the fab, including a clean room air conditioning system.

As the price of flash storage declines various flash devices and form factors will find their way into more primary storage applications in data centers with options for high capacity and high performance.

Tom Coughlin consults and writes on digital storage and applications.  He is chairman of the Storage Visions and Creative Storage Conferences, tomcoughlin.com