14 DAY TRIAL // Solid-state drives can take more shapes than hard drives, meaning that they can be tailored in such a way that they work better than their alternatives in certain scenarios. Samsung is proving this with the SM843 and SM1625. The SM843 and SM1625 aren't, design-wise, all that different from all the other solid-state drives people are used to. They aren't PCI Express models or anything else of the sort.
They even have the SATA/SAS interface, PCI Express or anything else of exclusive enterprise use, and their storage capacity is owed to MLC NAND Flash chips (multi-level cell).
They still have superior endurance to normal MLC SSDs though: 1064TBW (terabytes written) versus 60TBW.
The SM1625 is intended for external storage systems in data centers and such. Its capacity can be of 100 GB, 200 GB, 400 GB or 800 GB.
The performance is of 848/740 MB/s sequential, thanks to the existence of two SAS ports instead of just one. On that note, the random read/write performance is of 101,000/41,000 IOPS.
The other SSD, SM843, is a SATA unit of 120 GB, 240 GB or 480 GB. Its performance is of 520/420 MB/s read/write (sequential) and should be good for energy-efficient installations, as its power draw is 28% below that of older Samsung enterprise SSDs.
“Samsung's new data center and enterprise SSDs deliver extremely high performance with low power consumption in providing the most efficient storage solutions for data center applications,” said Myungho Kim, vice president of memory marketing, device solutions, Samsung Electronics.
Both the SM843 and SM1625 are being mass-produced out of 20nm NAND Flash memory chips. Their prices haven't been disclosed though, although that is a minor enough issue. Since these products will be ordered in large quantities, companies will have to negotiate with Samsung for a good deal.