14 DAY TRIAL // We've seen some weird things over the years, and some really big breakthroughs too, especially on the NAND Flash storage market, and it is precisely a NAND Flash milestone that we are looking at now.
The product in the photo up on the left is the Samsung XS1715, which just so happens to be “the industry's first 2.5-inch (SFF-8639) NVM Express (NVMe) PCIe solid state drive (SSD).”
That's a tall claim, but one we can safely say is accurate, and it's actually just half the full story.
The performance is the other half. Sure, it can be guessed at based on the name and type of device, but we doubt many people would hit the jackpot if they were to hold a betting pool.
Not only does the drive have a capacity of 1.6 TB, but it can process data at 3,000 MB/s, which means that 500 GB of data (100 Full HD movies in 5 GB length) can be processed in under 3 minutes.
That makes the SSD 14 times faster than high-end enterprise server HDDs, and six times faster than the former top-tier Samsung enterprise SSD.
Meanwhile, the random 4K performance is 10 times that of existing high-end SSDs, of 740,000 IOPS (Input Output Operations Per Second).
Sure that's just the upper limit, but even the lower-capacity models (400 GB, 800 GB) will work quickly.
All in all, the XS1715 is scary, double so when taking into account Samsung's plans to develop even better NVMe SSD products over the next few years. The corporation even intends to make them more eco-friendly.
Sadly, Samsung did not specify any price tags in the press release. No doubt the costs will be subject to negotiation, based on quantity and customer fidelity, or lack thereof.
Samsung's SSD web page has more information, or will have more information soon, on the XS1715, just like with the 1 TB 840 EVO SATA model.