14 DAY TRIAL // Solid state drives may not normally have what it takes to match hard disk drives in terms of storage capacity, or at least maximum capacity, but there are some exceptions. Samsung has just released one such exception.
Called SM1715, the new SSD is of the NVMe PCIe variety, which means that it features the PCI Express card form factor.
PCI Express solid state drives have the room needed to integrate more than the normal share of NAND chips found in storage devices.
Also, since the PCI Express interface is so much faster than SATA, the performance is leagues above the norm as well.
The only drawback is that PCI Express SSDs aren't aimed at consumer systems very often. Indeed, the NVMe variety (Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification) is made for high-density applications like servers, data centers, etc.
The Samsung SM1715 NVMe PCIe SSD
The storage device features the 3D V-NAND in an HHHL (half-height, half-length) card-type form factor, one that belongs to Samsung alone.
It offers 3.2 TB of full storage space, which is twice as much as the previous best record on the company's part, for this technology anyway, which was 1.6 TB.
The drive can attain an astounding performance of 3 GB/s, if you can believe it, and 2.2 GB/s writing speed, which is still colossal. After all, we're, even now, at the stage where 1.8 GB/s is considered very fast, even among solid state memory devices.
On that note, the random performance is of up to 750,000 read IOPS (input output operations per second) and up to 130,000 write IOPS.
Now if only we could say that the new product also sells for a pittance, the winning formula would be complete. Alas, we don't know the price, since Samsung chose not to include it in its press release, and it's probably subject to a lot of provider-customer haggling anyway. Dependent on shipment size and a host of other factors too.
Availability
The Samsung SM1715 should already be available, and if you think it's too capacious there are 1.6 TB and 800 GB models as well. Not sure if those two have the same reliability as the flagship though (ten drive writes per day).
Samsung intends to release NVMe PCI Express SSDs of even greater performance, density, and reliability over the next few months, and keep doing so indefinitely. Now if only SATA consumer units managed to start packing more than 960 GB – 1 TB, the winning equation would be complete.