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Samsung launches its first SSDs based on its Z-NAND memory

By Kenny Yeo - on 31 Jan 2018, 11:13am

Samsung launches its first SSDs based on its Z-NAND memory

(Image source: Samsung)

Samsung has been talking about its new Z-NAND memory for a while now and they have finally announced their first products to be based on this new memory.

The new drive, called the SZ985, is positioned as a high performance and high endurance NVMe-compliant drive for enterprise applications.

Samsung hasn't said much about how Z-NAND works, but the claimed performance figures are quite promising.

Using a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, the SZ985 will deliver sequential read and write speeds in excess of 3GB/s.

Random read performance is an impressive 750,000 IOPS, while random write performance is less so at 170,000 IOPs.

Z-NAND is positioned as a rival to Intel's 3D XPoint memory, so the important thing here is how does the SZ985 compare against the Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X that was launched early last year? Here's a table:

Samsung vs. Intel
Drive Samsung SZ985 Z-SSD Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X
Memory type Z-NAND 3D XPoint
Interface PCIe 3.0 x4 PCIe 3.0 x4
Sequential read/write 3.2 / 3.2 2.5 / 2.2
Random read/write 750,000 / 170,000 550,000 / 550,000
Write latency 16 microseconds 10 microseconds
Endurance 30 drive writes per day 30 drive writes per day
Capacity 240GB, 800GB 350GB, 700GB

As you can see, the Samsung SZ985's numbers are decent but nothing too groundbreaking. Random read performance is excellent and it trumps the Intel drive in terms of sequential performance, but its random write performance and write latency is lacking.

Still, it's good to see that Samsung has finally released its first Z-NAND SSD out in the market and it will be interesting to see if it will be coming to Samsung's consumer SSDs.

The Samsung SZ985 will be available in 240GB and 800GB capacities.

Pricing has yet to be announced, but Samsung will officially announce them at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference which will be held in mid-February.

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