Samsung Showcases New BGA, Enterprise And Consumer SSDs

Samsung has recently held its annual SSD Forum Japan, where the company showed off new high-performance client SSDs based on its Polaris controller and V-NAND memory, the M971 SSD that comes in a space-saving BGA form factor, as well as other new SSDs for OEMs and data centers. The SM961 and the PM961 drives will use Samsung's Polaris controller as well as V-NAND flash memory. Going into mass production next month, the new OEM SSD lineups from Samsung will come in M.2-2280 form-factor with PCIe 3.0 x4 interface while utilizing the NVMe protocol.

The SM961 will use 2bit MLC Samsung V-NAND memory and will be available in capacities of 128GB / 256GB / 512GB / 1TB. Compared to Samsung's previous Samsung promises that the SSD will increase sequential read speeds to 3200 MB/s and will also significantly boost random read and write performance - 4K random read up to 450,000 IOPS and 4K random write at 400,000 IOPS. For comparison, Samsung's previous SM951 model offers sequential reads up to 2,260MB/sec, sequential writes up to 1,600MB/sec and 4K random reads up to 300,000 IOPS.

The PM961 will use 3bit MLC V-NAND and again the Polaris controller. It will be available in capacities of 128GB / 256GB / 512GB / 1TB. Sequential reads will be up to 3,000MB/sec, sequential writes will be around 1,150MB / sec. Samsung also quoted 4K random reads at up to 360,000 IOPS and 4K random writes at up to 280,000 IOPS.

Thse SSDs are likely to appear in notebooks during the second half of 2016.

Samsung also revealed the PM871a and CM871a SATA 2.5" SSDs, both based on its new Samsung "Maia" controller.

The Samsung CM871a OEM SSD will be based on Samsung’s 16nm TLC NAND. The drive is rated for maximum sequential read speed of up to 535 MB/s as well as sequential write speed of up to 215 MB/s in default mode or up to 515 MB/s with TurboWrite technology active.
The CM871a uses part of the non-volatile memory in SLC mode for rapid caching. The CM871a will offer up to 97K random read IOPS as well as up to 59K random write IOPs.

Samsung will release its CM871a in 128 GB and 256 GB configurations.

The Samsung PM871a will use the Maia controller alongside 3bit MLC V-NAND memory. The drive has maximum sequential read speed of up to 530 MB/s and maximum sequential write speed of up to 515 MB/s (or up to 526 MB/s with TurboWrite). Random read performance of the PM871a is up to 97K, whereas random write performance of the drive is up to 88K IOPS. Samsung will release the PM871a SSDs in 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB and 1 TB configurations.

The second half of 2016 will also see the release of the BGA SSD "PM971". Solid-state drives in BGA (ball-grid array) packaging are smaller than SSDs in M.2 form-factor.

Baed on the new "Photon" controller, the PM971 uses 3bit MLC V-NAND flash memory as well as a DRAM cache.

Samsung plans to offer three versions of the SSD, featuring 128 GB, 256 GB, and 512 GB capacities. The PM971 SSD supports sequential read speed of up to 1500 MB/s as well as sequential write speed of up to 600 MB/s. The PM971 SSD can alo give 190K random read IOPS as well as up to 150K random write IOPS.

The PM971 will be used in tablets and 2-in-1 hybrid PCs in the second half of 2016.

Samsung also announced new SSDs for the enterprise / data center market.

The "PM1725" (HHHL) uses 3bit MLC V-NAND and will be availabe in 1.6TB / 3.2TB / 6.4TB versions. It has a PCI Expres 3.0 x8 interface and Samsung rates it for sequential reads of up to 5,000MB / sec, sequential writes of up to 1,800MB / sec, 4K random reads up to one million IOPS, while it also boasts 4K random writes at 120,000 IOPS.

The "SM1725" is also a super-fast SSD (HHHL) equipped with a 2bit MLC V-NAND. Samsung wil release two models --1.6TB / 3.2TB. Sequential reads reach up to 3,000MB / sec, sequential write are up to 2,200MB / sec, 4K random reads are 750,000 IOPS and 4K random writes are 185,000IOPS.