Samsung today announced an 8TB NVMe SSD that comes in the Next Generation 'NF1' small form factor. The drives are targeted at data-intensive analytics and virtualization applications in next-generation data centers and enterprise server systems.
The most interesting part of this SSD is its form-factor. Although 8TB SSDs are still relatively rare, an 8TB that measures 11cm x 3.05cm is a great achievement from Samsung. The Korean electronics giant has fitted 16 NAND chips with a capacity of 512GB on that small area.
Each chip consists of 16 layers of 256 Gigabit TLC NAND, and the company hopes to be able to double that later this year to 512 Gigabit for a 16TB drive.
The NF1 SSD features a new, high-performance controller that supports the NVMe 1.3 protocol and PCIe 4.0 interface. Samsung specifies sequential read speeds of up to 3,100MB/s and write speeds of up to 2,000MB/s. Random speeds come in at 500,000 IOPS for read operations and 50,000 IOPS for random writes. The drive also has 12GB LPDDR4-DRAM cache.
The Next Generation Small Form Factor (NGSFF) is the latest SSD standard which is expected to be standardized by JEDEC in October. It succeeds the M.2 standard and can more than double the space utilization within server systems. Samsung claims that 576TB of storage space in the latest 2U rack servers can be achieved by combining 72 of these new NGSFF 8TB drives.
Unfortunately, the company has not provided any information on availability and pricing.
