Samsung Demos Its Blazing Fast PM1725 PCIe SSD

We covered the press release of the impressive PM1725 before, but it is certainly something else to see it in action as HotHardware managed to do!

The PM1725 certainly lives up to the hype: at 5,689MB/s read in Iometer, the drive is actually seen exceeding its 5.5GB/s label rating.  The PCIe 3.0 x8 NVMe solid-state drive is rated for 1 million read IOPS and 120,000 write IOPS, with a 1.8GB/s write rating. Speaking of ratings, did we mention that the 6.4TB model is rated for 32TB of writes per day for five years?

Credit: HotHardware

Still no pricing information is known, but the PM1725 will be available in 3.2TB and 6.4TB models and is already shipping to OEMs and system integrators. Unfortunately, consumers will have an easier time procuring the closely related PCIe 950 Series Samsung drives instead; regardless of the smaller capacities, they will doubtlessly be much more affordable.

HotHardware also snapped a photo of a PM1633a SSD. From the outside it appears to be a typical nondescript 3.5” drive, but inside is a whopping 16TB of flash memory. Like the PM1725, it is utilizing Samsung’s latest gen 3D V-NAND flash memory. Again no word on pricing, but we would hazard a guess that a brick of gold would be roughly equivalent to the drive’s volume.

As one might expect, the standard SATA cable won’t suffice. Similar to the 3.5” Intel 750 SSDs, this one utilizes the SFF-8639 connector, which itself was recently renamed to the “U.2” connector as a more consumer friendly name, and as a play off of the currently popular M.2 connector on modern motherboards. Both the M.2 and U.2 connectors both can provide up to 4GB/s via a PCie 3.0 x4 link, but the U.2 connector combines a power connector with the M.2 interface and as such cannot be plugged directly into the vast majority of consumer motherboards without an adapter. That said, ASRock has apparently created such a thing on its Z170 boards, so perhaps some enterprising individuals could make the PM1633a work for them after all.