Samsung Announces A Trifecta Of NVMe SSDs

Hot on the heels of its 256Gb TLC 3D NAND announcement, Samsung is unveiling a trio of new NVMe solid-state drive families. First up is the PM953, which is an update to the popular SM951 drive. We don’t have performance numbers for comparison, but the PM953 will be a NVMe capable drive at launch, which should alleviate a lot of the guesswork interested SM951 buyers had to endure. The PM953 will be available in both 2.5” SATA Express (480GB, 960GB, and 1.92TB) and M.2 (480GB, 960GB) form-factors. Even though the drive still targets OEM and business customers, consumers will now have at least one high-performance option for that dusty SATA Express port.

The PM1633 is the second drive announced and comes packing a 12Gb/s SAS interface. The drive is rated for 160,000 random IOPS and 18,000 write IOPS with both sequential read and write speeds over 1GB/s. The drives will range from 480GB all the way up to 3.84TB.

Last up we have the PM1725 which is a half-height, half-length PCIe NVMe drive available in a whopping 3.2TB and 6.4TB flavors. A 2.5” device is hinted at as well, but no details on the interface are provided. Given the performance and NVMe pedigree, odds are it will utilize the SFF-8639 connector which has been officially branded the “U.2” connector (think of it as a x4 lane SATA Express). The PM1725’s performance is even more astonishing than its massive capacity, offering one million read IOPS and random writes of 12,000 IOPS. For throughput numbers its rated at 5.5 gigabytes per second reads and 1.8 gigabytes per second writes.

As was previously the case, none of these drives are being marketed directly to consumers, but that likely will not deter third party OEMs from doing so. As such prices and warranty lengths are not mentioned, but given the size of the PM1725 and its performance, perhaps its best we don’t know.