Samsung Shows Off A Z-SSD: With New Z-NAND
by Ian Cutress on March 17, 2017 4:00 PM EST
As the sort of person that can get addicted to deep technology discussions about the latest thing, without due care and attention I could easily fall into the pit of storage related technologies. From the storage bits through to software defined cache hierarchy, there is so much to learn and to talk about. Over the last two years, unless you were living under a rock, it would have been hard to miss the level of attention that Intel's 3D XPoint technology (a co-venture with Micron) has been getting. Billed as a significant disruption to the storage market, and claiming an intersection between DRAM and SSDs as a form of non-volatile storage, many column inches have been devoted to the potential uses of 3D XPoint. Despite all this talk, and promises that Intel's Super 7 partners are well under way with qualifying the hardware in their datacenters, we are yet to actually see it come to market - or even be actively demonstrated in any sizeable volume at a trade show. We're expecting more information this year, but while everyone is waiting, Samsung has snuck up behind everyone with their new Z-SSD product line.
The Z-SSD line was announced back at Flash Memory Summit, although details were scant. This was a PCIe NVMe storage technology using Samsung's new 'Z-NAND', which was aimed at the intersection between DRAM and SSDs (sounds like 3D XPoint?). Z-NAND is ultimately still baked in as NAND, although designed differently to provide better NAND characteristics. We still don't know the exact way this happens - some analysts have pointed to this being 3D NAND/V-NAND running in SLC mode, given some of the performance metrics, but this is still unknown.
At Cloud Expo Europe, Samsung had a Z-SSD on display and started talking numbers, if not the technology itself. The first drive for select customers to qualify will be 800GB in a half-height PCIe 3.0 x4 card. Sequential R/W will be up to 3.2 GBps, with Random R/W up to 750K/160K IOPS. Latency (presumably read latency) will be 70% lower than current NVMe drives, partially due to the new NAND but also a new controller, which we might hear about during Samsung's next tech day later this year. We are under the impression that the Z-NAND will also have high endurance, especially if it comes down to fewer bits per cell than current NAND offerings, but at this point it is hard to tell.
Initial reports indicated that Samsung was preparing 1TB, 2TB and 4TB drives under the Z-SSD banner. At present only the 800GB is on the table, which if we take into account overprovisioning might just be the 1TB drive anyway. Nothing was said about other capacities or features, except that the customers Samsung is currently dealing with are very interested in getting their hands on the first drives.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
91 Comments
View All Comments
eddman - Friday, March 17, 2017 - link
This is anandtech, not infowars.fanofanand - Monday, March 20, 2017 - link
Infowars is at least right half the time, bad example to give.Reflex - Monday, March 20, 2017 - link
Um, say what?aryonoco - Saturday, March 18, 2017 - link
It's so sad when a commenter whom I generally respect on technical matters turns out to be so misinformed about the word.South Korea is an amazing success story, both for the people of Korea, as well as the United States and its allies who spent so much blood, sweat and tears to defend it.
South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, these are Asia's success stories of the 20th century. Successes that illustrate that the post war world order was good for everyone, unlike what the populists want you to believe today.
aryonoco - Saturday, March 18, 2017 - link
Word = World.Maybe one day AT would ley e edit my comments. Maybe.
ddriver - Saturday, March 18, 2017 - link
On the contrary, I am more informed than I am supposed to be. And what is sad is your one sided, media fabricated world view.After the Korean war, up until the late 70s N. Korea did really well, its standard of living was on par with that of S. Korea, and it even surpassed it economically. It wasn't until the US convinced Russia(Soviet Union back then) and China to cut their support for NK in exchange for "warming relations" that the US imposed isolation began to take effect. And with a constant threat to their security (the US trains "lets invade NK" twice every year just a few miles from its borders), the NKs have been forced to allocate a tremendous amount of resources to their defense, in pretty much complete isolation. And makes their aspirations for nuclear weapon completely understandable.
SK doesn't owe its prosperity to being a US puppet state, it did that on its own. But NK owes its misery entirely to the US, without which today it would likely be just as prosperous as SK, even if under a more totalitarian regime (the SK wasn't exactly democratic most of the time, and now that they got a democratic president, she is impeached).
Tears... that's rich. The US only cares about SK for the strategic military importance to utilize against Russia and China. Unlike the Korean war, today the US has the military capacity to vaporize 98% of the NK military complex in a matter of hours. And even if China and Russia mind it, they wouldn't be able to do much other than to condemn it on a UNSC meeting. But why would the US bother? NK doesn't have strategic resources, and the US already has all the military bases they need in the region from occupied SK and Japan. The US doesn't really care about the suffering of the SK people either, if it did, it would not have inflicted those in the first place. What the US needs is the "evil rogue NK regime" to put on the media in attempts to convince the world there is a regime more evil and dangerous than their own.
As for Taiwan - when the Chinese communists rebelled and literally annihilated the ROC, its elite ran to Taiwan with pretty much all of the nation's wealth, where they were saved by the US navy. Which made the upcoming decades very difficult for China, and it also makes their success understandable, if is quite easy to "make it" on a small island with the entire wealth of mainland China in your hands. Alas in just a few years the mighty Taiwanese semiconductor industry will be totally eclipsed by the Chinese, despite being under an oppressive totalitarian communist regime. Most of the big tech corporations of Taiwan have moved to mainland China just to stay competitive. Unlike upstart Taiwan, China did actually manage to craw out of the gutter, by being everyone's cheap errant boy, to become a world power that will in all likelihood dethrone the US led western hegemony in less than 2 decades, without sinking in debt and without being anyone's bitch - now here is your SUCCESS STORY.
Japan, much like Korea, was been industrious long before WW2, and owe nothing of its success today to anyone but its own people.
Finally, speaking about the people of SK, I don't think they qualify for a success story. Their industry yes, but their people - far from it. Its population is declining, it ranks at the top in suicide rates, especially in young people, and is the absolute record holder at cosmetic surgery, because Korean people are ashamed to look Korean and spend mad money to look like Europeans. This is not a healthy population. Japan ain't that much healthier demographically either. In Japan and SK they now sell more adult diapers than baby diapers. Projections are those people will vanish in a century and a half, provided of course our civilization makes it that long.
Another gem on the subject you most likely are ignorant of is that during the Korean war, the majority of war crimes, massacres, prosecutions and such were committed not by the "evil NK" but by the SK forces, with the Bodo League massacre and the National Defense Corps Incident alone have resulted in over 200 000 deaths.
And before any of them armchair intellectual easily dismiss the content of this post as the obligatory "conspiracy theory" - everything contained herein can be easily verified by googling and reading mainstream articles about it, including on pro-western-biased wikipedia.
Retycint - Saturday, March 18, 2017 - link
So the point of all this is...ddriver - Saturday, March 18, 2017 - link
Free education and hoRyzen broadening I am obligated to offer at the sight of my fellow humans wallowing in ignorance.Damn it, now "Ryzen" is totally ruined for me. My first reaction was "risen" as in "amd from the dead", but they said it is about horizon. Now that I spelled it hoRyzen it rings like a "ho risen"...
aryonoco - Saturday, March 18, 2017 - link
Glad to see you took the bait.Now, may I suggest instead of debating random commenters on a technical website about the Korean war, you apply your time and try and get into a community college? I think their standards have fallen so much, you might have a shot at getting g in this time.
Or if you're not in the US, your local vocational training institute.
ddriver - Saturday, March 18, 2017 - link
I see now, it wasn't you being ignorant and uneducated, it was you baiting me. You clever fox you :DAnd let me guess, if I didn't call on your ignorance, I would be "sitting quietly in the corner, shamed" because "you showed me", right?
Now that's the kind of "can't lose, broken penny worth, desperate to appear smart" technique every clueless wannabe takes when he's got nothing of actual substance and value. You know, I actually have psychology papers written on people like you ;)
Sending me off to community college, now that's classy? Is that where you went to become a barber who comments at a tech site to feel intelligent? I wouldn't bother even with Harvard, Stanford or MIT, because digest their 5 year curriculum in 5 months casually. Total waste of time for people who can't learn unless they pay a ton of money to have someone drag them through the learning process.
Imagine me taking offense from someone who is here just to clap his hands at every article and be like "me gets tech, me so smart". That would be the day LOL