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.
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Lord-Bryan - Saturday, March 18, 2017 - link
What do all of this got to do with z-nandlilmoe - Saturday, March 18, 2017 - link
something to do with lost technology from the korean war that was recent rediscovered by samsung and implemented in their new z-nand product line.GT69 - Saturday, March 18, 2017 - link
Lord-Bryan - Go for the jugular, my man. :-) As I stated earlier, just what do all these silly diatribes have to do with z-nand? If I had an interest in this type of silly crap, I'd read People magazine or watch CNN. Come on folks, I thought we were supposed to be sharing ideas about new products - not our anal, self-serving opinions on unrelated subjects.ddriver - Sunday, March 19, 2017 - link
Nope, what you are supposed to do is clap your hands in attempts to look smart. I however did share an idea for a product, it was my first comment in this article.If you think you could see or hear any of what I said in people magazine or on cnn, then you are completely detached from reality :)
bloodinmyveins - Saturday, March 18, 2017 - link
@ddriverNice one ;) don't rape Anandtech readers :DDDDD
close - Saturday, March 18, 2017 - link
Yes @bloodinmyveins, he should go easy on AT readers. We don't want him to have more opportunities to show his skills ;).http://imgur.com/a/kW0V6
*Stories about how he knows more than anyone else around here - Check
*Proof that he knows more than anyone else around here - Missing
*Basic knowledge of common concepts used especially in his (purported) field - Missing
You could be a great story teller ddriver. Well... typing them, at least. :)
close - Saturday, March 18, 2017 - link
ddriver, whenever you go on a rant and try to pretend you're somehow privy to some information that nobody else has (more than you're supposed to be even o_O) or what highly specialized multiphysics simulations you do in your free time I will remind you that you are a person who doesn't know the difference between a millisecond and a microsecond.Yes, the last time you tried to support a claim you just proved you're the person who thinks ms stands for microsecond. This puts in perspective your "engineering" knowledge. Coupled with the fact that you have a Cyrillic (or related) keyboard layout I will go ahead and confidently say your opinions aren't "more informed", they are at the very least equally biased by facts in the media and personal preference.
And while a dose of bias is normal/expected, insisting that you're above everyone else and that your opinions are fact while failing to provide anything to support other than the glaring holes highlighted earlier places plenty of your comments somewhere between ridiculous and pathetic.
I understand your hesitation to present facts to support your statements since they mostly tend to discredit you but this is a tech site not a blog. And the comment section shouldn't be used to editorialize.
ddriver - Sunday, March 19, 2017 - link
It's a typo silly. I deal with milliseconds numerous times a day, but rather rarely with microseconds, in fact about 100 times less frequently than nanoseconds. It is now in the muscle memory of my fingers. And since I don't have the habit of looking neither at the display nor in my fingers, I often make such typos. And since there is no edit functionality here, there is no way to edit that.Nice of you to take screenshots and so on, seeing you have finally found a purpose in life, but building a case on that? Come on, you'd be better off to revert back to 5 inch HDDs ;)
Finally, there is absolutely no need to prove anything, my competence and far-out-of-the-box way of thinking are eloquent enough already. I certainly don't need to "out-prove" anyone, as none of my "opponents" have proven anything, or even displayed tangible signs of remote competence. And last but not least, I do enjoy and value my privacy, and the last thing I want is to have to deal with disillusioned wannabe online troll stalkers going after me, my family or my enterprises. You are free to have your doubts, if it helps you sleep at night ;)
eddman - Sunday, March 19, 2017 - link
Such an inflated ego.You accuse others of not proving anything yet you, yourself, did not offer ANY proof to back up your claim up there that the note7 situation was sabotage.
close - Monday, March 20, 2017 - link
@ddriver, of course it's a typo.Seriously though, next time you accuse others of not providing proof maybe you should bother following your own advice. Unless it's to shitty to follow yourself. I mean you write boatloads of stuff, you're all over the place, saying everything you can imagine but not once are you supporting it in any meaningful way.
Simply saying that you know maybe more than you should without evidence makes you sound like a teenager bragging with his many sexual conquests without saying they were measured in gigabytes.