2,500 Megabytes per Second
With competition for 3D V-NAND flash in the memory semiconductor market heating up, Samsung Electronics unveiled the 3rd-gen 3D V-NAND-based solid state drive (SSD), with a storage capacity 1.4 times as large as its 2nd-gen SSD, thanks to its new 48-layer stack technology. The Korean tech giant is planning to strengthen the productivity of existing 850 series SSDs using this technology.
Samsung revealed five new SSD lineups based on 3D V-NAND (19 models per storage capacity) at this year's Samsung SSD Global Summit at the Hotel Shilla, Seoul on Sept. 22. During the event, the company announced that it would introduce the new SSD lineup to 50 countries, including Korea, the U.S., China, and Germany, starting this month. It means that the company will roll out this 3rd-gen SSD only one year after the launch of the 2rd-gen SSD in a 32-layer stack.
What is notable is that with chip makers having difficulty making 256 Gb planar NAND flash, Samsung has succeeded in producing 256 Gb SSDs based on 3D V-NAND technology. A source in the semiconductor industry explained, "Samsung's success is significant in that it became the first company to overcome the difficulty of making planar NAND-based SSDs by producing 3D V-NAND-based ones instead."
Samsung, which makes up more than 40 percent of the global SSD market, is expected to strengthen its offensive. As the productivity of the 850 EVO SSD, which is enjoying high sales, has increased to the 40 percent level, the company is likely to assert dominance over others in price competitiveness and profits. Samsung represents 43.8 percent of the global SSD market as of the second quarter of this year.
The tech firm also debuted new products for the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSD market, in which Samsung and its rivals like SK Hynix and Toshiba are fighting for global dominance. The 950 Pro M.2 SSD works at a speed of 2,500 MB/s reading, more than twice as fast as existing SSDs. The speed of the new NVMe SSD is a twenty-fold increase from HDDs. Using Samsung's own design technology that can maintain fast speed at a high temperature with less power consumption, the energy efficiency of the new SSD has increased by a great deal. In fact, it can process 650 MB of data with only 1 W.
Samsung also showcased new products to target the corporate SSD market, which is rapidly growing in tandem with increasing demand for data centers. As a new enterprise-centered card storage product, the PM1725 SSD can operate at speeds so fast that it is possible to transfer a 5GB full HD video in 3 seconds. The next-gen NVMe SSD is durable enough that it is suitable for enterprise storage, where high-capacity data is transmitted at high speeds. It is also possible to write and delete 3,200 5 GB videos every day for five years without damaging the drive.