Samsung pulls out the big guns against HDDs

Sep 22, 2015 12:30 GMT  ·  By

Called the 950 PRO, the new SSD Samsung is an M.2 2280 form factor piece running at PCIe 3.0 x4 offering neck breaking transfer speeds of 2.5GB/s and 300,000 IOPS.

The new SSD module from Samsung is a 32-layer V-NAND and uses the NVMe protocol enabled by a new UBX controller. The new SSD can run at a very impressive 300,000 random read IOPS, and can sustain random writes of 110,000 IOPS with sequential throughputs that should reach 2.5 GB/sec reads and 1.5 GB/sec for writes.

Samsung expects the new drive to last, so it has an AES 256-bit Full Disk Encryption to protect data and Dynamic Thermal Guard, which can protect the device and data in inclement weather from 0 to 70 degrees Celsius.

It can also withstand physical shocks of up to 1500G/0.5ms and vibrations up to 20G. Apparently, this is among the first drives touted by Samsung as its new breed of NVMEs offering faster, bigger and cheaper memory chips, guaranteeing much better power consumption.

1TB 950 PRO will be Samsung's first 48-layer 3D V-NAND memory module

As a result, the new 950 PRO comes in 2 flavors at the moment, the 256GB one at $199.99 and the 512GB for $349.99. Early next year, the company will release its revolutionary 3D V-NAND 1TB storage sized 950 PRO for an undisclosed price.

The 950 PRO will be shipping with a 5-year warranty rated at 200 terabytes written for the 256GB model and 400 TBW for the 512GB. That means just over 100GB per day for both capacities. Samsung really hopes that with its new products based on V-NAND, it will increase its market share.

The improved performance and smaller chips will most likely increase the company's revenue and will accelerate the growth of the high-performance and high-density SSD markets. With these new SSDs, Samsung hopes it will move from the premium and corporate-level storage devices to the mainstream consumer market.

The new M.2 memory cards will hit the markets in October.

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