TO QUOTE STARCRAFT... hell, it’s about time. It’s finally here, ladies and gentlemen: the thing that Guy and I have been pining for literal months over many a Story of the Build video. We finally have Samsung’s latest PCIe 5.0 x4 drive. Yep, at long last, nearly two years on from their initial release, Samsung has announced the arrival of its own SSD to join the club, and it comes with some top-tier specs.
We’ve got two samples in our office currently: the heatsinkless 4TB variant, and the heatsinkked 2TB variant, and boy do they punch. 14,800 MB/s read, 13,400 MB/s write, and random read/write IOPS at 2200K/2600K: it’s a bit of a beast. Each drive comes with 1x 1GB of LPDDR4X cache per TB of storage, too, meaning the 8TB variant comes with a total of 8GB. Sammy’s also using its own in-house controller (currently undisclosed, so we have no idea what’s actually going on in there), combined with, perhaps unsurprisingly, its own TLC V NAND, appropriately dubbed V8.
Other top-line stats are fairly standard; you’ve got the usual bevy of data encryption feature sets, plus your bog-standard TBW endurance ratings for a drive of this size (1200 on the 2TB, and 2400 on the 4TB), and of course a five-year warranty. Pricing starts at $200 for the 1TB, topping out at $570 for the 4TB, with 8TB pricing news later in the year. It’s that last drive that’s particularly interesting, as it should be the first 5.0 8TB drive we’ve ever seen.
From what I can tell from first appearance, this is absolutely littered with tech. It’s a lot more complex than some of the other 5.0 drives I’ve seen for traces and capacitors, that’s for sure. Plus, both the NAND packages and controller are huge in contrast to the stuff Kioxia and Phison are producing. It’s still in the lab undergoing stringent testing, but we’ll let you know all about it next issue (you can bet your bottom dollar that it’ll be going in a build, too).