Samsung announces fourth-generation V-Nand memory and 32TB SSD in 2.5″ format
Samsung has announced the fourth generation of its 3d V-Nand memory. With the new tlc-nand memory, which consists of 64 layers, chips of 512Gbit can be made. Samsung will use those chips for a 32TB SSD in 2.5″ format.
Samsung announced the fourth-generation V-Nand at the Flash Memory Summit conference. The capacity per memory chip has been doubled compared to the previous generation, which consists of 48 layers and allows 256Gb chips. Those third-generation chips, which Samsung announced at FMS last year, are used in the 4TB version of the Samsung 850 EVO SSD, for example.
The first products with the new V-Nand should be launched in the fourth quarter of this year. Samsung could theoretically use the new chips to launch 2.5″ consumer SSDs with 8TB storage and M2 SSDs with a storage capacity of up to 2TB, but the South Korean manufacturer has not yet announced plans for this. According to Samsung, the chips will help manufacturers make “faster, more stylish and portable devices”, indicating that the memory chips will be used in devices such as laptops and tablets.
Samsung will in any case use the new chips itself to make a 32TB SSD for enterprise applications. It is a 2.5″ SSD with SAS connection, which should be released in 2017. Samsung will stack the 512Gbit Nand chips in sixteen layers, which together form a package of 1TB. By combining 32 of these packages it is possible to store 32TB of storage capacity in a 2.5″ drive.
The 32TB SSD will probably be the successor to the PM1633a, a 2.5″ SSD with a capacity of 15.36TB that was launched by Samsung this year. Samsung thinks it will be able to use SSDs with a capacity of 100TB by 2020. Seagate previously showed a prototype 60TB SSD at the Flash Memory Summit conference, based on further improvements to 3d-V-Nand memory, but that manufacturer is using the larger 3.5″ form factor. Seagate also has no concrete plans for bringing the SSD to market.
Samsung also announced the arrival of the ‘Z-SSD’, without giving many technical details. According to Samsung, it is an SSD that uses a variant of V-Nand, but has a modified controller that enables higher speeds. The sequential read speed would therefore be 1.6 times faster than that of NVME SSDs. According to Samsung, the Z-SSD will be launched in 2017.