Samsung has started mass-production of a power-efficient solid state drive (SSD) for data centres, the PM9A3.
The new SSD has the industry’s top class power efficiency that will help data centres to reduce operation costs.
The company said in a statement that PM9A3 is the industry’s first data centre-use SSD product based on sixth-generation V-NAND chips. It complies with NVMe Cloud SSD specification of Open Compute Project (OCP), the organisation that sets hardware and software standards in data centres.
Samsung said the new SSD also comes with enhanced security solutions, including anti-rollback, which prevents downloading firmware with a lower security version, and secure boot that verifies the digital signature during the boot process.
A huge improvement from its previous version
Built with the company’s sixth-generation (1xx-layer) V-NAND, the PM9A3 improves performance over the fifth-generation V-NAND-based PM983a (M.2), the statement added.
Based on its sequential write speed, PM9A3E1.S supports 283 megabyte per second (MB/s) per 1 watt, which, Samsung said, is a 50% improvement from its predecessor.
It supports random read and write speeds of 750K IOPS and 160K IOPS, respectively, an improvement of 40% and 150% from its predecessor.
The PM9A3 also comes in nine power levels to suit a diverse range of SSD form factors and interfaces — from 8.25 watts for the M.2 form factor to 35W for newer form factors such as EDSFF.
“Replacing all server hard disk drives (HDDs) launched in 2020 with the PM9A3 4TB drive would save 1,484 gigawatt hours (GWh) of energy, which is enough electricity to power all households in a major metropolitan city during a summer month,” the company claimed.
