Samsung begins mass production of energy efficient SSDs for data centers

Samsung begins mass production of energy efficient SSDs for data centers

Samsung has started mass production of a low power consumption SSD for data centers, the PM9A3. The new SSD has industry-leading power efficiency that will help data centers reduce operating costs. The company said in a statement that PM9A3 is the industry's first SSD product for use in data centers, based on sixth-generation V-NAND chips. It complies with the NVMe Cloud SSD specification from the Open Compute Project (OCP), the organization that sets standards for hardware and software in data centers. 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, which verifies the digital signature during the process.

A great improvement over its previous version.

Built with the company's sixth-generation V-NAND (1xx layer), 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 megabytes per second (MB/s) per 1 watt, which Samsung says is a 50% improvement over its predecessor. It supports random read and write speeds of 750K IOPS and 160K IOPS, respectively, a 40% and 150% improvement over its predecessor. The PM9A3 is also available in nine power levels to accommodate a wide range of form factors and SSD interfaces, from 8,25W for the M.2 form factor to 35W for newer form factors such as EDSFF. "Replacing all server hard drives (HDDs) released in 2020 with the 9TB PM3A4 drive would save 1484 gigawatt hours (GWh) of energy, which is enough electricity to power every home in the world. A large metropolitan city for a month of summer", the company claimed.