Samsung Unveils Z-SSD With Z-NAND

Despite NAND being a relatively new addition to the storage market, several competitor replacements have started to emerge. Even with the transition to 3D NAND, NAND as we know it is going to hit a physics brick wall. One replacement is the Intel/Micron 3D XPoint, but is is not alone. Samsung earlier revealed their candidate, Z-NAND which was announced last year. Samsung is not ready to unveil their first product based on Z-NAND, the aptly named Z-SSD.

Aimed at the intersection between NAND and DRAM, Z-NAND is reportedly fundamentally still NAND. This is unlike 3D XPoint which is based on an entirely new technology. While the specifics of Z-NAND are scant, Samsung has revealed a bit more about their SSD based on it. While we do have a physical drive, there is no word yet on pricing or availability but some customers are already sampling.

Coming in at an 800 GB capacity, the drive uses the PCIe half height form factor with 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes. Sequential read/ writes will be up to 3200 Gbps, while Random read/writes up to 750K/160K IOPS. This is faster than what 3D XPoint offers for sequential speeds and random reads but is significantly slower for random writes. Part of this increase in performance over current NVMe PCIE SSDs is also due to a new controller.