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Z-SSD

Earlier this yr, Samsung started talking almost a new NAND storage technology it planned to bring to market. The company has been close-mouthed almost its new Z-NAND and the Z-SSD it powers, though it did share the engineering is based on its three-dimensional V-NAND, otherwise known as 3D NAND. Early functioning data on Z-NAND and its showtime PCI Express SSD has begun to surface and Samsung is clearly gunning for Intel's Optane with this product.

Samsung has been extremely coy on what NAND technology is baked into Z-NAND or what consumers should wait, but allow's intermission downwards what we've got. The visitor has repeatedly said Z-NAND features an improved NAND controller, but most manufacturers keep the secrets of their NAND controllers tightly under wraps and don't share them with the printing. We do know, yet, Z-NAND "shares the key construction of Samsung'due south V-NAND." "Fundamental structure" is a vague phrase, but we can safely assume Z-NAND is a iii-dimensional NAND with an unknown number of stacks. We know standard 5-NAND is congenital on 40nm, and it seems likely Samsung is even so using that node for Z-NAND also.

Samsung could have gone back to an earlier process node than 40nm to calibration up its enterprise Optane competitor, merely this seems unlikely. While older nodes tend to offer higher reliability and faster performance than smaller ones, only Samsung already tapped 40nm for this reason and falling back to an earlier node for a limited run product makes fiddling sense. Right now, the smart money seems to be on a tweaked controller architecture and the utilize of SLC NAND (single-level cell). The more than data you shop per scrap of NAND flash, the slower the access fourth dimension and the lower the NAND's endurance.

A graph released terminal year indicated Samsung expects to bring costs down between the get-go and 2d generations of Z-NAND, but without graph labels we don't know how big of an improvement these data points represents.

Z-NAND-Comparison

Samsung is claiming numbers that nearly match Optane, along with an equal number of drive writes per twenty-four hour period (30 full, identical to Intel's P4800X). The company has also published a variety of its ain benchmarks, showing its new drive delivers dramatically meliorate performance than its previous efforts in this space. We've rounded up some of these for the slide show beneath. All information is from Samsung, as are the exam descriptions.

Overall, Samsung's data set shows credible performance improvements for Z-NAND, and a potentially potent challenger to Intel's Optane. The bigger question, yet, is which visitor will be able to sustain improvements year-on-twelvemonth. The NAND flash ecosystem is mature at this bespeak and while advances in throughput and operation could absolutely however happen, the last few years have been every bit much well-nigh driving NAND costs lower as nigh boosting functioning. Intel is at the hypothetical beginning of 3D XPoint'south ramp, and should take much more than runway to boost its performance over what's bachelor today.