Z nand ssd: Z-SSD | NVMe™ SSD | Samsung Semiconductor Global

IntroductionZ-NAND In Detail & The TestPerformance at Queue Depth 1Peak Throughput And Steady StateMixed I/O & NoSQL Database PerformanceConclusion

In 2015, Intel and Micron unveiled 3D XPoint memory, a new competitor to flash memory that promised significantly higher performance and endurance. Several years later, Intel has successfully commercialized 3D XPoint memory in a growing range of Optane products, but other alternative non-volatile memory technologies are still largely stuck in the lab.

To compete against Intel’s Optane SSDs, Samsung decided to exercise their lead in 3D NAND flash memory to produce a specialized high-performance variant, which they call Z-NAND. Fittingly, the first SSDs they use it in are branded «Z-SSDs». The first two models to be released were the SZ983 and SZ985, which were both high-end drives specifically for datacenter customers.

Meanwhile, with their major datacenter customers taken care of, Samsung is moving to make more of their enterprise and datacenter storage products available through retail distribution channels instead of just large-volume B2B sales. Spearheading that initiative, the SZ983 is now being sold to retail customers as the Samsung 983 ZET.

Enter the 983 ZET: Going Back To SLC

Samsung originally announced Z-NAND in 2016, a year after 3D XPoint memory was announced and before any Optane products had shipped. Fundamentally, the first generation of Z-NAND is an effort to turn back the clock a bit; to step back from today’s modern, high-density, (relatively) high-latency Triple Level Cell (TLC) NAND and back to simpler Single Level Cell (SLC) designs.

SLC designs are relatively straightforward: since they only need to store a single bit of data per cell, the cell only needs to be in one of two voltage states. And this makes them both faster to read and faster to write – sometimes immensely so. The tradeoff is that they offer less density per cell – one-half or one-third as much data as the equivalent MLC or TLC NAND – and therefore a higher cost per bit overall. This has lead to the rapid adoption of MLC and then TLC, which for most use cases is plenty sufficient in terms of performance while also offering great capacity.

However there are markets and use cases where absolute speed (and not capacity) is king, and this is where a SLC-based storage solution can provide much better real-world performance; enough so to justify the higher per-bit cost. And it’s this market that Intel and Samsung have been exploiting with their 3D XPoint and Z-NAND products respectively.

Adding an extra wrinkle to all of this is that Samsung’s Z-NAND isn’t merely SLC NAND; if simply operating existing NAND as SLC was all there is to Z-NAND, then we would also expect Toshiba, WD, SK Hynix to have also delivered their competitors by now. Instead, Samsung has taken additional steps to further improve their SLC-based Z-NAND. We’ll go into greater detail on this on the next page, but one of the big changes here was lowering the read and program times of the NAND, which further improves its read/write performance. This is important for Samsung both to give them an edge over the aforementioned competition, but also to ensure Z-NAND is competitive with 3D XPoint, which has proven to be no slouch in this area.

On paper then, Samsung’s Z-NAND looks plenty fast for the kinds of workloads and markets Samsung is chasing. Now it comes to Samsung’s 983 ZET to deliver on those ambitions.

Samsung 983 ZET Specifications
Capacity		480 GB	960 GB
Controller		Samsung Phoenix
Form Factor		HHHL PCIe AIC
Interface, Protocol		PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe 1.2b
NAND Flash		Samsung 64Gb 48L SLC Z-NAND
Sequential Read		3400 MB/s
Sequential Write		3000 MB/s
4kB Random Read	QD32 Throughput	750k IOPS
	QD1 99. 99% Latency	30 µs
4kB Random Write	QD32 Throughput	60k IOPS	75k IOPS
	QD1 99.99% Latency	30 µs
Power Consumption	Read	8.5 W
	Write	9.0 W
	Idle	5.5 W
Write Endurance Drive Writes Per Day		7.4 PB 8.5 DWPD	17.5 PB 10 DWPD
Warranty		5 years
Price		$999.99 ($2.08/GB)	$2075.85 ($2.16/GB)

Buy Samsung 983 ZET 480GB on Amazon. com

The Samsung 983 ZET uses the same Phoenix controller that we are familiar with from their TLC-based 983 DCT and the 970 family of consumer NVMe SSDs. Eight channels makes for a high-end controller in the consumer market, but this is more of an entry-level controller in the datacenter space—the other flash-based SSDs we’re comparing against have more powerful 12 or 16 channel controllers.

The 983 ZET is available in just two capacities, both using a PCIe add-in card form factor. Samsung has demonstrated a M.2 Z-SSD and this controller is used in several other M.2 and U.2 drives, but the Z-SSDs are a relatively low-volume product and this retail channel version is even more of a niche product, so the limited range of SKUs makes sense.

The sequential read and write specs for the 983 ZET are typical for high-end NVMe drives with PCIe 3 x4 interfaces, but it’s uncommon to see these speeds at such low capacities: the small per-die capacity of Samsung’s Z-NAND gives the 480GB 983 DCT as much parallelism to work with as a 2TB TLC drive. The random read performance of 750k IOPS is impressive for a SSD of any capacity, and while it isn’t entirely unprecedented, it is significantly higher than the 550k IOPS that Intel’s Optane SSD DC P4800X is rated for.

The random write specs bring the first difference in performance between the two capacities of the 983 ZET, and a stark reminder that we’re still dealing with some of the limitations of flash memory. The steady-state random write performance is just 60k to 75k IOPS, an order of magnitude lower than the random read performance. Intel’s Optane SSDs are only slightly slower for random writes than random reads, so the 983 ZET won’t be able to come close to matching Optane performance on workloads that include a significant quantity of random writes.

Write endurance for the 983 ZET also falls short of the bar set by Intel’s Optane SSDs, with 8.5 DWPD for the 480GB 983 ZET and 10 DWPD for the 960 GB model, while the Optane SSD debuted with a 30 DWPD rating that has since been increased to 60 DWPD.

Gallery: Samsung 983 ZET Z-SSD

The Competition

This review builds on our recent roundup of enterprise SSDs, and follows the same format and test procedures. This review is strictly focused on the use of the 983 ZET as a datacenter SSD, but we will have a follow-up to assess its suitability as an enthusiast class workstation/consumer drive.

Our collection of enterprise and datacenter SSDs is much smaller than our almost comprehensive catalog of consumer SSDs, but we do have drives from several different market segments to compare against. Most of these drives were described in detail in our last enterprise SSD review. The most important competitor is obviously the Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X, Intel’s flagship and the drive that Samsung’s Z-SSDs were created to compete against.

Sadly unavailable for this review is the Micron P320h, an early PCIe SSD that used 34nm planar SLC NAND and advertised similar random read performance, and better random write performance and endurance. The controller was a 32-channel monster with a PCIe 2.0 x8 host interface that used a proprietary protocol rather than the nascent NVMHCI standard that we now know as NVMe. That controller product line passed from IDT to PMC-Sierra to Microsemi and now Microchip, and its descendants are used in two other drives included in this review, both of which use the 16-channel versions rather than the 32-channel:

Z-NAND In Detail & The Test
IntroductionZ-NAND In Detail & The TestPerformance at Queue Depth 1Peak Throughput And Steady StateMixed I/O & NoSQL Database PerformanceConclusion

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From deficit to excess. SSD overproduction is about to halve prices

Technology

11 October 2022 18:11 11 Oct 2022 18:11

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By mid-2023, SSDs could be halved in price. This is a consequence of an oversupply of manufactured devices and memory chips, coinciding with a drop in demand for technology caused by global economic instability. The price drop will primarily affect the mass segment SSD, as well as enterprise-class drives. Manufacturers will try to make up for losses with SSDs for enthusiasts.

Buying an SSD becomes more profitable

The world is expected to rapidly fall in prices for modern storage media. This does not yet apply to obsolete hard drives, but solid state drives (Solid state drives, SSDs) by mid-2023 may fall in price by half. This forecast was made by the experts of the research company TrendFocus. Moreover, they previously announced a drop in SSD prices in Q3 2022 and later issued similar forecasts for the last quarter of 2022.

Reducing the cost of SSD drives, which are an integral part of modern computers and laptops, is associated with an oversupply of memory chips. Manufacturers so wanted to quickly overcome their very recent shortage caused by the coronavirus pandemic that they “slightly” overdid it.

In fact, the companies themselves are not to blame for what happened. They just did not take into account that after a relatively calm and not very rich in negative moments in 2021, everything that happened after February 23, 2022 will happen.

SSDs are already faster and more reliable than HDDs, and may soon become even more affordable

Because of all these events, sales of equipment have collapsed in the world. This was reflected primarily in smartphone manufacturers, as well as computer vendors. The latter are one of the largest consumers of SSD drives and flash memory modules directly. Cloud services have also contributed.

Artificial shortage

TrendFocus does not specify how many millions of unsold SSDs in various form factors are currently languishing in the warehouses of manufacturers, distributors and retailers, waiting for their consumer or corporate customer. Meanwhile, memory chip vendors have figured out how to solve the problem. They intend to return the market to a period of scarcity, but to do so artificially.

In 2020 and 2021, there were not enough memory modules due to the rush demand for all modern equipment. Manufacturers did not have time to supply them, and now they intend to drastically limit their release.

For example, Japanese Kioxia has reduced the number of 3D NAND chips produced by 40% since October 1, 2022. American Micron has taken similar actions, although so far on a much smaller scale.

It is known that Micron has reduced the production of 232-layer 3D NAND chips. It is used for super-fast SSDs with read and write speeds over 10 GB/s.

Will have to wait a bit

TrendFocus analysts are sure that such steps will not bring immediate effect. First, Micron, Kioxia, etc. need to sell the already produced memory chips, and at the moment there is, in some way, no one to buy them. Vendors of solid-state drives and computers will first have to ship the goods they already have in their warehouses.

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IT industry support

Trendfocus suggests it will take at least two quarters for PC makers to tap into already-produced 3D NAND and drives. Based on this, experts make the assumption that by mid-2023 SSDs will fall in price by half.

Stock depletion forecasts are based on active participation in the purchase of cloud service SSDs. Many of them are phasing out hard drives in favor of SSDs. As CNews reported, solid-state drives proved to be no less reliable than HDDs when used in servers.

Losses will have to be compensated

A 50% price cut for SSDs will certainly hurt the financial stability of their manufacturers. They will try to make up for this with, oddly enough, other SSDs.

TrendForce believes that the price cuts will primarily (and mainly) affect mass segment SSD drives with PCIe 3.0 x4 or PCIe 4.0 x4 interfaces. At the same time, faster drives with PCIe Gen5, most likely, if they become cheaper, then not so much. However, at the current stage, due to the initially high price, they are of interest only to computer technology enthusiasts, so the vast majority of consumers will feel a significant drop in prices for SSDs. This will be reflected even in the corporate segment, where not the fastest, but very capacious storage media are of the greatest interest. Massive SSDs can drop in price enough to make potential buyers lose interest in some business-class hard drives.