Samsung has announced the impending release of a brand new SSD in its line of Z-SSDs, and it could be one of the fastest solid state drives ever released. It uses what it calls Z-NAND flash memory, which it claims is 10-times as fast as 3-bit V-NAND chips. To augment all that speed, the PCIExpress packs in 1.5GB of on-board RAM to act as a caching drive.
All of that high-powered hardware equates to IOPS figures of 750K read and 170K write, which is staggering. The write speed leaves a little to be desired compared to high-powered competition, but even Intel's Optane SSD DC p4800X only has 550K IOPS for reads, as per Hexus.
The drive itself will have an 800GB capacity, which is a bit of an odd figure, but it's the one Samsung went with. There will be a 240GB version however, which is a little more typical. It will utilize the PCIE 3.0 interface and is expected to go on sale at some point in the first half of this year.
The only downside is, you may never get to use it for your gaming. The drive isn't designed for gamers, but for IoT and AI purposes. It will make its first appearance at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco on February 11, where we'll learn more. It may be that Samsung debuts a consumer version too, but we wouldn't count on it.
Even if it did, the price would likely be pretty astronomical.
