Samsung launches industry’s highest-performing SAS enterprise

Samsung Electronics has announced the industry’s highest-performing 24G SAS (SAS-4) SSD: the PM1653. Based on the latest SAS interface, the new drive can support twice the speed of the previous 12G SAS-3 generation.

The PM1653 is also the industry’s first 24G SAS SSD made with sixth-generation (1xx-layer) V-NAND chips, enabling storage capacities from 800GB to 30.72TB for advanced enterprise server systems.

“As the leading provider of SAS storage for a decade, Samsung has been offering the most advanced and reliable enterprise solutions in full support of the critical workloads of global server OEMs, governments and financial institutions,” said Kwangil Park, senior VP of the Memory Product Planning Team at Samsung Electronics. “Samsung enterprise solutions are also accredited by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology for the most powerful data security.

To build a robust 24G SAS ecosystem across the enterprise market, host bus adapter (HBA) system readiness is also essential. Samsung has been closely working with Broadcom, a HBA provider, to ensure a seamless and timely transition to this new SAS milestone.

“Broadcom values the innovation that 24G SAS products, such as the Samsung SSD PM1653, will bring to the enterprise server market,” said Jas Tremblay, VP and GM of the Data Center Solutions Group at Broadcom. “The combination of the PM1653 SSD and Broadcom’s next-generation SAS RAID products delivers up to 5X RAID 5 performance; which will be critical to meet the strong demands of the 24G ecosystem.”

The PM1653 has been optimized for high-performance enterprise servers, offering the industry’s highest random read speed — a key metric for server storage performance — of up to 800K IOPS. Its sequential read speed can reach 4,300MB/s. This is the maximum available speed for the 24G SAS interface and twice the speed of the previous-generation PM1643a drive.

Leveraging its dual-port system, the new SSD will give enterprise server OEMs the flexibility of using one or both ports, depending on their system environment. Even if one port was to experience a failure during operation, data can be transferred and accessed through the other port with superior enterprise-grade reliability.

The PM1653 is capable of supporting 24G and the legacy 12G SAS-3 platform, as well. Samsung has begun sampling the PM1653 SSD with select customers, and plans to begin mass production in the second half of this year.