Samsung makes SSD with 800GB Z-Nand available for supercomputers

Samsung is going to make the SZ985 available in the Z-SSD series: a PCI-e-x4 SSD, which will be available in variants with 240 and 800GB. The card is built around Samsung’s Z-Nand, which should become a competitor for Intel’s 3D Xpoint.

Samsung combines the NVME SSD with 1.5GB DDR4 and an undisclosed controller. The SZ985 delivers 750,000 iops random read performance and a significantly lower 170,000 iops random write performance. The latency is sixteen microseconds. Samsung focuses on use for high-performance computing, especially for artificial intelligence and big data.

The SSD is built around Z-Nand. Samsung announced this type of nand in 2016 and updated it last year, but the manufacturer has not yet given any details about the memory, other than that it is optimized single-level cell nand. The Korean company may offer more clarity during the upcoming International Solid-State Circuits Conference, which will take place in mid-February.

With the flash disk, Samsung introduces a competitor to, for example, Intel’s Optane SSD DC P4800X, which has 3D Xpoint memory. The performance of the 750GB version of this SSD is 550,000 iops in random read and write. The latency of Intel’s disk is ten microseconds.

The prices that the enterprise market has to pay for the SZ98 versions are not yet known.