Samsung is promising that its 6th-generation V-NAND solid-state drives reach new heights in terms of speedy SSDs.
The company already has one such 250GB SATA SSD going into mass production, with its 6th-gen 3D V-NAND stepping up to 100+ layers in an industry first.
This means that Samsung's new drive won't just see a considerable performance boost, but also power-efficiency gains.
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Power
Samsung explains that it’s using new ‘channel hole etching’ technology to add 40 percent more cells to its previous 9x-layer structure. Furthermore, the new drives boast a circuit design optimized for speed, with the manufacturer quoting under 450 microseconds for writes and 45 microseconds for reads.
All this boils down to a claimed 10 percent increase in performance compared to the previous-generation tech, with power consumption being reduced even further by 15 percent.
While a 250GB model is already in production, Samsung also says a 512GB SSD will emerge later this year.
Enterprising solutions
These models will be targeted at enterprise clients and heavyweight server usage, but the new 3D V-NAND will also be gracing next-gen mobile devices and the automotive market, Samsung notes.
As ever with freshly unleashed enterprise offerings, we can expect the technology to trickle down to consumer products – it’s just a question of how long that will take.
At any rate, it’s good to see innovation coming to SSDs at quite a pace: Samsung also boasts that it developed this new generation tech in 13 months, reducing the time to mass production by four months.
Kye Hyun Kyung, executive VP of solution product and development at Samsung Electronics, observed: “With faster development cycles for next-generation V-NAND products, we plan to rapidly expand the markets for our high-speed, high-capacity 512GB V-NAND-based solutions.”
