Samsung Releases SM863 and PM863 SSDs up to 3.8TB/ 1.9TB respectively

Today Samsung officially released the SM863 and PM863 solid state drives with much larger capacities than previous versions. Both drives utilize Samsung’s 3D V-NAND technology which addresses power efficiency, capacity, performance and endurance limits planar NAND is running into. We utilize a collection of about 50 Samsung SV843, PM853T, 845DC Pro’s in our datacenters for STH and have yet to see a failure.

The Samsung PM863 is a 3-bit per cell (TLC) drive that can handle up to 3.8TB of storage in a single 2.5″ SSD. This is an example of the smaller SSD form factor getting competitive with rotating media in terms of storage density. Being a TLC drive, we would expect fairly competitive pricing. We did send a note requesting more information in terms of MSRP and street pricing and are awaiting a response. We did see a MSRP of $2199 on the 3.8TB drive.

The Samsung SM863 is a higher-end offering using 2-bit per cell technology. The capacity is only 1.9TB for each drive which is about half of the PM863. We would expect the combination of MLC plus 3D V-NAND to yield significant improvements in terms of latency and endurance over the PM863. Since Samsung recently announced the 2TB 850 Pro, we would expect these drives to have a similar amount of NAND with more overprovisioning which is standard on datacenter SSDs. The MSRP of the SM863 1.92TB drive is $1249 with the PM863 of the same capacity selling for $1099.)

Here is the official press release:

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced memory technology, today introduced its latest lineup of high performance SATA solid state drives (SSDs) for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) — the Samsung PM863 and SM863. These next-generation drives deliver faster speeds and improved reliability in much higher capacities, as well as greater power efficiency, in order to support the heavy demands placed on the data center.

“Companies around the world are racing to digitize their business processes, which is putting increased strain on the data center and extreme pressure on IT managers to find a solution quickly,” said Un-soo Kim, Senior Vice President of Branded Product Marketing, Memory Business, at Samsung Electronics. “The PM863 and SM863 solid state drives are the ideal solution, offering much higher density in the 2.5” form factor, which saves IT managers at small and medium sized businesses precious real estate in the data center without sacrificing power or performance thanks to our breakthrough V-NAND technology.”

Powered by Samsung’s leading-edge V-NAND technology – which improves the performance of SSDs — the PM863 and SM863 deliver outstanding performance and reliability while still achieving low power consumption levels.

The 3-bit MLC V-NAND-based PM863 is developed for mixed pattern applications and ideal for use in content delivery networks and streaming or Web servers. Alternatively, the write-intensive SM863 based on 2-bit MLC V-NAND is an optimal choice for online transaction processing (OLTP) and serves as an ideal choice for email and database servers.

The Samsung PM863 comes in 120GB, 240GB, 480GB, 960GB and now 1.9TB and 3.8TB capacities. It also offers read speeds up to 540 MB/s, and for the 240GB drives and above provides random read speeds of up to 99,000 Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS). The Samsung SM863 provides more options for configurable overprovisioning and is available in 120 gigabyte (GB), 240GB, 480GB, 960GB and now 1.9TB capacities. It also features read speeds up to 520 megabytes per second (MB/s) and write speeds up to 485 MB/s.

Both drives will be available to SMBs in early August 2015. They are already available for the enterprise.

We did request review samples, so hopefully we will get them soon to test.