Samsung has published some preliminary details about its enterprise-grade SSDs featuring a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. The drives will be available in an E3.S 1T form-factor within a year of its announcement. Furthermore, Samsung’s SSDs will be available alongside the first PCIe 5.0 supporting enterprise platforms such as AMD’s EPYC Genoa and Intel’s Sapphire Rapids.
Samsung’s PM1743 solid-state drive will be based on the company’s proprietary controller and the 6th Generation TLC V-NAND memory. The upcoming SSD from the company can have one drive writing per day, and moreover, it can also tackle mixed workloads.
The Samsung PM1743 drive will feature a PCIe Gen 5 x4 (single-port) or dual x2 (dual-port) interface and, as mentioned above, will come in an E3. S 1T form-factor (111.5 mm × 31.5 mm (L×W). The E3. S 1T form-factor is designed in such a way that it can increase storage density in a server. Although the tech giant did not reveal anything about the performance of the SSD, the optimum performance of the PCIe 5.0 x4 interface could be clocked at 15.7 GB/s.
The PM1743 should be faster than the PM9A3, which is Samsung’s fasted PCIe 4.04 x4 SSDs. The PM9A3 also is designed for data center applications. Furthermore, it offers up to 6800 MBps sequential read speed. An E3.S 1T drive can consume up to 25W of power.
Almost all the SSDs to come out recently work only towards enterprise and mission-critical applications. That includes the ones manufactured by Samsung, especially the one with a 2.5-inch form factor that features a SAS or a U.2 interface. Meanwhile, some drives also come in an add-in-card form-factor and use a PCIe 3.0/4.0 x8 interface. Now that the upcoming latest SSDs will come featured with an EDSFF E3 form-factor, the SSD drives’ capacity could increase significantly. Furthermore, it also promises a higher storage density of servers running on AMD’s Genoa and Intel’s Sapphire Rapids processors.
