OCP Virtual Summit: Samsung PM9A3 SSD With SNIA E1.S Form Factor and PCIe Gen 4

Samsung Electronics Co, Ltd. announced in an OCP Virtual Summit keynote that it has developed a SSD (PM9A3 SSD) with a SNIA-based ^(*) E1.S form factor and PCIe Gen 4 support to harness the production efficiencies of the company’s 6-gen (1xx-layer), 3-bit V-NAND.

At the same time, introduced a reference design for its E1.S-based storage system.

The keynote, in addition to announcing the PM9A3, highlighted a new approach to open source multi-industry storage collaboration that spotlighted the development of an open-source platform (OSP) fundamentally tied to cloud-scale infrastructure deployments. It was presented by Jongyoul Lee, SVP, memory software development team, Samsung, at the summit.

“Offering the most 1U server-optimized form-factor, the PM9A3 will improve space utilization, add PCIe Gen4 speeds, enable increased capacity and more,” said Jongyoul Lee. “We see it eventually becoming the most sought-after storage solution on the market for tier one and tier two cloud datacenter servers, and one of the more cost-effective.”

The E1.S drive form-factor combines major benefits of 2.5-inch U.2 SSDs, with what is considered the optimal storage design for 1U servers. For M.2 SSD users, the E1.S SSD will expand the SSD power budget, accommodate PCIe Gen 4, and allow datacenter managers to add more SSDs per rack-unit.

The announced PM9A3 drive, to be available in three versions ^(**), is expected to feature a PCIe Gen 4 (x4) interface for more than twice the sequential read performance of PCIe Gen 3 (3,200MB/s), and include dedicated hardware accelerators for nearly twice the random writes (180,000 IO/s) of the previous gen.

Capacities will range from 960GB to 7.68TB.

The PM9A3 SSD’s E1.S design with an industry-standard EDSFF connector is set to enhance the popular SSD lineup, one that includes the leading SSD for datacenter applications (PM983).

For datacenters now using U.2 SSDs, the E1.S form factor will allow hardware engineers to add more SSDs per server, freeing up additional 1U space and lowering the TCO.

Open-source platform reference design
The company is also providing a collaborative server reference design to assist datacenter managers in quickly adopting and deploying its E1.S-based storage system.

The reference design, made by Inspur Systems, is available.

(*) SNIA SFF-TA-1006    
(**) Form factor and speed table