Samsung PM9A3 E1.S Data Center SSD in Production

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. begun mass producing its line of data center SSDs, the PM9A3 E1.S.

It complies with the Open Compute Project (OCP) NVMe Cloud SSD spec to satisfy the demands of enterprise workloads. Defined by data center providers including Facebook, the OCP spec is a set of unified interoperable standards, enabling SSD vendors to work toward next-gen storage designs with more effectiveness.

“Wider 5G deployment and accelerating growth in IoT devices are fueling a hyperconnected lifestyle, driving the demand for more sophisticated hyperscale data centers,” said Cheolmin Park, VP, memory product planning, Samsung Electronics. “Providing an optimal mix of performance, power, reliability and firmware, we believe our new PM9A3 will help advance today’s data center storage technologies and expand the market for OCP-compliant SSDs.”

“Innovations such as the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD and E1.S are important to solving today’s data center challenges. The OCP NVMe Cloud SSD spec defines hyperscale SSD requirements, enabling SSD makers to provide products that meet the challenging demands of hyperscale environments. Deploying storage at scale is very challenging and Samsung’s support for next-gen industry-leading technologies such as the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD and EDSFF E1.S is a great step forward,” said Ross Stenfort, hardware storage engineer, Facebook, Inc.

Built with the company’s sixth-gen (1xx-layer) V-NAND, the PM9A3 improves performance over the fifth-gen V-NAND-based PM983a (M.2), with double the sequential write speed at 3,000MB/s, a 40% higher random read speed of 750,000 IO/s and 150% higher random writes at 160,000 IO/s.

Power features are critical to maximizing the efficiency of data center operations. The PM9A3 provides power at 283MB/s per watt for sequential writes, making it nearly 50% more energy efficient than the previous gen’s 188MB/s per watt. In fact, replacing all server HDDs launched in 2020 with the PM9A3 4TB drive would save 1,484 gigawatt hours (GWh) of energy, which is enough electricity to power all households in a major metropolitan city during a summer month ^(*).

The PM9A3 also comes in 9 power levels for a diverse range of SSD form factors and interfaces – from 8.25W for the M.2 form factor to 35W for newer form factors such as EDSFF.

In addition to standard security features such as user data encryption and authentication, this drive is equipped with secure boot and anti-rollback mechanisms to ensure data protection. Secure boot adds another layer of protection vs. unauthorized firmware being used, while anti-rollback prevents the drive from rolling back or downgrading to an older flawed version of the firmware.

^(*) Based on a total of 1,412GWh of electricity consumed by households in Seoul, Korea, during August 2020