Samsung has announced the production of its first Z-SSD product, the SZ985. The Z-SSD uses Samsung's Z-NAND memory, and aims to compete with Intel's 3D Xpoint memory. The SZ985 is a high-performance and high-endurance NVMe SSD.
Samsung has talked about Z-NAND and the SZ985 in the past and has shown off prototypes of them at several trade shows and conferences. Their initial announcement in 2016 was about Z-NAND memory and Z-SSD drives, promising 1TB drives followed by 2TB and 4TB capacities in 2017. The launch of the 800GB and 240GB models is well behind the original timeline, but the Z-SSD is finally ready almost a year after Intel's Optane products. Samsung hasn't given much new information about how this new drive works, but they have revealed that it will include 1.5GB of LPDDR4 DRAM.
As for the full specifications, Samsung again didn't give much information, but it did point out some key metrics that put the Z-SSD in the top performance tier. The SZ985 can reach up to 750k random IOPS for reads and 170k random IOPS for writes. In another comparison against SSDs based on 3D TLC NAND flash memory, the Z-NAND's memory read performance is ten times that of 3D TLC NAND. Samsung hasn't been able to overcome all the limitations of flash memory, but it has made some impressive improvements.
The Z-SSD SZ985 will be presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, February 11-15.
