Samsung 8 Terabyte NF1 Gumstick NVMe SSD Smashes Storage Barriers In A Tiny Form Factor

Samsung is laying claim to having the highest capacity NVMe solid state drive on the market, an 8-terabyte model based on the ultra-thin Next-Generation Small Form Factor (NGSFF). As is often the case when it comes to technological firsts in storage, the new 8TB NVMe NF1 SSD is not a consumer drive, so don't expect to pick this thing up for your gaming PC, as cool as that might be. Instead, it's optimized for heavy data analytics and virtualization applications in next-gen data centers and enterprise environments.

The new drive features 16 of Samsung's 512-gigabyte (GB) NAND flash memory packages. They're each stacked in 16 layers of 256-gigabit (Gb) 3-bit V-NAND chips, resulting in the world's first 8TB NVMe SSD, with a small footprint measuring 11 x 3.05 centimeters. For reference, what Samsung is serving up boasts twice the capacity of M.2 NVM SSDs commonly used in hyper-scale server systems and ultraportable laptops.

"By introducing the first NF1 NVMe SSD, Samsung is taking the investment efficiency in datacenters to new heights," said Sewon Chun, senior vice president of Memory Marketing at Samsung Electronics. "We will continue to lead the trend toward enabling ultra-high density data centers and enterprise systems by delivering storage solutions with unparalleled performance and density levels."

Samsung is expecting clients to "quickly and easily" adopt its new drive to replace conventional NVMe SSDs, noting that the NF1 enables up to three times the system density in existing server environments. That means a 2U rack server can be equipped with up to 576TB of fast storage.

As with all NVMe drives, the NF1 shuttles data through the PCI Express bus. It features a brand new controller design and is rated to deliver up to 3,100MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 2,000MB/s of sequential writes. Random read and write operations check in at 500,000 IOPS and 50,000 IOPS, respectively. Samsung also slapped 12GB of LPDDR4 memory onto each NF1 SSD to enable faster and more efficient data processing, the company said.

These drives have an endurance level of 1.3 driver writes per day (DWPD) and are backed by a 3-year warranty. Samsung didn't say when the NF1 will be available to customers or for how much.