Enterprise-class solid state drives used to be rare beasts that commanded heavy price premiums over their more common, consumer-oriented counterparts. As leading
SSD and flash memory manufacturers have evolved their processes and technologies, however, availability and pricing for many
enterprise-class solid state storage solutions have dropped dramatically. Whereas enterprise SSDs that target mission-critical workstations or data centers used to cost many times that of a consumer SSD, that is no longer the case for some products.
Samsung's 883 and 983 DCT drives we’ll be showing you here, for example, are available in relatively large capacities and surprisingly won’t break the bank.
Sure, there are still ultra-premium, specialized data center solid state drives that cost thousands of dollars, but the mid-range Samsung 883 and 983 DCT drives are not among them. The Samsung 883 DCT family consists of the company’s flagship SATA-based SSDs, while the 983 DCT family is comprised of higher-performance,
NVMe-based offerings that come in a few different form factors.
We have the main features and specifications for the Samsung 883 and 983 DCT drives listed directly below, followed by a quick physical tour of the drives, before we dive into performance...
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Samsung 883 & 983 DCT Solid State Drives |
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Specifications & Features
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The Samsung 883 DCT family of SSDs leverage the common 2.5” form factor and come in a wide array of capacities, ranging from 240GB all the way on up to a massive 3.84TB. Specifically, we’ve got the top three capacities (960GB, 1.92TB, and 3.84TB) featured here in our review.
The 883 DCT family of drives is built around Samsung's native
SATA 6Gbps MARU controller, which is paired to some amount of LPDDR4 DRAM and the company’s latest 3D V-NAND flash memory. The amount of DRAM depends on the capacity of the drive. The 240GB/480G models have 512MB of DRAM, while the beefier 960GB. 1.92TB, and 3.84TB drives have 1GB, 2GB, and 4GB, respectively.
Read and write speeds are rated at 560MB/s and 530MB/s for the three capacities shown here (with up to 98K (read) / 28K (write) IOPs), but the smaller drives peak at only 320MB/s writes. The drives offer Class 0 (AES 256) encryption, end-to-end data protection (with power loss protection), and endurance ratings of 1,366TBW (960GB), 2,733TBW (1.92TB), and 5,466TBW (3.84TB), or 0.8 full drive writes per day.
The Samsung 983 DCT family of solid state drives also leverages the company’s latest 3D
V-NAND flash memory, but is a different sort of animal altogether. The 983 DCT family is available in two form factors – 2.5” U.2 or M.2 22110 (110mm) in capacities of 960GB and 1.92TB. The two form factors do not have the same specifications, however. The U.2 drives are rated for read speeds up to 3.4GB/s with 1.3GB/s – 2.2GB/s writes, while the M.2 drives peak at 3GB/s (reads) and 1.2GB/s – 1.43GB/s (writes). Although we have all of the drives on hand, the M.2 drives caused our test system to hang during POST, so we only have numbers for the U.2 variants on the pages ahead. The U.2 drives peak at up to 580K / 52K (read / write) IOPs, while the M.2 drives peak at up to 480K / 42K.
The Samsung 983 DCT features the same native NVMe
PCIe x4 Phoenix controller present on some of
Samsung’s high-end consumer SSDs. It is paired to 1.5GB (960GB) or 3GB (1.92TB) of LPDDR4 DRAM cache and the drives offer Class 0 (AES 256) or TCG/Opal data encryption and end-to-end data protection, with power loss protection that comes by way of an array of on-board capacitors. Endurance ratings for this series are similar to the 883 DCT, at 1,366TBW (960GB) and 2,733TBW (1.92TB), or 0.8 full drive writes per day. And all of the drives have up to a 5-year warranty.
On the software front, the drives are supported by Samsung’s SSD Toolkit utility and Samsung also has a proprietary NVMe driver available, though the 983 DCT series will function just fine with OS-native NVMe drivers as well.
