Samsung SM843 Pro: Ultra Fast Data Center SSD

We have taken a look at a few Samsung-built solid state drives over the years and found them all to be relatively strong performers in their respective product categories. If you’d like to check some out for yourself, you can find our coverage of the Samsung 830 Series SSD here and our coverage of the newer Samsung SSD 840 Series drive here.

Today we’re going to be looking at a somewhat different type of drive from Samsung, the SM843 Pro Data Series SSD. The SM843 is essentially the same drive as the consumer-targeted 840 Pro SSD, but with a specialized firmware that’s optimized for mainstream, ready-heavy data center applications and more over-provisioning of the NAND. We’ve got the full specifications of the drive below, followed by some pics of the product and its internals.

As cool as the internals look, it’s the Samsung SM843 Pro Data Series SSD’s performance that is really attractive. You’ll get to see what we mean by that on the pages ahead...

Samsung SM843 Pro Data Series Specifications & Features

Form Factor	2.5 inches
Capacity	120/240/480 GB
Host Interface	Serial ATA 3 (6 Gb/s)
MTBF	2,000,000 hours
Uncorrectable Bit Error Rate (UBER)	1x1017
Power Consumption (Active)	3.4 W
Power Consumption (Idle)	300 mW
Random Read	Up to 70,000 IOPS
Random Writes	Up to 11,500 IOPS
Random Terabytes Written (TBW)	Up to 1,060 TBW Up to 1 WPD*
Sequential Read	Up to 530 MB/s
Sequential Writes	Up to 420 MB/s
Sequential Terabytes Written (TBW)	Up to 4,200 TBWUp to 5 WPD*
Physical Dimensions	100 x 70 x 7mm
Weight	56g
	*WPD = Drive Writes Per Day for 5 Years

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Externally, the Samsung SM843 Pro Data Series SSD looks much like any other solid state drive that conforms to the common 2.5” form factor, but with a 7mm Z-Height. The drive has a basic metal enclosure, with a simple texture and a single decal listing model and serial number information.

 

The drive you see pictured here is a 240GB model. It is rated for up to 530 MB/s and 420 MB/s sequential reads and writes, respectively, with write endurance of one full random or five full sequential drive writes per day for five years. If you’ve read about some other enterprise-targeted solid state drives, you’ll notice that write endurance number is somewhat low. The Micron P400m, for example, is rated for 10 full drive writes per day for five years. As such, Samsung recommends this drive for more read-heavy, main stream data center applications.

 

As you peek inside the drive, you’ll see every component is Samsung-made. In this 240GB drive, there is actually 256GB of 20nm MLC NAND, comprised of eight chips in total. There is also a 512MB DRAM cache and, of course, a Samsung MDX drive controller. The controller is an 8-channel design with three ARM Cortex-R4 cores running at 300MHz and a SATA 6Gbps interface.