Samsung unveils "ruler form factor" NVMe SSDs for OCP

Samsung announced a solid state drive with an E1.S form factor and full PCIe Gen 4 support.

The new drive, which leverages the production efficiencies of the company’s sixth-generation (1xx-layer), three-bit V-NAND, uses the new form factor to maximize the number of drives possible in a 1-RU chassis.

“Offering the most 1U server-optimized form-factor, the PM9A3 will improve space utilization, add PCIe Gen4 speeds, enable increased capacity and more,” said Mr. Jongyoul Lee, senior vice president of Samsung’s Memory Software Development Team at the Open Compute Project Virtual Global Summit. “We see it eventually becoming the most sought-after storage solution on the market for tier one and tier two cloud datacenter servers, and one of the more cost-effective,” he added.

The newly announced PM9A3 drive, to be available in three versions, is expected to feature a PCIe Gen 4 (x4) interface for more than twice the sequential read performance of PCIe Gen 3 (3200MB/s), and include dedicated hardware accelerators for nearly twice the random writes (180,000 IOPs) of the previous generation. Capacities will range from 960 GB to 7.68 TB.