Samsung claims it’s designed the first ‘never-dying’ SSDs for PCIe Gen 4

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Over the years, many a fool has attempted to discover the secret to immortality, all in vain. We never thought it would be Samsung who’d go and figure it all out. The South Korean tech giant claims its new PCIe 4 SSDs will never die. No SSD manufacturer has ever attempted to claim their SSDs are infallible before.

It’s just one of a trio of new SSD technologies targeted at data-centres which Samsung believes will revolutionise storage performance.

Now, you’re probably wondering how such a feat is even possible. It all comes down to Samsung’s FIP (fail-in-place) technology. Previously, a single hardware failure across just one of potentially hundreds of NAND chips would cause an SSD to fail, necessitating replacement. The FIP software identifies a faulty chip, scans for damage to data, and then moves the data to a working NAND chip. The broken NAND chip would then be partitioned off, preserving the integrity and performance of the overall SSD. Users will lose a bit of storage but the overall SSD will still work just fine.

The second of the new technologies is SSD virtualisation. This allows a single large SSD to be subdivided into up to 64 smaller SSDs. This would then provide a closed off virtual space for up to 64 users per SSD, an obvious benefit for cloud storage providers who will be able to make more efficient use of SSD storage. More users + same amount of storage = more dollarydoos. 

Samsung’s third and final trick is V-NAND machine learning technology. Machine learning is a term we see bandied around every other day but in this instance it’s used to predict and verify cell characteristics, identifying variations in circuit patterns using big data. As SSD speeds get faster, the reliability of the data worsens. V-NAND ML technology will anticipate rapid voltage changes and use this data to build more precise cell control. In turn, this will allow SSDs to be manufactured with faster performance, greater capacity, and more reliability.

“We are combining breakthrough speeds and capacities with revolutionary software solutions as we accelerate expansion in the premium SSD market,” said Kye Hyun Kyung, executive vice president of Memory Solution Product & Development at Samsung Electronics. “We plan to introduce additional innovation led by our most advanced (sixth-generation) V-NAND in helping to trigger a lot more growth in the global IT market.”

All three of these new technologies are going to be leveraged for Samsung’s PCIe 4.0-based PM1733 and M1735 enterprise SSDs. Mass production began last month on these immortal SSDs which are twice the speed of Gen3 SSDs.

These little wonders will set you back many thousands of dollars so perhaps best not get your hopes up for actually getting your hands on a consumer-grade version any time soon.