Samsung's PM9D3a Solid State Drive

Today’s datacenters are constantly faced with challenges of balancing power, speed and cooling efficiency with limited space in server racks. With the exponential growth of data and its many applications, the requirements of customer operating servers and datacenters are expanding. The server storage market demands constant power, space, and performance improvements through new technological innovations. In addition to developing higher performing technologies and solutions to meet greater demands, the innovations must address a number of environmental challenges that exist within storage racks located in today’s data centers. What Is PM9D3a? The PM9D3a is a highly advanced PCIe Gen5.0 Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) server SSD, offering exceptional performance, power-efficiency, and reliability for enterprise-server and multicore processing data system environments. These improvements not only address the demands of today’s data storage acceleration, but also lowers the cost of maintaining the data center environment. PM9D3a Features and Benefits Best in Class Performance The PM9D3a features a Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) based 2.5" form factor with full PCIe Gen5. This device is able to harness the production efficiencies of Samsung’s eighth-generation three-bit V-NAND technology. This boosts random read speeds up to 2.4 times with random reads of up to 2,000,000 IOPS and random writes up to 350,000 IOPS. Sequential read and write speeds can reach 12,000MB/s and 6,200MB/s. The PM9D3a random write capability of 350K IOPS at 15.36TB delivers one of the highest performing SSDs in the industry. Form Factors to Meet Any Data Center Requirement The PM9D3a comes in a variety of form factors and capacity ranges. Included are E1.S(25/15/9.5mmT), E1.L(9.5mmT), 2.5"(15mmT), and M.2, E3.S(1T). This wide selection will provide the flexibility to meet storage specific needs in almost any data center without increasing the size of the data center. Enhanced Power and Cooling Efficiency The PM9D3a has the best improved power-efficient solution with an 45% improvement and offers improved cooling efficiency by applying 2.5" 15mmT thickness with fins for better thermal characteristics compared to the previous generation. Additionally, E1 drives come with a built-in heatsink and embedded thermal interface material. These improvements help data centers to decrease management costs, maximize profits and mitigate environmental risks. Lowest Failure Rates with High Reliability Equipped with error-correcting code (ECC) to provide the lowest failure rate and highest reliability in the industry. It offers a mean time between failures (MTBF) of 2.5 million hours. Built-In Cyber Security Samsung PM9D3a SSD is validated against the TCG Storage Opal Family Test Cases. In addition, this Samsung SSD is undergoing FIPS 140-3 validation. Common Criteria certification is not commonly required of devices like SSDs at this time, but Samsung has extensive experience with CC and mobile devices; CC certification of SSDs is something that Samsung is monitoring, including The EU Cybersecurity Act (Article 49 Regulation EU 2019/881). Telemetry Features for Data Center Management Over a hundred data set analyses are provided in advance for data centers run by our clients to monitor and detect on-site risks and issues and handle them efficiently. This proactive approach to Telemetry allows measures to be implemented that ensure efficient server operation while optimizing operational expenses and TCO. Summary Samsung’s PM9D3a SSD is forging the next frontier for Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Large Language Model processing. It is ideally equipped to deal with dynamic workloads and allows data centers to process, store, and deliver data more effectively.