Samsung made several announcements at the Flash Memory Summit 2023 in Santa Clara. It unveiled a concept version of a 256TB SSD, giving the PM1743 SSD for servers a PCIe 5.0 upgrade. The first users of that server storage would be generative AI developers.
The South Korean giant additionally unveiled an SSD architecture for Flexible Data Placement (FDP) that should eventually house a petabyte of capacity. FDP allows for precise placement of data on a drive’s flash blocks. By placing specific data together, the drive should last a lot longer.
Power saving
The 256TB SSD does not yet have a name, but some details are known. For example, it uses quad-level cells (QLC) and should be seven times more efficient than eight individual 32TB variants. For large enterprises, energy savings can add up quickly, so it will be music to their ears.
The PM1743 comes in several capacities, with up to 15.36TB. Like previous revisions, the PCIe 5.0 interface is twice as fast as its predecessor: 32 Gigatransfers per second compared to 16 GT/s. For AI workloads, this is a significant feat, given the gigantic data sets that often involve training large language models.
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