Samsung joins the 60TB SSD club and looks forward to 120TB drives

Several companies offer high-capacity SSDs, but until recently only two companies offered high-performance 60TB-class drives with a PCIe interface: Solidigm and Western Digital. As our colleagues at Blocks & Files discovered, Samsung quietly launched its 61.44TB BM1743 solid-state drive in mid-June and is now planning 120TB-class SSDs based on the same platform.

Samsung’s BM1743 61.44 TB has a proprietary controller and is based on Samsung’s 7^th Generation V-NAND (3D NAND) QLC memory. In addition, Samsung believes that its 7^th Gen V-NAND “has the potential to accommodate up to 122.88 TB,”

Samsung plans to offer the BM1743 in two form factors: U.2 for PCIe 4.0 x4 for traditional servers and E3.S for PCIe 5.0 x4 interfaces for machines designed for maximum storage density. The BM1743 is suitable for various applications, including AI training and inference, content delivery networks, and read-intensive workloads. Its write endurance is 0.26 drive writes per day (DWPD) over five years.

In terms of performance, Samsung’s BM1743 is hardly a champion when compared to high-end drives for gaming machines and workstations. The drive can achieve sustained sequential read speeds of 7,200 MB/s and write speeds of 2,000 MB/s. It can handle up to 1.6 million 4K random reads and 110,000 4K random writes for random operations.

Power consumption figures for the BM1743 were not disclosed, but are expected to be high. However, the drive’s main selling point is its massive storage density, which likely outweighs concerns about its absolute power efficiency for intended applications, as a 60TB SSD will still consume less than several storage devices of similar capacity and performance.

As mentioned above, Samsung’s BM1743 61.44TB faces little competition in the market, so its price will be quite high. For example, Solidigm’s D5-P5336 61.44TB SSD costs $6,905. Other companies like Kioxia, Micron, and SK Hynix have not yet launched their 60TB-class SSDs, which currently gives Samsung and Solidigm an advantage.