Samsung Introduces Next-Generation Data Center SSD BM1743 with Advanced QLC Flash

Samsung Semiconductor recently introduced in its technical blog the next-generation data center-class solid-state drive BM1743 equipped with its current latest QLC flash memory (v7).

According to TrendForce's statement in April, in the field of QLC data center-class solid-state drives, only Samsung and SK Hynix's Solidigm, which have been deeply cultivated for many years, passed the enterprise customer verification at that time.

Compared to the previous-generation v5 QLC V-NAND (TapTechNews note: Samsung's v6 V-NAND has no QLC product), Samsung's v7 QLC V-NAND flash has almost doubled the number of stacking layers, and the storage density has also been greatly improved.

At the same time, the sequential read and write performance of v7 QLC V-NAND is at least twice that of the previous one, and the random read speed has reached 4 times.

This means that BM1743 can provide capacity and performance far exceeding those of the previous-generation data center QLC solid-state drive BM1733a based on v5 QLC V-NAND to meet the demand for better storage in data centers.

BM1743 includes two form factors, U.2 and E3.S, among which the U.2 version supports PCIe 4.0 and can reach a capacity of up to 61.44 TB and has the potential to be further expanded to 122.88 TB, while the E3.S version can support PCIe 5.0.

As a contrast, BM1733a only supports PCIe 3.0, and the maximum capacity is only 15.36 TB, which is one-quarter of 61.44 TB.

In terms of reliability, the write endurance of BM1743 is 0.26 DWPD, and the power-off data retention time is 3 months; the two data of BM1733a are 0.18 DWPD and 1 month, respectively.

The specific performance of the 2.5-inch U.2 version of BM1743 is as follows:

Sequential readSequential writeRandom readRandom write7200 MB/s2000 MB/s1600 KIOPS110 KIOPS

Samsung Semiconductor said that users can either directly use BM1743 in the existing PCIe 3.0 environment to enjoy its lower TCO cost;

or can fully utilize the improvement brought by BM1743's support for PCIe 4.0 to reduce the response time of read tasks and improve the ability to process AI load;

and the support for PCIe 5.0 of the BM1743 E3.S version will bring greater performance advantages to data centers.