Samsung Readies PM1733 PCI-E 4.0 SSD and High-Capacity Memory for AMD EPYC Servers

Samsung and other partners help AMD build EPYC platform support

Following AMD’s launch of EPYC “Rome” server platform earlier this week, Samsung announced that its upcoming PM1733 PCI-E 4.0 solid state drive and new high capacity memory modules are fully compatible. Aimed at the enterprise and data center warm storage markets, the new components are set to let EPYC processors stretch their legs and reach their performance potential with blistering storage speeds and up to 4TB of memory per CPU.

Perhaps most interesting from the announcement is the PM1733 SSD which pairs a proprietary Samsung controller with its own 512 Gb Gen 5 (9x layer) V-NAND flash running as TLC (there are also 1 Tb Gen 5 V-NAND dies but the 512 Gb are more performant) to offer solid state storage in dual port U.2 or half-height half-length (HHHL) add in card form factors ranging in capacity from 1.6 TB to up to 15.36 TB HHHL or 30.72 TB U.2 respectively. Samsung rates the upcoming PCI-E 4.0 SSD at 8 GB/s sequential reads, ~3.8 GB/s sequential writes, 1500K random read IOPS and 250K random write IOPS making this one of the fastest drives announced so far and one of the few to really take advantage of the PCI-E 4.0 interface’s increased bandwidth. The U.2 drive is limited to PCI-E 4.0 x4 while the add in card versions use a PCI-E 4.0 x8 link though the difference between the two is likely negligible.

In addition to the speedy persistent storage, Samsung also announced that it is launching new RDIMM and LRDIMM memory modules based on 8 Gb or 16 Gb DDR4 chips that result in DIMMs spanning from 8GB to 256GB per module enabling up to 4TB per CPU.

Of course, the hardware is backwards compatible with older AMD and Intel server and consumer platforms limited to PCI-E 3.0, but the PM1733 in particular is best served by being paired with an AMD-based EPYC “Rome” or Ryzen 3000 system where the faster PCI-E 4.0 interface can let the V-NAND really stretch its legs. Enterprise customers may still consider the newer drives in older hardware depending on their upgrade cycles and internal decisions.

The Samsung PM1733 will be available later this quarter. Pricing has not yet been revealed but expect to pay a premium for the enterprise-class hardware.