Samsung deploys exclusive NAND technologies in 845DC EVO and PRO SSDs

One of the most important revelations from the Samsung Global SSD Summit 2014 in Seoul was the unveiling of the new 845DC PRO. The 845DC PRO is a V-NAND (3D NAND) SSD that is geared for the SMB and SOHO segment, though we fully expect it to find a home in more intense production environments as well.

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The combination of the 6Gb/s SATA 845DC EVO and the 845DC PRO provide a considerable one-two punch for Samsung. These two offerings allow them to address the booming SATA value market with two distinct solutions, much like the M500 and M500DC pairing from Micron. The distinct differentiator is that the two Samsung offerings both offer disruptive new NAND technologies that are not currently offered by other manufacturers.

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The 845DC PRO features Samsung's first generation 24-layer V-NAND. V-NAND is 3D NAND that achieves better density, performance, endurance, and power consumption, via vertical stacking of the NAND cells. This runs counter to the established norm of increasing density through NAND shrinks, and with good reason. Shrinks provide more density, but actually reduce endurance.

Samsung has already moved to 32-layer V-NAND for their premium 850 PRO model that is shipping into the client market. This apparently leaves the 845DC PRO's 24-layer V-NAND as a more economical alternative. We have the 845DC PRO on the way, and look to these pages for an upcoming review soon.

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We have actually covered the 845DC EVO in depth in our Samsung 845DC EVO Enterprise SSD Review. The 845DC EVO is the first datacenter SSD to employ 3bit MLC NAND. This provides acceptable endurance for read-centric workloads at a much more competitive price point.

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The 845DC EVO is already on the market and the 845DC PRO will arrive this month.

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Both SSDs are optimized for different ends of the workload spectrum. The DC EVO addresses read-centric applications such as content delivery networks and web servers, while the DC PRO addresses workloads with a heavier write workload, such as application and database servers.

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Both of these value SSDs offer robust performance that tops the anonymous A and B competitors in their respective workloads.

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This chart does a good job of breaking down the performance aspects of both SSDs at their various capacity points. The random read performance of both SSDs is impressive, but the 845DC PRO sustained random write IOPS jumps right off the chart at 51,000 IOPS. Many leading high-endurance 6Gb/s SSDs fall well below this level of performance.

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The 845DC PRO features a robust 10 DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day) of endurance and features an industry-standard five year warranty. This will provide a very impressive 14 Petabytes of write endurance for the 800GB model. This is also comparable endurance to leading high-endurance offerings such as the Intel DC S3700 and the Micron P400m.

The 845DC PRO will become available in July, and at a shockingly low price point of $1.50-$2.00 per GB. The low price of the new Samsung SSDs is likely to alter the price structure of every mainstream MLC datacenter SSD on the market. Look to these pages soon for our full analysis of the performance and features of the 845DC PRO.