The Samsung 990 PRO SSD will release the PCIe Gen5 interface
Samsung has submitted to the Korean regulator a new series of solid-state drives. Everything indicates that it is the Samsung 990 PRO, the next generation SSD for PCIe 5.0.
Consumer storage will take another leap in level in a few months by taking advantage of the possibilities of the PCI-Express Gen5 interface. It must be remembered that the Intel Alder Lake platform already supports this interface (although in a limited way due to the number of lanes) and this is probably why the new units have not yet been marketed.
The launch of the next Intel Rocket Lake platform and the new processors and motherboards under ZEN 4 architecture that will arrive this quarter from the hand of AMD, should mean its definitive premiere.
Samsung 990 Pro
Samsung is the world’s largest seller of solid state drives and it is clear that it will be one of the first to market this type of drives that will arrive in M.2 format under PCIe 5.0 with the consequent increase in performance. Intel demonstrated at CES in January the capabilities of this interface that promises stratospheric sequential readouts of up to 13,000 MB per second and writings almost at their level: 12,000 MB per second.
Another novelty will be NVMe 2.0, a new version of another of the key protocols in SSDs since it allows the unit to be made bootable, reduces I/O overhead and allows the host hardware and software to fully exploit the levels of parallelism to which these units are capable of reaching.
The internal name of the version filed by Samsung with the Korean regulator includes the codes “MZ-V9P1T0” and “MZ-V9P2T0”. For reference, existing Samsung 980 Pro PCIe Gen 4.0 SSDs are labeled “MZ-V8P1T00.”
Unlike other integrators who will use 3rd party memory or controllers, it is expected that the Samsung 990 PRO is a totally own solution, with NAND flash memories, DRAM cache and the South Korean giant’s own controller. It should be noted that Samsung has already released its first PCIe Gen 5.0 SSDs for servers and data centers with the PM1743 model offering capacities of up to 15.36TB.
It is not necessary as much storage capacity in consumption, but a new advance up to 8 Tbytes, in addition to the typical 1, 2 and 4 TB. It should be released shortly after Intel and AMD launch their new processing platforms.
