Solidigm has launched a pair of datacenter SSDs using the PCIe gen 5 interface.
The SK hynix subsidiary’s D7 PS1010 and PS1030 follow on from its earlier PCIe gen 4 D7-P5520 and P5620 which were built from 144-layer 3D NAND in TLC format. The new drives use 176-layer 3D NAND, still in TLC format, and are much faster, thanks in part to their PCIe 5 bus, twice the speed of the PCIe 4 bus.
Greg Matson, Solidigm’s SVP of Strategic Planning and Marketing, said in a statement: “The Solidigm D7-PS1010 and D7-PS1030 SSDs were meticulously engineered to meet the increasingly demanding IO requirements across a range of workloads such as general-purpose servers, OLTP, server-based storage, decision support systems and AI/ML.
“In a world where every watt counts, these drives are PCIe 5.0 done right, not only delivering industry-leading four-corner performance, but also up to 70 percent better energy efficiency compared to similar drives by other manufacturers.”
Here’s a performance comparison table for the new drives and the older P5520 and P5620:
We can see that the stated random read IOPS have almost tripled while the random write IOPS have nearly doubled (PS1010) or more than doubled (PS1030). The sequential read bandwidth has also slightly more than doubled, with the write speed also more than doubling. These drives’ latency has improved as well, with read latency lessening by 20 percent and write latency decreasing 28 percent.
The capacity ranges are pretty similar to the older drives, with the mixed-use, 1 drive write per day (DWPD), PS1010 having 1.92, 3.84, 7.68, and 15.36TB variants. The read-intensive, 3 DWPD PS1030 ranges from 1.6 to 3.2, 6.4 and on to 12.8TB. They are packed in either 2.5-inch U.2 cases or the newer E3.S 15mm enclosure.
Their main characteristics are:
What Solidigm calls standard endurance is the lower endurance model of the two. It says the PS1010 is a mixed-use and mainstream drive with the PS1030 being mixed-use and write-centric with both having performance heavily skewed in favor of reads over writes.
Solidigm’s product brief has a detailed PS1010 performance comparison against stated values for competing suppliers Kioxia, Micron and Samsung:
Solidigm suggests these new SSDs can be used for HPC, general purpose servers, OLAP and cloud computing services. It makes a big thing about them being suited for AI pipeline work, functioning as an NVME data cache drive in cloud-located GPU servers, and also as an all-flash tier front-ending a disk-based object storage tier. For on-prem use it has the GPU server using them as an NVMe cache drive in front of all-QLC SSD object tier.
Ace Stryker, Director of Market Development at Solidigm, claimed in a statement: “As AI workloads continue to surge, storage performance becomes critical. The Solidigm D7-PS1010 and D7-PS1030 are a game-changer for AI-driven enterprises, capable of outperforming competitors at critical stages of the AI pipeline.”
Energy efficiency is claimed to be 70 percent better than Samsung’s PM1743.
Get a product briefing doc for the two new SSDs here.
