STORAGE SUPERIORITY
Intel versus Samsung, Optane versus Z-NAND, in a fight for the future
THE STORAGE WARS have been waging for quite some time now. Samsung’s 960 series PCIe SSDs have comfortably sat top and center of the non-volatile hill for the last 12 months. And with little challenge to the Korean giant, there’s been no need for the company to reveal any new devices designed to push the boundaries of solid-state storage further. Even Intel and Micron have struggled to put up any resistance to the dominance of Sammy’s 3D MLC V-NAND tech and its controller—at least, not until recently.
And then there are the connection standards, or perhaps it’s more apt to just say M.2 at this point. Because that’s the only connection standard still worth its salt in the PCIe board game. Intel’s U.2, like many—if not all— closed-off proprietary connection standards, has fallen by the wayside, with lots of motherboard manufacturers no longer supporting it. With few devices operating on the standard, and the price-to-performance of Intel’s 750 SSDs being less than desirable, there just wasn’t enough choice to see it used enough.
This year hasn’t been a complete dud for storage tech, though. Intel and Micron’s design teams have finally brought the true might of their Optane 3D XPoint memory technology to market. First in the less-than-stellar Optane cache M.2 sticks, then in the phenomenal power of the 900P series SSDs. Although sequentials were lower than the competition, the stellar low latency and incredible 4K random reads and writes made it leaps and bounds more powerful than the prestigious 960 Pro.
Intel has promised that there’s more to come from the fledgling resistive tech, but for the time being, the battle seems to be shifting away from how fast a sequential figure you can get, and more toward low latency and higher IOPs. Samsung is well aware of this, too, recently announcing the launch of its Z-NAND consumer SSDs.
Z-NAND is, as far as we know, a derivation of Samsung’s 3D NAND technology. Still built off the existing 40nm processing node, it’s expected to feature a brand new controller, and a single-level cell design, as opposed to the 960 series multi-level cell. In short, the more data you store on a single bit of V-NAND both increases its latency and reduces the number of total read and write requests possible on the cell itself. SLC is far superior, but comes at a far greater cost and, unfortunately, lower density, meaning a larger PCB and, ultimately for Samsung, a PCIe add-in card, much like Intel’s 900 series drives.
Although, for the time being, Z-NAND is enterprise only, we do have some figures for the drives, which can give us a bit of an idea about where the consumer equivalents will sit. Samsung revealed that both sequential read and write speeds will operate at 3.2GB/s, compared to Intel’s 2.4GB/s read and 2GB/s write; random read IOPS will be up at 750K versus Intel’s 550K; write IOPS will be 170K versus Intel’s 500K; random read latency should be around 12–20 microseconds, compared to Optane’s 10 microseconds; and, lastly, the random write latency will be 16 microseconds versus Intel’s 10. Although not competitive across the board, if Samsung’s drives arrive at a significantly lower price point than Intel’s (because they rely on already well-established technology), they could render Optane redundant, unless you need it for very specific use case scenarios.
There’s not been any confirmation of exactly when we expect to see a Samsung Z-NAND consumer drive appear, but we do expect these to drop some time during the first half of 2018.