Samsung launches Z-NAND SSDs, competition for Optane

[porina]

Quote

Samsung announced today that they are officially launching their first Z-SSD product, the SZ985. The Z-SSD uses Samsung's Z-NAND memory, a high-performance derivative of their 3D NAND flash memory and Samsung's intended competition for Intel's 3D XPoint memory. The SZ985 is a high-performance, high-endurance enterprise NVMe SSD.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12376/samsung-launches-zssd-sz985-up-to-800gb-of-znand

 

Not wanting to leave the ultra high end SSD space to Intel, Samsung have now launched products using Z-NAND promising many of the benefits of Optane, although we'll have to wait and see on pricing. Initially it will be offered in 240GB and 800GB models. Claimed random read speeds are higher than Optane, but lower random writes may mean they will be suited to different use cases. I suspect this is for high queue depth, and it will be interesting to see how it performs at low QD also. Endurance is at a rated 30 drive writes per day for 5 years.

[Sakkura]

Doesn't really compete with Optane. The advantage of 3DXPoint is lower latency, which is not reflected in sequential or high-QD random performance. It shows up in the latency and low-QD random performance, neither of which are commonly quoted in marketing material. At least they did quote a write latency here, but not read.

 

And the only reason the SSD ends up ahead in sequentials and high-QD random performance is that they use more chips. If you interleave enough (RAID0 etc), even HDDs and freaking tape could beat Optane in sequentials.

[leadeater]

8 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

Doesn't really compete with Optane. The advantage of 3DXPoint is lower latency, which is not reflected in sequential or high-QD random performance. It shows up in the latency and low-QD random performance, neither of which are commonly quoted in marketing material. At least they did quote a write latency here, but not read.

 

And the only reason the SSD ends up ahead in sequentials and high-QD random performance is that they use more chips. If you interleave enough (RAID0 etc), even HDDs and freaking tape could beat Optane in sequentials.

Z-NAND does have far lower latency than their current 3D-NAND though, higher than Optane though.

 

Edit:

Quote

Samsung has not provided full performance specifications for the SZ985, but they have highlighted several key metrics that put the Z-SSD in the top performance tier. The SZ985 can deliver up to 750k random read IOPS, well above the 550k IOPS that Intel's Optane SSD DC P4800X is rated for. Write performance from the SZ985 is much less impressive at only 170k random write IOPS.

IOPs has a direct relationship to latency so you can get some information from this, though as you mentioned no queue depth information.

 

Edit 2:

Quote

	Tech	Capacity	R/W IOPS	R/W bandwidth	Life	R/W Latency
Optane P4800X	3D XPoint	750GB	550K	2.4/2.0 GB/sec	41 PBW	10/10μs
SZ985	SLC NAND	800GB	750K/170K	3.2/3.2 GB/sec	42.7 PBW	12-20/16μs

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/17/specs_for_samsungs_potential_optane_killer/

[Sakkura]

4 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Z-NAND does have far lower latency than their current 3D-NAND though, higher than Optane though.

 

Edit:

IOPs has a direct relationship to latency so you can get some information from this, though as you mentioned no queue depth information.

Higher queue depths tend to mask the effect of latency, and allow quantity to beat quality (more chips, more interleaving, better overall performance). "Up to" IOPS usually means high queue depth.

 

But of course high queue depth performance is very relevant to lots of enterprise storage needs anyway. Just a question of whether there's a big enough niche for Optane.

[porina]

1 minute ago, Sakkura said:

But of course high queue depth performance is very relevant to lots of enterprise storage needs anyway. Just a question of whether there's a big enough niche for Optane.

If you have a workload that favours low QD performance, there is little alternative to Optane. It doesn't need consumer levels of volume to make business sense. If you have a workload that works great with high QD or sequential, you've been covered for a long time. The question is will Z-NAND take over some use cases only covered by Optane currently, although it should still be interesting just as a high(er) performing version of conventional NAND SSDs.

[Tech_Dreamer]

wonder why they cut down the warranty from 10 years to 5 since the pro series, not that it's going anywhere , but you know.

[leadeater]

26 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

Higher queue depths tend to mask the effect of latency, and allow quantity to beat quality (more chips, more interleaving, better overall performance). "Up to" IOPS usually means high queue depth.

 

But of course high queue depth performance is very relevant to lots of enterprise storage needs anyway. Just a question of whether there's a big enough niche for Optane.

See the further ninja edits, latency is still low. Flash is still inherently limited compared to newer better technologies like 3DXPoint but it's cheaper and easier to roll out in large quantities where it would work well.

 

We can extrapolate from the difference in both latency and write IOPs that the write IOPS of the SZ985 is less than half but the latency is not double so it should be hitting the maximum write IOPs at fairly low queue depths due to internal limitations somewhere, likely the DRAM cache to flash.

[Guest]

I’d still probably go for Intel 3D. There is a big difference between new and refined technology. The still lower latency makes Optane just superior still, although the Z-Nand will be cheaper.

[FloRolf]

2 hours ago, porina said:

Endurance is at a rated 30 drive writes per day for 5 years.

What. The. Fuck. 

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, FloRolf said:

What. The. Fuck. 

Cheap TLC SSDs for desktops/laptops typically range from 0.1-0.3 for some perspective on just how crazy high that is.

[FloRolf]

18 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Cheap TLC SSDs for desktops/laptops typically range from 0.1-0.3 for some perspective on just how crazy high that is.

I just calculated. 

If you were to write 42,7PB in one session, you'd have to write 3,2gb/s for 154 days straight. Holy shit. 

[Zodiark1593]

38 minutes ago, FloRolf said:

I just calculated. 

If you were to write 42,7PB in one session, you'd have to write 3,2gb/s for 154 days straight. Holy shit. 

If Linus went into slave-driver mode and kept LMG staff working 24/7, and decided to use only one such drive to service everyone, and if the drive is actually fast enough, I'm fairly certain it can be done.

[porina]

3 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

If Linus went into slave-driver mode and kept LMG staff working 24/7, and decided to use only one such drive to service everyone, and if the drive is actually fast enough, I'm fairly certain it can be done.

The capacity of a single device wouldn't be nearly enough for the stuff they do, and if they had to do an array, the performance would be spread over that array. Not to mention the difficulty of having a lot of them in an array, looks like they're PCIe 4x interface in the images so far. Dunno if there'll be other versions later.

[DocSwag]

5 hours ago, leadeater said:

Z-NAND does have far lower latency than their current 3D-NAND though, higher than Optane though.

 

Edit:

IOPs has a direct relationship to latency so you can get some information from this, though as you mentioned no queue depth information.

 

Edit 2:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/17/specs_for_samsungs_potential_optane_killer/

There should be stuff that needs to be kept in mind though.

 

First off, from what it sounds like Z-NAND is really just 3D SLC. So while it's gonna have better performance than 3D TLC, especially when it comes to write latency, you still haven't escaped some of the basic issues with NAND (write amplification, a minimum of reads and writes being 4 KB, etc.).

 

While Z-NAND sounds like it's gonna be pretty freaking fast compared to other SSDs at the moment I don't think it's gonna quite match optane, but rather sort of fill in a gap between 3D TLC SSDs and Optane. While the numbers quoted here are impressive, what's worth noting is the biggest advantage of optane is latency and low QD performance. The latency quoted by the Z-SSD is getting close but it's still a fair bit behind, and while Samsung quotes a high random read number that's most likely peak performance measured at some ridiculously high QD. Plus, the random write is super low.

 

Of course, this is all speculation so we'll have to wait for reviewers to get the product before being certain but I really don't think we'll see NAND being able to match optane any time soon.

[Doobeedoo]

This looks awesome. I wonder about 240GB price. 

[dizmo]

25 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

This looks awesome. I wonder about 240GB price. 

If you're thinking about sticking it in your gaming rig, it's not meant for you

[ARikozuM]

7 minutes ago, dizmo said:

If you're thinking about sticking it in your gaming rig, it's not meant for you

I'd still get one to try out. 

[Zodiark1593]

3 hours ago, porina said:

The capacity of a single device wouldn't be nearly enough for the stuff they do, and if they had to do an array, the performance would be spread over that array. Not to mention the difficulty of having a lot of them in an array, looks like they're PCIe 4x interface in the images so far. Dunno if there'll be other versions later.

Well, it's a good thing I never specified a lone drive had to actually be suitable for LMG. They only need to shove data through the drive, even if they're working more slowly as a result.

[Doobeedoo]

12 minutes ago, dizmo said:

If you're thinking about sticking it in your gaming rig, it's not meant for you

Don't worry I know which workload this would mainly be aimed at.

Only certain games actually benefit quite noticeably from SSD though. Like WoW open world with ton of assets and players in one place to load all those armor items on them and characters. Transition to populated places are much better, not seeing walking ground shadows and characters popping one by one haha. Initial logging in to the world load times are much faster too, specially with many addons also. 

Still 4K random read increase is very welcome. So have to see the price compared to M.2 NVMe SSDs but still, lower capacity option is nice. 

[porina]

42 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

This looks awesome. I wonder about 240GB price. 

Look at the 960 Pro and go up from there. Probably wont be as high as Optane 900p 280GB though.

16 minutes ago, dizmo said:

If you're thinking about sticking it in your gaming rig, it's not meant for you

I did not get a 280GB 900p just to install one game on it.  (it wasn't for the "free" Star Citizen ship either...)

[Doobeedoo]

1 minute ago, porina said:

Look at the 960 Pro 

I did though they ditched 256GB option for it. I really don't need higher capacity specially cause of price. I'm in no rush so I'll wait for their new M.2 NVMe drive. There's enterprise version so consumer one yet to come. So yeah that and this Z nand will be interested to see. 

[porina]

15 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

I did though they ditched 256GB option for it. I really don't need higher capacity specially cause of price. I'm in no rush so I'll wait for their new M.2 NVMe drive. There's enterprise version so consumer one yet to come. So yeah that and this Z nand will be interested to see. 

I haven't looked at the 960 models in a while. If the smaller one isn't around any more, use a bigger one for price per capacity indication, and add a bit more since smaller ones usually aren't quite as good.

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, DocSwag said:

The latency quoted by the Z-SSD is getting close but it's still a fair bit behind, and while Samsung quotes a high random read number that's most likely peak performance measured at some ridiculously high QD. Plus, the random write is super low.

Those seq numbers and read IOPs are actually a lot lower compared to their current 3D MLC NAND enterprise NVMe SSDs, those have around 6.4GB/s read and 1 million read IOPs, all high QD of course.