Samsung Electronics has launched the industry's highest capacity NVMe solid state drive (SSD) based on the small Small Form Factor (NGSFF) - an eight-terabyte (TB) NF1 SSD.

The new 8TB NVMe NF1 SSD has been optimized for data-intensive analytics and virtualization applications in data centers and enterprise server systems.

Next-generation Small Form Factor (NGSFF) is the latest SSD standard which is expected to be standardized by JEDEC in October. It succeeds the M.2 standard.

The new SSD is built with 16 of Samsung's 512-gigabyte (GB) NAND packages, each stacked in 16 layers of 256 gigabit (Gb) 3-bit V-NAND chips, achieving an 8TB density in an ultra-small footprint of 11cm x 3.05cm. This is twice the capacity offered by the M.2 NVMe SSD (11cm x 2.2cm) commonly used in hyper-scale server designs and laptops. The NF1 SSD is expected to replace conventional 2.5-inch NVMe SSDs by enabling up to three times the system density in existing server infrastructure, allowing for an unprecedented 576TB of storage space (72 NF1 SSDs) in the latest 2U rack servers.

The NF1 SSD features a new controller that supports the NVMe 1.3 protocol and PCIe 4.0 interface, delivering sequential read speeds of 3,100 megabytes per second (MB/s) and write speeds of 2,000MB/s. These speeds are more than five times and three times that of a typical SATA SSD, respectively. Random speeds come in at 500,000 IOPS for read operations and 50,000 IOPS for writes. The SSD also includes a 12GB LPDDR4 DRAM to enable faster data processing.

To ensure data reliability, the NF1 NVMe SSD has been designed with an endurance level of 1.3 drive write per day (DWPD), which guarantees writing an entire 8TB of data 1.3 times a day over its three-year warranty period.

Samsung plans to accompany its 256Gb 3-bit V-NAND-based SSD with a 512Gb version in the second half of this year to accommodate even faster processing for big data applications.