SSDs marked PM1731a will only be the first representative of a new trend.
Samsung has unveiled its first SSD to deploy ZNS, or Zoned Namespaces technology. The latter is currently available as an extension of the NVMe 1.4a specification, but given the needs of large companies, manufacturers really want to use it, as it offers important innovations. In a nutshell, the essence of custom namespaces is to put the controllable data inside the SSD, which is mainly provided by the software background in the operating system, and it analyzes the data waiting to be printed and then puts it into different areas after selecting it writes.
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Just because of the technological advantages of SSDs, this does not seem logical, since there is usually no problem with placing data very randomly on NAND flash chips, but in terms of age, care should already be taken to overwrite the cells. Zoned Namespaces SSD drive specifically blocks random data dumps, the Zoned Namespaces interface itself allows data logging to be properly handled with this process, and applications are provided with the information they need to make it happen. The biggest advantage of this is that it can significantly extend the life of your SSD, which is especially important in data centers where the write load is very high.
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The Samsung PM1731a 2.5-inch hard drive features a dual-port PCI Express 3.0 interface and six-generation, 128-layer V-NAND flash chips. The number of bits stored per cell is not public, but Samsung’s statements suggest this is currently a TLC solution as the company has talked about switching to QLC for the next round.
The new storage capacity can be 2 and 4 TB, while the WAF, that is, the write amplification factor, is close to one. This is an interesting parameter that indicates the number of actual writes made by the SSD relative to the number of requests requested by the host system. The closer this value is to one, the more efficiently the write load is optimized. With a typical server-based SSD, WAF is more in the range 3 to 4, which means the PM1731a can be loaded with Zoned Namespaces approximately four times more than its comparable capacity counterparts without dedicated namespaces.
Samsung will begin mass production of 2 and 4 TB PM1731a SSDs using generally assigned namespaces in the second half of the year.
