At Flash Memory Summit this week (on-line for the primary time), Western Digital is displaying off three new SSD merchandise and have outlined the corporate’s areas of strategic focus in a keynote presentation.
First up, Western Digital is commercializing NVMe Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) expertise with the brand new Ultrastar DC ZN540 datacenter SSD. We coated ZNS in depth earlier this yr after the extension to the NVMe normal was ratified. Western Digital has been one of many strongest proponents of ZNS, so it is no shock that they are one of many first to launch a zoned SSD product.
The ZN540 relies on the same {hardware} platform to their current conventional enterprise/datacenter SSDs just like the Ultrastar DC SN640 and SN840. The ZN540 is a 2.5″ U.2 SSD utilizing 3D TLC NAND and a Western Digital-designed SSD controller, and gives capacities as much as 8TB with dual-port PCIe 3.zero help. The most important {hardware} distinction is a giant lower within the quantity of RAM the SSD wants in comparison with the same old 1GB per 1TB ratio; Western Digital is not able to disclose precisely how a lot RAM they’re transport within the ZN540, nevertheless it needs to be a pleasant lower in BOM.
The new ZN540 additionally renders the Ultrastar DC SN340 largely out of date. The SN340 was designed to get a number of the advantages of a zoned SSD by utilizing a Flash Translation Layer that works with 32kB blocks as a substitute of the same old 4kB. That permits a DRAM discount by an element of eight, on the expense of a lot decrease random write efficiency, particularly for small block sizes. ZNS SSDs merely prohibit random writes within the first place somewhat than silently ship horrible efficiency with extraordinarily excessive write amplification, and the ZNS interface permits software program to be correctly knowledgeable of those limitations and supplies instruments to deal with them.
The Ultrastar DC ZN540 is at the moment sampling to main prospects. Software help for ZNS SSDs is pretty mature on the OS stage within the Linux kernel and associated tooling. Application-level help for zoned storage is extra of a piece in progress, however Western Digital and others have been arduous at work. Zoned storage backends exist already for some well-known functions just like the Ceph cluster filesystem and RocksDB key-value database.
Next up, Western Digital is introducing their first industrial-grade NVMe SSD. Western Digital’s industrial and automotive lineup at the moment consists of eMMC and UFS modules and SD/microSD playing cards. The new Western Digital IX SN530 NVMe SSD is an industrial/automotive grade model of the PC SN530, OEM counterpart to the retail SN550. These are DRAMless NVMe SSDs, albeit a number of the best-performing DRAMless SSDs available on the market. The IX SN530 can be out there with capacities of 256GB to 2TB of TLC NAND, or working as SLC NAND with capacities of 85-340GB and drastically larger write endurance. One of the primary goal markets for the IX SN530 can be automotive functions, the place the push towards self-driving vehicles is rising storage capability and efficiency necessities.
The TLC-based variants of the IX SN530 are sampling now, and the SLC variations will begin sampling in January.
| Western Digital IX SN530 SSD Specifications | |||||||||||
| Capacity | 85 GB | 170 GB | 340 GB | 256 GB | 512 GB | 1 TB | 2 TB | ||||
| Form Factor | M.2 2280 or M.2 2230 | M.2 2280 | |||||||||
| Controller | WD in-house | ||||||||||
| DRAM | None | ||||||||||
| NAND Flash | Western Digital 96L SLC | Western Digital 96L TLC | |||||||||
| Sequential Read | 2400 MB/s | 2400 MB/s | 2500 MB/s | ||||||||
| Burst Sequential Write |
900 MB/s | 1750 MB/s | 1950 MB/s | 900 MB/s | 1750 MB/s | 1950 MB/s | 1800 MB/s | ||||
| Sustained Sequential Write | 900 MB/s | 1750 MB/s | 1950 MB/s | 140 MB/s | 280 MB/s | 540 MB/s | 525 MB/s | ||||
| Random Read IOPS | 160okay | 310okay | 410okay | ||||||||
