Samsung Demos PM1725 At 1 Million IOPS And 6.3 Gigabytes Per Second

Samsung has been on an announcement streak with its 3D NAND-infused enterprise SSD products, including a new PCIe SSD and a 15.63 TB SSD. The company has its PM1725 SSD on display here at Dell World in Austin. The PM1725 was previously announced at the Flash Memory Summit, but this is the first time Samsung displayed its newest speedster on the track.

Samsung's display highlighted the PM1725 pulling down over 6.2 GBps with a sequential workload (128K, QD32). To put this in perspective, this exceeds the top speed we recorded with the PMC Flashtec NVRAM drive, which feeds data directly out of DDR3 DRAM.

The eye-watering 6.2 GBps was impressive, but static demos only highlight the most impressive performance metric, so companies usually only show the workload that provides the best results.

We are never satisfied with a single workload. After commandeering the server (with permission of course, ahem) we switched the test over to 4K random read. With a single worker, we recorded over 1,000,000 IOPS (yes, 1 million) with a 4K random read workload. This is the highest performance we have ever recorded with a single SSD, including other bleeding edge PCIe models.

We know that read performance of any ilk will always look great, so we switched gears and ran a 4K random write workload, and came up with an impressive 343,072 IOPS. We didn't have time to precondition the SSD, which we usually do for six hours in our product evaluations, so these random write results should be taken with a grain of salt. Disclaimers aside, we rolled on to a sequential write test. 

We ran a 128K sequential write workload, and the PM1725 provided 1,955 MB/s of performance. This isn't as high as some PCIe SSDs that come through our labs, but it is important to note that this is with a prototype.

It's good to see the prototype PM1725 performing so well in multiple workloads, even though we couldn't actually see the SSD as it was buried inside a server chassis.

We were able to snap a pic of the actual SSD itself earlier this year at the Flash Memory Summit, where it was listed with a top random read/write speed of 1,000,000/120,000 IOPS, and sequential read/write speeds of 6,000/2,200 MBps. This beefy SSD tops out at 3.2 TB and is powered by the EPIC PCIe 3.0 x8 controller. It also makes the important additions of dual-port functionality (x4 x4) and multiple namespace support. The PM1725 comes in both 2.5" and PCIe flavors.

Paul Alcorn is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and Google+.

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